Brooklyn

UNLIKE the late, great Lou Rawls, I’m not a “natural” man. By that I mean that in my walks around NYC, I much prefer the more urban areas, as the…

PICTURED here is the annual Transit Museum subway trivia quiz held in downtown Brooklyn each January, which attracted hundreds of participants every year for several years, with the last one…

THE Gil Hodges Community Garden is a green spot in gritty Gowanus, at Carroll Street and Denton Place. It was founded as early as 1982, but over 30 years later…

GLENMORE Avenue is a narrow, one-way route (running east to west) a block south of Liberty Avenue; it formerly was continuous to auto traffic, but in 1955 the Howard Houses,…

In the days before central plumbing, you had to attend to the necessities somehow. New York City used to feature dozens of public baths. A remaining one, on 268 East…

THOUGH Brooklyn and Manhattan are largely bereft of alleys and dead ends (both boroughs have eradicated many of them in the name of urban renewal), some neighborhoods have more than…

In 1640, Dutch provincial governor William Kieft prosecuted a war upon the indigenous Native Americans that resulted in more than 1,000 Indian fatalities in Manhattan and western Long Island. It was…

THE owners of a house at Van Sicklen Street and Corso Court, a private cul de sac south of Gravesend Neck Road in the heart of Gravesend, have preserved this…

A few winters ago, I walked in Coney Island in early March after a few days of light snow that had put down nearly a foot. I strolled down the…

WHAT was originally called the Meeker Avenue Bridge when it opened in 1939 was renamed the Tadeusz Kościuszko Bridge for the Polish general who aided George Washington during the American Revolution on 9/22/1940;…

By SERGEY KADINSKYForgotten NY correspondent On the map, the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn appears nearly unchanged since the mid-19th century, with few superblocks, and not one grid-defiant street. But on…

FROM April 2014, when the trees were still bare, comes this photo of the unique Camperdown Elm in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. In the years before moving to Flushing in 1993,…