BEFORE Brooklyn was a borough, it was a city; before that, it was a smaller city; before that, it was a small town; before that, a few huts by the…

NEW York’s first water system was built between 1837 and 1842. Prior to those years, water was obtained from cisterns, wells and barrels from rain. Construction began in 1837 on…

FINALLY! Your webmaster has come back to the Bronx! It had not been since November 2021 I had set foot in the mainland borough. As many of you know, I…

FOR years I had hunted Margaret Court. No, not the famed Australian tennis champion in the 1960s and 1970s. I was seeking a short alley in Homecrest, a subdivision of…

WHILE West 33rd passes the Empire State Building as it nears 5th Avenue, I was more fascinated by the Bawo and Dotter Building across the street at #20 West 33rd,…

In 1877, the Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Island Railway was incorporated, opening the next year in 1878. It originally ran from the Prospect Park entrance at Flatbush and Ocean Avenues…

PUGSLEY Creek, an inlet of the East River, forms a fork with the much longer and deeper Westchester Creek in Clason Point, Bronx, with Castle Hill Park at the foot…

ANCIENT New Utrecht, Brooklyn, now co-terminous with Kings County, was once just one of six towns that made up Kings County, delineated by British rulers in 1683. “Kings” refers to the…

BAY Parkway, which slots in between 21st and 23rd in the list of southwest Brooklyn avenues from 1 to 28, and I have had an off and on relationship. Oddly…

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…

GRADUALLY, my photos of Livingston Street that I fired off at the end of my Nevins Street walk are leaching out. This is at the very beginning of Livingston, at…

A look north up Bond Street from Livingston in downtown Brooklyn reveals the dignified domed Dime Savings Bank and its new neighbor, the  74-story, 1,066-foot residential Brooklyn Tower. The Dime…