Brooklyn

WAY back in 2011 I walked Union Street all the way from the waterfront in Carroll Gardens to Prospect Park; I haven’t yet made my way to where Union Street…

On Sunday, March 17, 2024 I meandered around the Gowanus area and wound up walking the length of Nevins Street, which runs from Carroll Street to Flatbush Avenue in the…

THERE are a number of iron poles that supported trolley wires scattered around NYC, especially in Brooklyn, where I can locate about a dozen or so. Here is one found…

ONE of my favorite pastimes is to pore over old maps, especially of New York City, and note what is still there and what has disappeared. In the mid-19th Century,…

At the triangle formed by East New York Avenue and Prospect Place where they meet Rockaway Avenue, you will find a tall building with a bricked-up picture window, as well…

WHAT a surprise it was when, while pedaling around DUMBO on. a bicycle in the 1970s or 1980s, I took off east down Plymouth Street, navigating the Belgian blocked pavement…

BORN and raised in Bay Ridge Brooklyn, me. And from the time Robert Moses dug a trench across the street from my house that wound up as the Gowanus Expressway,…

YOU never know what you’re going to find down by the water, which is why I am happy to have been born and raised in a city by the water.…

SINCE the beginnings of Forgotten NY in 1999 I have periodically talked about “Octapoles,” NYC’s standard silver-colored lampposts whose shafts have eight sides, hence my name for them. They have…

THERE are no less than 20 place names in Brooklyn named “Paerdegat.” There’s Paerdegat Park, shown here; Paerdegat Basin, which separates the communities of Bergen Beach/Georgetown and Canarsie; Paerdegat Avenue…

As a kid, I was rather more holy than I am now. For example, I served as an altar boy eons ago at my home parish in Bay Ridge, St.…

BACK In September 2022 I took a train to 15th Street/Prospect Park and walked through the park, eventually winding up at Barclays Center. I had been feeling “off” for awhile,…