SEEN here on a Forgotten NY tour in 2018, The Tompkins Square Temperance Monument, erected in 1891, was a gift from a San Francisco dentist and temperance activist, Henry Cogswell (1820-1900).…

I am, or was, frequently on the block of East 18th between Broadway and Park Avenue South, just north of Union Square. Though I haven’t been in lately, I’ve been…

In the heart of Bushwick is a green superblock named in honor of Maria Hernandez, a neighborhood activist who lived across from the park on Starr Street. It is a…

DON’T let the glassy exterior of the building on the NE corner of Lexington Avenue and East 45th fool you…this building, now home to Midtown Comics on the second floor,…

HOW does one explain Barnell Street, which seems to have popped up organically on Red Hook street maps including Google over the past couple of decades? The city doesn’t grace…

In the “stuff that I probably won’t see happen” file, today I decided to reprint one of two articles I wrote for Gothamist in 2019, this one co-bylined with Neil…

In an earlier era of subway construction, the bulk of what is now called the L train was constructed between 1916 and 1924, an eight-year period, by an privately-owned entity…

I have admired the Bronx Community College campus in University Heights for a long time but avoided photography there after an admonition by a security guard several years ago; fortunately,…

FOR some reason, I failed to include this in the recent online zoom chat I gave regarding mosaic subway art. I’m unsure whether to post the rest in Forgotten NY,…

If anything, in 1931 Winchester Boulevard was a bit more developed than Hillside Avenue out in Hollis Hills. Both were dirt roads that got muddy in a hurry after the…

I didn’t realize it at the time, since the ground floor had been corrupted and “modernized” while I was working there, but 150 5th Avenue at W. 20th Street is…

YOGI Berra said it best, as he often did: “You can observe a lot by looking.” I must have used that quote in FNY before, but not lately. I was…