Brooklyn

Take a residential neighborhood, build a linear pedestrian park spanning several city blocks, add spectacular views across a nearby body of water, shake and stir. The recipe for overdevelopment, gentrification…

Squibb Park at Columbia Heights and the BQE overpass was named for Dr. E.R. Squibb (1819-1900), a pharmacologist whose lab was located nearby. Squibb became a major commercial manufacturer; its slogan…

I’ve been checking some things out, as you may expect, on the 1940-era tax photos newly uploaded to the NYC Municipal Archives site. I’ve looked at the well-known buildings in Manhattan…

At Beverly and Bedford Avenues in Flatbush is this huge Art Moderne monolith that looks like something straight out of the 1936 movie Things to Come (the third section, where…

Something about North Brooklyn attracts me during the Christmas season. I have done surveys of both Manhattan and Graham Avenues in December. Today, I chose Humboldt Street, as I have a…

Between 1959-1964, when I was just being formatted, the city bruited the Gowanus Expressway through my neighborhood, which connected the BQE and the Belt Parkway junction at 65th Street and…

I took a walk from Williamsburg, up the Humboldt Street spine into Greenpoint, enjoying one of the rare clear fall days in December. Pictures from this walk will show up…

Block after block of monolithic stone-clad buildings between 2nd Ave and 3rd Avenue from 30th to 36th Streets were constructed by architect William Higginson in the first 3 decades of the…

Here’s what was the Loew’s Alpine Theatre at 5th Avenue and Bay Ridge Avenue (69th Street) in 1941. The Alpine was opened in 1921 and was a movie theater from…

I’ve explored the 4th Avenue IND station at 9th Street in Park Slope before for Forgotten New York, way back in 1999 when the station was almost in ruins. Since…

Seekers of beautiful architecture visit Greenpoint’s India, Kent, Milton, and Noble Streets for their concentrations of classic 19th-century buildings. But my favorite cross street in Greenpoint is Oak, which also…

One of my initial features in Forgotten New York nearly 20 years ago concerned the gigantic neon signs built to attract notice from motorists on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the…