On the fifth straight ForgottenTour in 2012 featuring beautiful weather, ForgottenTour 55 met at the William H. Seward statue in Madison Park (honoring Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State who engineered…
Madison Square
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Since I’m the biggest square in town, I thought it would be appropriate to do a page, or set of pages, on the five major squares in Manhattan south of…
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43 West 23rd Street was built as a warehouse in 1897 (Henry Hardenbergh) and in that Beaux Arts era, even warehouses had panache. There’s something to arrest the eye on…
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Remember that episode of Star Trek when the giant microbe ate the Enterprise? At the start of the show, Mr. Spock is looking into his scanner and suddenly gets a shocked look on…
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photo: Flatbush Gardener The word came this week over at Jeremiah’s that the grand old M. Gordon Novelty facade, on 929-933 Broadway just south of East 22nd, had now been covered up in…
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Your webmaster was recently in a “business meeting” on 23rd Street — which I hope will result in a proposal for the followup to the ForgottenBook [it didn’t]— when I noticed…
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Your webmaster has worked in the proximity of 6th Avenue off and on for years, in hole-in-the-wall Russian type shops, defunct art schools, college textbook sweatshops, gardening magazine publishers, you…
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In 1963, the life of a 6-year-old lamppost enthusiast changed irrevocably: the cast iron Type 24M “Corvington” poles that had dominated the streets of Bay Ridge disappeared seemingly overnight, with mostly…
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CONTINUED FROM PART 2 It’s been a potter’s field, an arsenal and a military parade ground. Until 1844, a major wagon route to Boston occupied its site. Madison Square…
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This time, as we open the ancient New York City Street Necrology with its cracked, crumbling leather cover, a dogeared page with running, streaming ink and stains from lord knows…
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At first glance, the brick building at 6th Avenue and 24th Street doesn’t appear to be all that unusual, other than the presence of the longtime strip joint Billy’s Topless on…
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Once the mainstay of multilane boulevards in the pre-expressway era, cast-iron twinlamps once decorated highways like the Grand Concourse in the Bronx and Queens Boulevard and Horace Harding Boulevard in…