Brooklyn

CONTINUED FROM GREEN-WOOD HEIGHTS PART 1 5th Avenue The stretch of Fifth Avenue along Green-Wood cemetery is by far its quietest, sandwiched between its incredibly bustling areas on either end: Park…

I confess. “Green-Wood Heights” is a name concocted by real-estaters stumped about what to call the area on the NW side of Green-Wood Cemetery between Park Slope and Sunset Park. Some…

above: West 4 Street near 7th, Greenwich Village Maniacally busy schedule this weekend. Finishing a chapter for another book, helping a friend pack for a move, leading a ForgottenTour. Too much for…

Forgotten Fans wave with Minerva In what was undoubtedly the best weather ever for a ForgottenTour (sunny and 68) forty Forgotten fans (and one heckler!) converged on Brooklyn’s Green-Wood cemetery, a…

Before modern efficiencies, milk and milk products were done on a local scale. Eventually due to New York City’s swelling population, larger facilities were needed. There were many private companies filling…

When I first started researching NYC history I assumed that Sheepshead Bay was named for its one-time resemblance, in outline, to a sheep’s head. After all, that’s how a peninsula on…

CONTINUED FROM SHEEPSHEAD BAY, PART 2 We’ve run out of letters The town of Flatbush, absorbed into Brooklyn in the 1890s, had its own tidy street naming system: East and West…

CONTINUED FROM SHEEPSHEAD BAY, PART 1 Up in the old hotels Brian Merlis, in the title of his Sheepshead Bay book, calls Sheepshead Bay “Brooklyn’s Gold Coast.” After Austin Corbin built…

In 1963, the life of a 6-year-old lamppost enthusiast changed irrevocably: the cast iron Type 24M “Corvington” poles that had dominated the streets of Bay Ridge disappeared seemingly overnight, with mostly…

There are hundreds…perhaps thousands…of names over apartment house doors and building cornices all over town, memorialized for decades but known to no one. Of course, some are just made-up names…

Few Brooklyn neighborhoods have changed as much as has the part of Fort Greene/Prospect Heights just east of Times Plaza, where two of Brooklyn’s longest streets, Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues, get…

Manhattan may have its Canal Street, built over a former waterway draining the equally lost Collect Pond, but Brooklyn has its very own waterway known as the Gowanus Canal bisecting the neighborhood…