Maspeth

SINCE Forgotten New York seems to have wandered into several blind alleys this week, I may as well go with the flow and talk about another one. On the undefended…

EVEN after Greater New York was founded in 1905, southern Brooklyn and much of Queens, Bronx and Staten Island was farmland if not open country, dotted here and there with…

THIS grouping of attached two-story residences found on 59th Drive between Fresh Pond Road and 64th Street, opposite the Rieff Playground, was built as workers’ houses of the Sampson’s Oil…

In April 2017, Mitch Waxman, a member of the Newtown Creek Alliance, conducted one of his Newtown Creek tours, his most comprehensive, which he called “Creek-a-Thon”. It was an all-day affair…

In the colonial era, the neighborhood now known as Maspeth, Queens was the site of the home of a prominent canal builder, De Witt Clinton, who held nearly every available…

SUNSHINE is my undecaffeinated coffee, my 5 Hour Energy, my Red Bull. I get more done on days with full sunshine than I do on overcast days; nonetheless, I have…

I was thinking of West Maspeth, a part of town few but its inhabitants give a second thought, specifically the region just east of the Long Island Rail Road Montauk…

We have met the Creek and it is us. Here I am standing on the west end of 58th Road in a no-man’s land (except for the many industrial concerns located…

THE symbol of Warsaw, Poland, is a mermaid wielding a sword and a shield. As early as the late 1300s, surviving paintings of coats of arms show a a creature…

THERE are a couple of artifacts in Maspeth that may seem like a head-scratcher, as there are a couple of pieces of infrastructure that reference a neighborhood a couple of…

THE topography between 64th Street and 65th Place at 53rd Avenue in Maspeth was deemed to hilly to build a road so instead, a pedestrian staircase connects the two routes,…

THERE’S something odd about Caldwell Avenue in Queens, which runs from 68th Street at Mount Olivet Cemetery east and southeast to Dry Harbor Road at about 84th Street, though it’s…