It turns out that Brooklyn had a “dry” or alcohol-free town decades before Staten Island’s Prohibition Park, now known as Westerleigh. While Prohibition Park was established in 1887 and strictly…

In May 2023, I walked Humboldt Street’s near-entire length, from Flushing Avenue north to Greenpoint Avenue. In many ways it’s the north-south axis of East Williamsburg. I remember my very…

NATHAN Hale Court is one of a number of apartment houses on Eastyern Parrkway near Franklin Avenue with patriotic names; the Thomas Jefferson is nearby. The name Nathan Hale is synonymous with…

I have always had a fascination for the structure in the wedge of territory between Lafayette and Mulberry where they meet Bleecker. Right now the building comes to one of…

STREET patterns can tell you a great deal about the characteristics of a neighborhood. For one thing, they call out the spirits of railroads past. We have already seen the…

BLEECKER STREET, often misspelled without its “c”, was named for William Bleecker, a friend of Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant, who was a writer himself: a renowned punster, his work appeared in several…

EARLY December 2023 was mild, in the 50s and 60s, foretelling a winter that was milder than usual…again. In the era of climate change, no winter has been below normal…

BACK in 2019, I walked Victory Boulevard from Clove Road to the Staten Island Expressway as part of a walk that clocked in at over 9 miles. It was intended…

I recently went on a jaunt in Green-Wood Cemetery for the first time in a few years, and I’ll likely do a full page eventually; I plan another visit in…

THE Moore Street Retail Market in East Williamsburg is a LaGuardia-era establishment on Humboldt Street, stretching from Moore to Varet Streets. Filled with produce vendors, small food stalls, crafts-makers and…

QUITE a few years have passed since I strode Van Duzer Street and St. Paul’s Avenue in Stapleton. Of late I have been revisiting locales where I have not been…

Continued from Part 1 5th Avenue in Brooklyn is merely one of a sequence of numbered avenues in western Brooklyn that run from 1st to 28th Avenues. While some like…