Manhattan

I’ll admit, I messed up a bit on this particular walk. For much of the tour, I had the camera at the wrong setting and many of the photos are…

In 2010 I snapped this photo on Leroy and Washington Streets of a vinyl and plastic sign for La Frieda Meats, a 4th generation butcher that has gained an enviable…

For over ten years, my MTA bus dispatcher compadre Gary Fonville has been providing photos and stories behind buildings and signs he has seen along his former routes. He has…

For years I had labored under the idea that the two busts (one above the door, the other on the top floor)  that you can see on the Brill Building, NW…

I know about Thomas Gainsborough, but I pretty much know about him because of The Kinks. The portrait and landscape painter’s (1727-1788) most famous work is The Blue Boy, rendered…

I don’t like the way I lined up this shot, so I’ll have to improve on it the next time I’m in the vicinity, but now more than ever is…

Inscribed with the words “Our Strength Is Our Heritage, Our Heritage Is Our Life” (seen on the lower right) this mural at 232 East Broadway east of Clinton Street depicts…

In my career in graphic arts as a proofreader, typesetter, copywriter, and mechanical artist (which are all, I realize, becoming jobs of the past) there was a time when I…

The former 331, 329, 327 Washington Street before Independence Plaza was built Though the massive yet quite mundane Independence Plaza now dominates the old Washington Market area, there’s a break in…

As early as 2005, I was chronicling the changing Bowery in Forgotten New York and was lamenting the imminent demise of McGurk’s Suicide Hall just north of East Houston Street.…

Corinthian-columned, monumental Union Square Savings Bank, Union Square East and East 15th, was built in 1905 as a mini-Greek temple worshiping thrift. Its architect was Henry Bacon, the designer of the Lincoln Memorial…

An L-shaped alley appears on maps of Lower Manhattan going back as far as 1776. At that early date we can already see streets with the same names as now,…