Brooklyn

Back in the 1940s, every once in awhile, subway cars and stations would become sort of unkempt, and people could be less than courteous. Maybe there’d be a candy wrapper…

Are trolleys truly extinct? According to the City of New York, they are. But for a brief shining moment in Brooklyn, they weren’t. There was a Jurassic Park-like experiment that…

Bowling alleys. I thought bowling was enjoying a revival in the 80s and 90s, with electronic exploding scoreboards and spiffed-up bowling establishments that put the lie to the commonly held impression…

I don’t drive. Not only don’t I see the sense in laying out hundreds a month for car payments, gasoline and repairs, I’m carphobic, and don’t see the sense in…

There’s a pretty boring-looking, undistinguished building painted gray along Third Avenue between First and Third Streets at the end of Park Slope, where it meets the Gowanus Canal. Walking past,…

Wedges, scoopers, turtlebeaks and nozzles! When the talk turns to street lighting, as it often does with me and Forgotten Fans (remember those cone-shaped things that turned up on bishops…

Ever heard of a Brooklyn neighborhood called White Sands? If you haven’t, no big deal…most Brooklyn historians haven’t either! Perched in the no man’s land between Bath Beach and Coney Island, White…

In early November the Forgottoners Tour swung through Staten Island. In St. George, New Brighton, Grymes Hill and Stapleton we saw dozens of beautiful buildings dating back to the 1850s or…

Once upon a time, trolleys clang-clanged their way through the streets of Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx and even parts of Queens and Staten Island. Trolleys ruled to the degree that…

In early fall some Forgotten Fans enjoyed a walk through Coney Island in which relics of its former glory and promises, perhaps, of its future regeneration were recorded. Our tour definitely…

Just as New York City’s street signs have evolved and changed over the years, so have its one-way signs, which have undergone a three-part metamorphosis in the years I have…

The Fourth Avenue IND elevated station opened July 1, 1933, and has pretty much been allowed to decay ever since. In my opinion, the MTA doesn’t know what it has,…