Astoria

Back in 2016 I was enthusiastically noting Bartunek Hardware’s ancient sign at its #28-07 23 Avenue location, nearby the Ditmars Boulevard N train station. The store has been in business…

What follows is an expansion of a piece that recently appeared in SpliceToday. I added more information and photos taken during a recent walk in Astoria’s northern end. After fur…

I’ve decided to take this Sunday “off,” so FNY’s Sergey Kadinsky is filling in with an item about a part of Queens west of Astoria Village where I’m rarely found,…

Sound Street runs for only a block in Astoria, between 23rd Avenue and Astoria Boulevard, one-way south, yet it does bring traffic to a bridge crossing the Grand Central Parkway.…

Why write about a bar on Broadway in Astoria that closed a couple of years ago? It turns out there’s probably some Long Island City history in the name. It’s…

Remember when there could be large gatherings of facemask-free people for purely recreational purposes with no guilt trips? I know, the memory is fading. I remember them, though. I regretted…

I have been thinking lately of all the places I have been to once, and only once, since I began work on Forgotten New York in 1998. I will try…

There are plenty of Dutch place names around town … Spuyten Duyvil, Knickerbocker, Onderdonk, and just about every name with a “Van” in front of it from Van Buren to…

Restricted by the Covid crisis, or the Great Infection, In May and June, only camera foraging I did was in the neighborhoods surrounding my home in Little Neck, so that…

Grand Avenue Pizza is not on Grand Avenue but it is on an avenue that used to be Grand. I’ll explain in a minute. Today I got out of the…

While scrolling around Facebook lately, I stumbled on a bit of Astoria history that is hiding on Newtown Road, blocks away from the place where it was originally constructed. I…

From May to December 2019 I had a high-paying (by my standards) but perplexing job at a Very Small Design Firm a couple of blocks from Columbus Circle. I was…