Downtown Brooklyn

MUCH of downtown Brooklyn has given up its rich collection of one-block and dead-end alleys, with a few notable exceptions, such as Grace Court, Grace Court Alley and even Harrison…

THE thousands of subway passengers who pass through the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station daily, catching A, C or G trains, probably take little note of the abandoned side platform, which served shuttle…

HERE’S Willoughby Street in the fall of 2017 on an impassably busy weekday afternoon. I don’t look back on my unemployed days in the 2010s with much fondness with the…

A huge factory that formerly turned out threads for the Howard Clothes Company (a men’s haberdasher), and before that, gyroscopes, stands on the west side of the pedal to the…

ACCORDING to the NY Public Library website, the Brooklyn Business Library “has a reference collection of more than 100,000 volumes, a circulating collection of 30,000 books, internet access, electronic resources, 800…

A look north up Bond Street from Livingston in downtown Brooklyn reveals the dignified domed Dime Savings Bank and its new neighbor, the  74-story, 1,066-foot residential Brooklyn Tower. The Dime…

RED Hook Lane, in Downtown Brooklyn, can be added to the list of New York City streets that are nowhere near the locations they are named for, joining routes like…

In downtown Brooklyn, Flatbush, Atlantic Avenue, and 4th Avenue all come together at a triangle called Times Plaza after a newspaper, long defunct, that had its offices nearby. In 1908…

PARKED outside #167 Concord Street in Brooklyn is owner Frank Didik’s car,  a hybrid gasoline/electric powered vehicle called the Didik Long Ranger designed in the mid-1980s. It’s 96 inches long, 65 inches…

A look at any picture book of old Brooklyn will show you that Fulton Street from about 1850 all the way to about 1950 was the pre-eminent street of the…

In 1908 the IRT Subway was extended to Brooklyn for the first time, and Heins and LaFarge, the architects who constructed most of the subway’s early stations and stationhouses, erected…

THERE was a time when Blimpie ruled the roost as far as fast food submarine sandwiches (known by a variety of names elsewhere in the country) in the New York…