Scandinavians have largely disappeared from Bay Ridge and Sunset Park, just as other neighborhoods have radically changed over the years. Immigrants from northern Europe first began arriving in Brooklyn in great…

In February 2005 I spent seven days in Staten Island. While many Manhattanites would consider that tantamount to a sentence to life without BlackBerries or having the Republicans in Madison Square…

Sometimes, you can walk past something a hundred times and never know it’s Forgottenworthy. That’s what happened this week [March 19-25, 2006] when news broke that the Tunnel Garage, a venerable…

Few Brooklyn neighborhoods have changed as much as has the part of Fort Greene/Prospect Heights just east of Times Plaza, where two of Brooklyn’s longest streets, Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues, get…

Manhattan may have its Canal Street, built over a former waterway draining the equally lost Collect Pond, but Brooklyn has its very own waterway known as the Gowanus Canal bisecting the neighborhood…

Title card: 910 Grand Concourse at East 163 St I FIRST WALKED the Bronx’s Grand Concourse on July 18, 1999, on ForgottenTour 2. It was 100 degrees, the tour split…

REVISITING the scene of the very first ForgottenTour in June 1999 FNY turns again to Brooklyn’s Broadway, formerly the main drag in Williamsburg, where the Vanderbilts looked across the river to Manhattan from…

Open House New York is a once-a-year extravaganza, a public celebration of architecture and design in New York City. Approximately one hundred different locales, many of which would never ordinarily…

WHEN I REVISIT Brooklyn’s 5th Avenue, I am going back to a stretch I have traversed thousands of times. Each day between September 1971 and the fall of 1980 (the latter…

I USUALLY return to my old pages unannounced. If I have something new on a certain subject I usually just drop it in without really notifying anyone; one day, you’re looking…

CONTINUED FROM PART 1 WHEN IT reaches Union Turnpike, the Jackie Robinson Parkway and the Van Wyck Expressway in Kew Gardens, Queens Blvd. begins its slow process of winding down. Quiet…

WHETHER it wants to admit it or not, the Department of Transportation’s main function is the movement of motor vehicles; to enable them to move as quickly as possible. That means…