Chinatown

I haven’t done as many long-form specials with as many as 100 pictures per page of late. In the Age of Twitter, people are increasingly impatient with these long treatises…

This drugstore ad on Canal Street just east of Broadway has stood up to years of direct sun. As you might expect the telephone exchange CA stood for CAnal. I’ve…

It all began on a lunchtime stroll when I was working at Macy’s in the summer of 2001. I’d frequently take the train downtown or uptown — sometimes I’d go…

I won’t go nuts with the NYC Department of Records photos — in FNY, I have always relied on new photos taken by me — but it’s hard to resist…

Time to delve once more into the Bob Mulero collection of lampposts. Bob and I achieved our separate lamppost obsessions separately: while both us have been enthusiastically noting the state of…

While walking uptown during Summer Streets 2010 I passed by two of New York City’s most picturesque relics at Park Avenue and East 46th, at the tunnel that takes the Park Avenue…

Division Street is one of Manhattan’s most unremarked-on thoroughfares. It hasn’t gotten much respect over the centuries and decades, either — it’s been reduced to less than half of its…

“YOU CAN SEE ALL THE STARS as you walk down Hollywood Boulevard,” says Ray Davies, and they’re there, right in the sidewalk for all to see. But the ghosts wander the Bowery…

IT’S ALWAYS FUN when it’s time to do a lamppost page in Forgotten NY, because these vaguely anthropomorphic untility poles are what got me started with this Forgotten NY stuff…

Hundreds of statues dot the Manhattan landscape, and indeed, in all five boroughs. All but a handful represent idyllic, mythic or allegorical figures, or decorative designs. In the distinct minority are…

Before the days when the New York City Department of Transportation began to install replicas of classic bishop-crook, “Corvington” long-armed lamps and twinlamp designs, they defaced still-standing classic lampposts that were…