WHILE poking around in Google Street View, as I do for fun (somebody has to do it) I chanced upon the remnants of colonial-era roads at the intersection of Barnes…

TAKE a look at this section of a vintage 1922 Hagstrom Bronx map … I isolated Hunts Point. There is an entire section of streets that has been completely wiped…

THERE are some spots in Manhattan in which entire blocks of streets have been lost in the name of urban renewal or urban planning. One such area was a warren…

On Facebook, William Padron supplies this map displayed map inside a vintage-1917 IRT Lo-V type trailer subway car #4902 at the New York Transit Museum. Lincoln (52nd), Fisk (69th), Junction Avenue…

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;…