5th Avenue

I have not often mentioned 5th Avenue’s signature stoplight, the Mercury, a bronze pole with red and green lamps placed catercorner on 5th Avenue from Washington Square to 59th Street…

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…

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…

FOR 8 years or so, from 1982-1990, I lived in a railroad-flat type apartment at #654 73rd Street, which until 1960 or so was smack in the middle of the…

In the early 20th Century, not everyone necessarily wore a watch. Men carried expensive pocket watches, but until the advent of the wristwatch, time was tracked by clocks of various…

Back in October I was roving Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan quite a bit. In the year of Covid, I resumed roaming about, including riding the subways, at first fitfully in…

There are three 5th avenue stations in the NYC subways, each of them on crosstown lines. 5th Avenue, the spine of Manhattan Island, serves as the divider between East and…

March 2019 marks Forgotten New York’s 20th anniversary. To celebrate the occasion, I’ve re-scanned about 150 key images from the early days of FNY from 35MM prints. In the early…

Depending on who you speak to, there’s a wide opinion on the accomplishments and career of Dr. James Marion Sims. Dr. James Marion Sims (1813-1883) is often called the father of gynecology; he founded…

“What hath God wrought?” With those words, the Information Age began. You know Samuel Finley Breese Morse (1791-1872) invented the telegraph and sent that first famous message in 1844 … but did you…

There are only three subway stations located on 5th Avenue in Manhattan, and none at all in Brooklyn, which also has a lengthy 5th Avenue. In Manhattan, the Queen of…

You’re looking at an increasingly vanishing lamppost specimen located at 5th Ave. and E. 61st Street, in front of the Pierre luxury skyscraper hotel. Slotted Donald Deskey lampposts, designed by…