I found myself in Bay Ridge a great deal in 2013, mainly because of extensive dental work, but the neighborhood, in which I lived from 1957-2003, is one I always…

In late summer 2013 I was again wandering in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, because the changes going on in these neighborhoods is accelerating to a breathtaking pace. What was once a…

If you have been reading FNY for awhile you know I’m fascinated with the patterns produced by Queens’ occasionally wacko street numbering system (and I also speculate what it would…

Are 10th, 11th and 12th Streets, on either side of 5th Avenue, in Greenwich Village? The East Village? The Union Square area? I can’t tell. I was scuttling furtively around…

I have lived on, or very near, 6th Avenue in Bay Ridge three times. My first couple of decades were spent in my parents’ 2-bedroom apartment at 8302 6th Avenue…

In July 2012, I was wandering around Hamilton Heights on an overcast and overhumid afternoon in quest of Alexander Hamilton‘s house, built in 1802, that he called the Grange in…

Brooklyn Bridge Park is an over $200 million extravaganza, an 85-acre park along the East River from Atlantic Avenue north and northweat along the East River to Jay Street in…

It can be argued that Leroy Street is the most unusual street in all of Manhattan, and perhaps all of New York City. What other street can claim: That it…

Lispenard is one of those only-in-New York street names you find downtown, such as Desbrosses and Laight — neither of which I am sure how to pronounce. I think it’s…

Midtown Manhattan’s side streets can be lined with ancient structures, but they have come to hide their antiquity well. In the go-go real estate world, busy, commercial neighborhoods call for…

I do not remember Bryant Park during its legendary Bad Old Days of the 1970s and 1980s, when, according to all the chroniclings I have read, it was a ‘wretched…

East Houston Street is the game-changer in Manhattan, dividing the club of streets with names of southern Manhattan Island from the fraternity of streets with numbers (and a few letters)…