THROUGH much of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Penny Bridge was a toll bridge on the Bushwick & Newtown Turnpike (end of Meeker Ave). In the seventeenth century, it…

On December 31, 2023 I ventured into DUMBO, north of downtown Brooklyn, a formerly chiefly industrial region now a hotbed of expensive residences, retail and even a branch of the…

IT’S happening. Slowly, almost inexorably. But it’s happening and it’s getting more and more noticeable by the day. Yes, once again, I am getting interested in NYC’s railroad pedestrian crossings.…

FOR the subway signage buffs, the Borough Hall (Brooklyn) station presents unique opportunities to see various station identification methods over the years. For a number of years in the 1970s…

AFTER 25 years of Forgotten New York…official on March 26th…I’ve begun to take note of IND signage from the 1930s. Not the large identification tablets seen on the station platforms,…

BRONX’S Park Avenue is a northern extension of Manhattan’s (much like Broadway and Third Avenue) and its house numbers follow the sequence that started all the way south at East…

UNUSUALLY for a NYC subway station that opened in July 1918, the 68th Street-Hunter College station has a mezzanine section built over the tracks. When it’s not too busy, you…

GRAND Central Madison, the new Long Island Rail Road terminal beneath the main terminal serving Metro-North rains, opened in early 2023 after about 20 years of construction. It’s truly vast,…

HOLLAND Tunnel engineer Ole Singstad (who replaced original tunnel engineer Clifford Milburn Holland) is little remembered today but should be mentioned in the same breath as Robert Moses and Othmar…

GRAND Central Terminal tourgoers cluster around a derelict baggage car in early 2016. For years a myth persisted that this baggage car was used by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, while he…

Title card photo by Peter Dougherty, whose Tracks of the NYC Subway’s new edition is available. THIS weekend is particularly busy with holiday stuff and freelance work, so I’ll do…

UNTIL just recently, M3 electric-powered rail cars employed on the Long Island Rail Road, were still in use as delivery of new M9 cars was delayed. (As MTA subway cars…