“In 1905, T. B. Ackerson Company purchased a densely wooded tract of land and immediately cleared it, laid out streets and installed underground water, sewer, gas and electric lines. Eighteen…

I arrived in Little Neck on July 1, 2007, although, living in Flushing since 1993, I was quite aware of the Queens neighborhood tucked into its northeast quadrant just west…

Fire alarms have been a feature on NYC streets since the late 1800s, and methods of marking them, first to passing horse-drawn coaches and pedestrians up to moving vehicles has…

150 Charles Street, finished in 2016, contains some of the most expensive apartments in the city, where penthouses can sell for nearly $35 million. It’s also a celebrity magnet, with…

Here’s a 1940 photograph of Grand Street looking east from West Broadway in SoHo. Naturally the first thing I noticed was the unusually curved lamppost on the corner. Why would…

Many Chinatowns around the USA make full use of local decor, even down to the directional signs and lampposts, and beginning in 1964 or so, NYC began to add its…

Word comes that a pair of classic NYC lampposts from an earlier era have been torn down, at least temporarily. This Corvington at Morris Street and a stub of Washington…

I recently walked/bicycled the length of the Rockaway Peninsula boardwalk. It cones in two separate sections: the boardwalk at Riis Park and beach, and the eastern section, formally called Ocean…

Like most older cities, Philadelphia has done a good job rooting out and eradicating older cast-iron or wrought-iron lampposts, but here’s one it hasn’t found, perhaps the last dinosaur of…

I have found some slides of eastern Queens scenes circa 1960 or so, the dawn of the modern age in Queens. This is a cluster of attached houses on 103rd…

Though Fort Totten, the former military base at Willets Point in Bayside, has been in my “back yard” so to speak ever since 1993, when I moved to Flushing, and…

I’ve written about tiny Dunham Place (pronounced “dunnam”) before, back in 2008. About the only thing I forgot to mention is that the alley, between South 6th Street and Broadway…