WHILE riding on the B35 bus on Church Avenue in Kensington in the 1960s (my parents and I would take bus rides on all the local lines when I was…

THE Van Siclens, who spelt their name in two ways as was common in the colonial era before spellings were codified, settled in western Long Island in the mid-17th Century…

We found two classics in one on this Forgotten NY tour in 2019 in the Gowanus Canal region in Brooklyn. In the foreground is a dayburning Type B Henry Bacon…

THE blue and white 60-foot by 60-foot Columbia University “C” on the Marble Hill side of the Harlem River has been painted and repainted on the gneiss rock facing the…

THE southeastern tip of Staten Island, its closest approach to Long Island, has been protected by fortifications since 1663, when a Dutch blockhouse was established. The area was known as…

OLEAN Street, in the heart of Brooklyn in Midwood,  runs for two diagonal blocks between East 22nd and East 24th Streets between Avenues N and O. In a confusing situation…

I haven’t been on the subways and trains as often as I was prior to 2020. My fascination hasn’t ended, but at first I stayed away while the Pandemic was…

In a little-known quirk of geography, a small piece of the borough of Manhattan, known as Marble Hill, is on the mainland. It is surrounded on three sides by the…

THE Huntington Free Library in Westchester Square, Bronx (where Westchester and East Tremont Avenues get together) is a small, dark brownstone building with an arched front door with a chiseled…

No sooner had I learned about the imminent demise of the 19th-Century Ryder-Van Cleef House in Gravesend than I was notified about the destruction of the Wilhelmus Stoothoff House a…

RYDER-Van Cleef House, constructed in 1840 by Lawrence Ryder, stood at 26 Village Road north before it was moved to #38 in 1930. A Ryder daughter married a Van Cleef,…

I’ve been round these parts before — in fact, I’ve done a survey of Canarsie’s still-numerous, but dwindling number of alleys before, in 2008 as a matter of fact. However I…