Tribeca

If you have never heard of Finn Square, that’s perfectly understandable. In NYC parlance, a “square” can be any shape, and Finn Square is a triangle in Tribeca formed by…

On the outskirts of Chinatown and Little Italy (the two Manhattan neighborhoods bleed into each other), at Centre and Grand Streets, stands one of the oldest examples of the oldest working…

Despite having both its east and west ends chopped off in various bouts of urban renewal, Duane Street abides nicely. When it was first laid out around 1800, give or…

I’ll turn today to one of the objects that, in more than one way, led to the creation of Forgotten New York — the presence of a rare lamppost on a…

“Heaven,” postulated David Byrne, “is a place where nothing ever happens.” “Being just contaminates the void,” Robyn Hitchcock riposted some years later. In that spirit, it’s just possible that the three alleyways…

Whenever I find myself in the Ear Inn, 326 Spring Street between Greenwich and Washington, it always seems to be a crystal clear but blustery day and that’s just as well,…

Continued from West Broadway Part 2 West Broadway and Grand Street. Once north of Canal Street, West Broadway enters Soho (no longer below Canal but now south of Houston) and changes…

Continued from West Broadway Part 1 Here’s the scene on West Broadway between Duane and Thomas Streets. All the buildings are from 1860-1875, and two have “Easter eggs” that give clues…

Those who live in or who’ve been to Atlanta say that an inordinate amount of streets are called Peachtree; in Manhattan, meanwhile, there are 6 streets called Broadway, and all…

The ghost of George Washington is all over New York City. There he is taking the oath of office at Federal Hall at Wall and Nassau Streets…he’s bidding farewell to…

CONTINUED FROM CREAKY ALLEYS PART 1 Before testing our courage and skulking around some more of lower Manhattan’s rare extant alleys, I thought we should pay tribute to a pair…

Your webmaster recently went prowling about lower Manhattan, re-shooting the little-known laneways and alleys of the island’s underbelly. It wasn’t so much an attempt to revisit old ground–though admittedly, the…