Sunnyside

It was a deep and dark December as the song goes, and I had just a couple of hours before I lost the light. I decided to walk the scarp that…

CONTINUED FROM TODT HILL PART 1   This huge elm stands atop, or near, the ancient Burbanck family gravesite at Four Corners and Todt Hill Roads. Most large, older elms…

Todt Hill, Staten Island’s 412-foot tall mountain, is in the center of the borough and is at once wild, wide-open and untrammeled and manages, at the same time, to be…

Paralyzing inertia is my archenemy. Despite accumulating a wealth of knowledge about the relics and remnants of the NYC of the past throughout my teens, 20s and 30s, I didn’t…

SUNNYSIDE extends from the Sunnyside Railroad Yards along Skillman Avenue in the north to the Queens-Midtown Expressway in the south between 30th and about 58th Streets. Originally slower to develop than…

WHETHER it wants to admit it or not, the Department of Transportation’s main function is the movement of motor vehicles; to enable them to move as quickly as possible. That means…

In Queens, the Long Island Rail Road has certainly left remnants of its golden era of passenger trains. The Rockaway Branch is still there, waiting to be reactivated or converted into something worthwhile,…

Continued from Part 1 This time, our survey of little-noticed Queens alleyways takes us from gritty, concrete-enveloped Long Island City all the way east to bucolic, rural Little Neck–which could…

Queens, in many ways, is the youngest of the five boroughs. It became a part of the city when its widely separated towns joined with the Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten Island…