Brooklyn

Remember the stories you read about the 49er goldpanners sifting gold nuggets out of rubble? I suspect not as much gold was found that way as the stories would have…

I found an American flag and a Norwegian flag flying by a seemingly empty yard on 62nd Street between 8th and 9th Avenue. I knew I had come upon one…

Today I once again wind the clock back into the past with a look at my newly acquired Hagstrom Queens map from 1922. The border of Brooklyn and Queens is…

I was recently tipped off to the downloadable presence of some 1922 Hagstrom maps of NYC, at least 4 boroughs minus Staten Island, on the New York Public Library website…

Brooklyn once had a cast-iron lamppost design to call its very own.    Lamps that looked like this, known as the Old Edison Post No. 4, once dominated the downtown…

A café on the corner of Van Brunt and Dikeman Streets in Red Hook carries the name of one of New York’s forgotten forts.  At old Pier 39 facing Upper…

Lampposts  nearly completely made of wood in various styles (hence my nickname for them), first appeared in the 1930s in use on the series of parkways spearheaded by Robert Moses in…

NYC’s Department of Transportation is gradually — very gradually — replacing its street signs, as many of them go back to the 1980s and are quite sun-bleached (though it seems…

ForgottenFans who have been with me for a while know that my favorite type of architecture is unadorned, low-rise brick construction, whether used for manufacturing, warehousing, or even residential. I…

Southeast Brooklyn still has a number of colonial-era houses constructed by Dutch and English settlers from the mid-18th to early 19th Centuries. Among them are the Pieter Claesen Wyckoff House…

Macomb Street, running between 4th Avenue and Prospect Park West, was probably named for Alexander Macomb Sr. (1748-1831), a prosperous Revolution-era merchant born in Belfast, Ireland. Though he initially had Tory sympathies he…

A number of years ago, I believe it was in 1999, I interviewed for American Ink Maker Magazine. The business, part of the Cygnus magazine organization, was located in a corporate park…