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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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;…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Various alarms and surveillance devices cover a pair of chiseled street signs on a very old brick building at Wythe Avenue and North 8th Street in the Willie. How do…