TUCKED away beside the Manhattan Bridge, predating it by a century or more, was a one-lane alley called Birmingham Street, running between Henry and Madison Street east of Market Street.…

Probably no other Brooklyn neighborhood has as many ghosts as Coney Island, from Luna Park to Steeplechase to George Tilyou to the Elephant Hotel. For over sixty years, Surf Avenue’s…

While poring through old maps and street directories ( I do it so you don’t have to) I occasionally see some great old street names that I wish had been…

Unlike Queens, which was in the midst of overhauling its street nomenclature in 1922, pushing out names and old numbered streets and instituting a borough-wide numbering system, the map of…

As I have related in FNY over the past year (2018), four elevated stations of the Astoria Line were closed for several months and then reopened with a radical new…

Years ago, soon after beginning Forgotten NY, I compiled a far-from-comprehensive list of lost streets in lower Manhattan. I had a lot of fun doing it, though I’m not as…

While wandering around in the Seaport area under the spaghetti cluster of elevated roads that connect the Brooklyn Bridge to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, I spotted this unusual road…

The casual visitor to Sunnyside might assume that Lowery’s Wine Factory on Queens Boulevard between 40th and 41st Street was named for the original owner. Never assume anything in Queens;…

By SERGEY KADINSKY Forgotten NY correspondent Having documented the abandoned Dr. Simon Baruch Public Bath as part of the page on East River Park, I went a mile to the…

From the NYC Municipal Archives comes this image of a Depression-era ragpicker making his way along Batavia Street at New Chambers Street just north of the Brooklyn Bridge. If that…

Some of the buildings on Franklin Street in Greenpoint bear the stamp of the old C.A. Friberg Iron Foundry, #2 to 8 Driggs Street. There is no Driggs Street at…

Macomb Street, running between 4th Avenue and Prospect Park West, was probably named for Alexander Macomb Sr. (1748-1831), a prosperous Revolution-era merchant born in Belfast, Ireland. Though he initially had Tory sympathies he…