Manhattan

You don’t see a lot of woodframe buildings in upper Manhattan, especially with some of their roofline decorations still intact. In fact it’s illegal to build woodframe buildings in Manhattan,…

photo: Glen Norman, 2001 This Twin stood on the SW corner of 5th Avenue and West 32nd Street until approximately 2013. It’s a Twinlamp but not the original 5th Avenue…

ForgottenFans gather at the Square Diner, Varick and Leonard Streets, for ForgottenTour #99 on October 18, 2015. Some of the tour highlights:   Because of the miracle of landmarks preservation, the…

Usually, when an ancient ad starts fading that’s bad news because its legibility is ruined. But I’ve found a sign at 117 East 24th Street, a couple of blocks east…

The Market Diner, manufactured by the De Raffele Diner Company and opened at 11th Avenue and West 43rd Street in 1964, closes at the end of the business day on…

Much of Manhattan is a numbered street grid, with the exception of lower Manhattan below Houston Street, Greenwich Village, and many streets far uptown in Inwood and the Dyckman Street…

I first saw Freeman Alley on a map in the 1980s, when I went to the Rand McNally Map Store on East 53rd Street just east of 5th Avenue and…

Bob Mulero, who usually finds remaining ancient Streetlights of New York City, found this vintage hand-drawn sign on one of the pillars in the IRT Chambers Street station, serving the…

Doctor Thomas Addis Emmet was quite a man of letters in the late 19th and early 20th Century — a gynecologist by trade, he was a book collector and a…

While stumbling around Tribeca scouting the ForgottenTour that was held on October 4, 2015, I saw this painted ad at #77 Hudson Street just south of Harrison Street, and I…

Here’s an item I didn’t get to because of time constraints on the Forgotten NY Tribeca tour on Sunday, October 4, 2015: The gold leaf signage on this building on…

Classic, railway-car shaped diners have become scarce in Manhattan (and to a lesser degree other boroughs)  since the Bloomberg Era ushered in Luxury City. Property owners and developers look with…