472 Broadway, one of Manhattan’s narrowest buildings in Soho north of Grand Street, has been up, down and then up again…literally. It’s known as the Gila Building because of the…

QUEENS Village, centered at Springfield Blvd. and Jamaica Avenue, was known originally as Little Plains, then Brushville, after a local landowner, until about 1920. The present elevated station was constructed in…

I never tire of Greenpoint, and each time I am there, there is something “new” I haven’t seen before, or one more layer of the onion to peel off. Much…

THE Beddi-Makky Art Foundry, 227 India Street east of McGuinness Boulevard, is a bronze monument foundry established in Greenpoint in the 1940s when two immigrant Hungarian foundryworkers named Bedi and…

ONLY in the ‘dirty 30s’ (as weatherman Tex Antoine used to say) could a laundry be named the most beautiful building in Queens…though in the borough of Archie Bunker, maybe that isn’t…

JUST as Macy’s moved uptown from its original location, so did Lord & Taylor. The store’s third location was in this French Second Empire building, on the southwest corner of…

In 1908 the IRT Subway was extended to Brooklyn for the first time, and Heins and LaFarge, the architects who constructed most of the subway’s early stations and stationhouses, erected…

It occurs to me that I haven’t done an entry in the Forgotten NY Street Necrology category for awhile, and in this case, I want to do something a bit…

ONE of my favorite subway websites is Vanshnookenraggen, the pseudonym of Andrew Lynch, who writes about a NYC subway system that never was, or one that never will be. Entries…

TRAVIS  is about as far west as you can get in Staten Island, at the west end of Victory Boulevard. Just as Proctor and Gamble made Mariners Harbor a company…

PRECIOUS and few are the streets in New York City that begin with Z, and fewer still are subway stations that begin with the 26th letter. Westchester Square can claim…

ENTRANCE and exit kiosks were constructed by the IRT, or Interborough Rapid Transit (today’s numbered subway lines) for its original 28 stations from City Hall north to 145th Street along…