In 1999 I found this abandoned diner on 91st Avenue and Rockaway Boulevard in Ozone Park. It could have been abandoned a week before or ten years before…it’s all the same.…

Everyone has heard of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, where generations of film stars have signed their names and imprinted their hands in wet concrete. It turns out we have…

Cornelius McCracken, the president of New York University, had a peach of an idea back in 1901. He would place a classical arcade on one of the highest points in…

In the 1990s, the Long Island Railroad renovated the Bayside station in Queens. The MTA installed new platforms, lighting, handicapped access, the works. New porches have been added to the station…

14th Road and 119th Street was the location of an undeclared landmark in College Point, Queens for 127 years ­ before most of Queens was even settled. Flessel’s was there…

It was a 100-degree Fourth Of July in 1999 and I was staggering around the Lincoln Center area of Manhattan for want of anything else to do. Before I passed out…

Flushing Airport, the former Queens private aircraft facility, hasn’t seen a landing or takeoff in many years. It’s not even in Flushing. Along with the Whitestone Expressway, it’s the chief…

When you get off the El at the Gates Avenue station and Broadway, you have only to walk up the street about a block or so to be transported back…

Scattered throughout New York City are streets that are composed entirely of steps, and steep ones at that. As a rule they were placed on hills that were too steep…

Many people don’t know it but many of the buildings of the original village of Astoria still survive, in a tiny area west of 21st Street and north of Astoria Boulevard,…

Smack in the middle of the East River, near the UN Headquarters, is an artificial island built in the 1890s. U Thant Island was named for the Burmese secretary-general of…

Every summer/fall, the NYC Transit Museum takes over Schermerhorn Street, outside the Museum, for its annual Bus Festival, in which buses from decades ago, right up to the present, are…