Brooklyn

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…

The Decatur Theatre, 1674 (Brooklyn’s) Broadway, just north of Decatur Street, opened in 1914 on the site of a vaudeville house, the People’s Pleasure Palace. I wish they had stuck…

The Tivoli Theatre, formerly at 363 Fulton Street just north of Adams, had a magnificent semicircular marquee, with white letters on a black background. In this 1940 tax photo recently…

One one of the very rare sunny days in November 2018, I walked from Grand Army Plaza at Prospect Park into Prospect Heights, Clinton Hill, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Williamsburg, getting over…

By PATRICK O’CONNOR guest columnist What’s that, now?  The Terminal Moraine is the pile of rocks and soil pushed up by the advancing glaciers of the last ice age.  There…

Prospect Avenue is the spine of Windsor Terrace, running from 3rd and Hamilton Avenues southeast and south to Ocean Parkway. It’s named for nearby Prospect Park and its high hills…

William Holbrook Beard (1825-1900) was a popular painter of comedic animal scenes; it was he who first popularized the Wall Street “bulls” and “bears” by depicting them wrestling on the…