Downtown Brooklyn

In late winter 2012 I was wandering around downtown Brooklyn, on Fulton, Duffield, and Livingston Streets. Fulton has undergone a change lately, as the venerable Fulton Mall, instituted in 1979,…

You could park in his lot at Rockwell Place and Fulton Street for that amount once.

This is the last, or at least among the last, Lawrence Street signs on the BMT platform I’ve always known as Lawrence Street. The station name was wiped from the…

There it stands at the north end of Cadman Plaza in downtown Brooklyn near the Brooklyn Bridge entrance, a litle-visited memorial to a little-known NYC Mayor. William Jay Gaynor (1851-1913)…

A run of preternaturally sunny and mild November weather has allowed me to do some ForgottenWalks covering much of mid-and southern Brooklyn as well as western Manhattan, and all this…

In downtown Brooklyn, there are a pair of streets called Fleet Street and Fleet Place — and even an additional alley on York Street in DUMBO called Fleet’s Alley. I had…

May 2010: I was stumbling around Fort Greene and Clinton Hill on a recent Saturday, mumbling incoherently, no doubt frightening all the yuppies and richies who had recently moved in, when…

At one time, railroad stations, especially terminals in large cities, were thought of as magnificent gateways or portals to new realms, welcoming travelers from far and wide to places they had…

Few Brooklyn neighborhoods have changed as much as has the part of Fort Greene/Prospect Heights just east of Times Plaza, where two of Brooklyn’s longest streets, Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues, get…

ATTENTION has been paid, and rightly so, to the NYC subway system on its 100th anniversary in 2004, but there’s an even older transit system in New York existing alongside the…

Lost opportunities. Blown chances. Once again, I’ve been cheated out of a vintage dining experience. I’d always been curious about, and wanted to take in a meal at, Brooklyn’s famous Gage &…

You’ll find a lot of books on the shelves, especially during the holiday season, that have dozens of old-time postcards of New York’s most famous landmarks…the Empire State Building, the…