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| Writing Forgotten New York, the book, was an exhausting yet exhilarating experience. Sure, as I've said ad nauseam in the Forgottenbook Diary, there were a lot of hours hunched over a keyboard in my non-air conditioned living room, but as many hours as I spent indoors on revisions, there were engaging hours spent outside with my camera capturing scenes that made their way onto the pages. I gave my editor Matthew Benjamin enough for a 700-page book (better to have too much than not enough), and it was necessary to cut quite a bit. Some may find its way to Son of Forgotten New York if it ever appears, but, as we'll see on this page, some of the scenes I captured for the book are gone forever in New York's changing scene....
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I was asked to essay black and white photography for the book, and after an experimentation with black and white film which I rejected because I couldn't get free film when I got the rolls developed (your webmaster was on a budget while unemployed) I then switched to using my digital Olympus (PowerShot S1 IS) and manipulating the shots in Photoshop to remove the color. This, too, I dropped and switched to a Canon film camera and delivered stacks and stacks of photo "hard copies" to HarperCollins. That way, they could scan the pictures to their own specifications, and photo editor Jessica Paskay did a terrific job with your webmaster's occasionally smudged, shadowy and blurry attempts at photography.
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| FORGOTTEN NEW YORK hoodie jackets and much more
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| AMSTERDAM AVENUE and WEST119th STREET, Manhattanville. This is one of Manhattan's 3 remaining Croton Aqueduct gatehouses.. This is a small granite building with a slate roof. It was recently designated a NYC landmark, all but precluding its demolition or alteration.
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| TIMES PLAZA (Atlantic, 4th and Flatbush Avenues), Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Atlantic Avenue's is one of the few station houses remaining from the subways' early days: it was designed by subway contractors Heins and LaFarge and placed here in 1908 when the subways first forayed into Brooklyn. After several years in the wilderness, when it served as a hotdog stand with garish neon signage, it settled into a tattered, neglected old age, covered in graffiti and peeling paint.
In 2003, during a complete renovation of the subway construction beneath, it was restored to full glory (though it now stands isolated in a traffic island with no entrances at all) and given a skylight above a station staircase. It's meant, though, to be viewed from across the street and serves no practical purpose other than filigree.
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| GREENPOINT AVENUE, Blissville, Queens. The City View Best Western Hotel is a former public school, and does indeed boast an impressive city view on the Manhattan-facing side. I've read it has a rep as a hot sheets kind of place. When I called the receptionist and asked for a room with a city view, she thought I was trying to be funny. But I wanted to stay in a Manhattan-facing room. For the city view.
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| BROADWAY and WEST 147th STREET, Hamilton Heights. The Bunny Theatre has nothing to do with Bugs or Hef, but is instead named for early 1900s vaudeville impresario-comedian John Bunny, who used his hefty girth to great effect in over 100 silent shorts. It became the Nova and closed a few years ago, but, for now, the building remains.
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| ATLANTIC and WASHINGTON AVENUES, Clinton Hill. Thanks to a present resident at 555 Washington, Linda Piechota, I was able to gain entrance to my old high school, Cathedral Prep. The school has been converted to condos, while the inner courtyard is now a general sitting area. Not a great deal has been altered from the old days here, but the schoolrooms have been subdivided into apartments.
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| CONOVER and REED STREETS, Red Hook. Bob Diamond's dreams of a trolley museum and a trolley line to Brooklyn Heights along Columbia Street are now dead, but things looked quite rosy for him back in 2000, when he actually got tracks laid along the waterfront and Conover and Reed Streets. When Diamond ran out of money, the city withdrew its support for the project and took up the tracks and repaved the streets.
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| Diamond's trolley cars, salvaged from Boston's Green Line, remained in place on tracks along the waterfront until early 2006; a waterside pedestrian path, and a parking lot for the new Fairway supermarket, occupy this space now. What happened to the cars?
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More Forgottenbook rejects on Page 2
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