In early 2009, in a real estate environment that has seen home prices and rents drop precipitously and sales slow to a crawl, battle to maintain New York City’s character is…

I suspect Coney Island will weather its current difficulties. It always seems to. Recent developments, however, have put several Coney Island aficionados in deep despair. To recap, quite sketchily, developer Joseph…

The naming of Brooklyn streets — well, NYC streets — is a topic of constant fascination. Well, for your webmaster, at least. A glance at the Brooklyn map in the Sheepshead…

The London plane tree, a variety of the sycamore, is the street tree of choice in New York — to the point of exhaustion, since street after street features so many of them.…

December 2008: Just got a special ForgottenAlert from FFan David Sanders: I was returning from upstate NY today and got off the PATH train at 33rd Street, heading to the N…

A little tortured analogy — Dali’s The Persistence of Memory featured melting watches, depicting the survival of memory despite the demise of the devices used to record it, and here’s an FNY page…

Remember that episode of Star Trek when the giant microbe ate the Enterprise? At the start of the show, Mr. Spock is looking into his scanner and suddenly gets a shocked look on…

It may have come across before but I enjoy New York City’s elevated trains. Not every American city has them anymore, or has them to the extent that New York does.…

Queens is dotted with minuscule cemeteries, some still existing, some as dead as the people who were buried within, whose remains are blown in the breeze now. Corona used to have…

Whenever I find myself in the Ear Inn, 326 Spring Street between Greenwich and Washington, it always seems to be a crystal clear but blustery day and that’s just as well,…

photo: Flatbush Gardener The word came this week over at Jeremiah’s that the grand old M. Gordon Novelty facade, on 929-933 Broadway just south of East 22nd, had now been covered up in…

I don’t mind street art. That might be news to some ForgottenFans, who perhaps think that, as the all-American boy and world’s oldest Boy Scout that I have always been, not…