Queens

Maspeth’s WWI Memorial is in a traffic triangle named for a local soldier, Walter Garlinge. Originally NYC Parks Department had posted a sign calling it “Garlinger Triangle” adding an incorrect…

You may not think that this 1915 Belcher-Hyde map of the Woodside area around the Long Island Rail Road/Roosevelt Avenue transit complex (near old Shaw’s Hotel) has much relevancy today……

Time hasn’t been kind to the tiny building once known as Shaw’s Hotel on 64th Street north of Woodside Avenue, hard by the Long Island Rail Road main branch. A…

The long-armed “Corvington” lamppost, originally dubbed the “boulevard post” first appeared around 1900, give or take a few years, and were manufactured to illuminate wider roads, such as Broadway north…

Other than the grocery on the corner of 38th Avenue and 58th Street, the stretch of 58th between 37th and 38th is unrecognizable as the commercial strip it used to…

There are a lot of historical gems hidden in Woodside, some of them hidden behind layers of modern aluminum siding — but some of them look pretty much the same…

Outside the circa 1710 Onderdonk House on Flushing and Onderdonk Avenues , the seat of the Greater Ridgewood Historical Society (which is recommended for a visit) amid glass wholesalers, auto…

Commuter and intercity rail connecting NYC and New England has run over these elevated tracks at Northern Boulevard and Broadway since the Hell Gate Bridge was constructed in 1916-1917. Here the line…

You could always count on Henry Stern, commissioner of the NYC Parks Department off an on for several years, most recently during the Giuliani administration, for whimsical names given to…

When traveling the rails you will occasionally see signal stanchions like this one, with lights arranged on a circular metal background. These railroad signals were developed by the Pennsylvania railroad…

For years after moving to fab Flushing in 1993, I had been puzzled by this once-handsome brick building at Northern Boulevard and 147th Street, whose front yard is now used…

I first became aware of Kew Gardens’ winding streets when I was on jury duty — the year must have been in the late 1990s. You can be called to…