THE first president was famous for his humility, eschewing titles of nobility, retiring after a second term, and initially buried in a modest tomb on his plantation. Posthumously, his name…

STRANGE to say it but I’ve seen the massive Silvercup sign in Long Island City more often from the rear than from the front. This shot is from an eastbound…

SEVEN years after walking up Thompson Street, which runs north in Manhattan from Broome Street to Washington Squarein Soho and the Village, I walked north on its brother, Sullivan Street,…

UNTIL about ten years ago there was a very old, rusted, arrow-shaped sign pointing toward New Jersey on Richmond Terrace just east of Port Richmond Avenue, and if you look…

I have not often mentioned 5th Avenue’s signature stoplight, the Mercury, a bronze pole with red and green lamps placed catercorner on 5th Avenue from Washington Square to 59th Street…

OVER the years, fading ad historian Kevin Jump and Forgotten-NY founder Kevin Walsh have documented numerous examples of painted ads across the city for loan broker J.J. Friel. They’ve seen…

ALTHOUGH I am a loyal (dues-paying) member of the NYC Transit Museum on Schermerhorn Street, I have not been able to visit since January 2020, just before the pandemic. The…

HERE’S the Richmond Hill LIRR elevated station on the Long Island Rail Road Lower Montauk Branch in 1997. When in the next year I heard this line would be mostly…

BEFORE cellular phones took over in the 1990s, small, wireless devices, beepers, received short messages, typically numeric (like a callback number) or brief text, by alerting the user with a…

CHRISTIAN imagery abounds on Carroll Street between 6th and 7th Avenues in Park Slope, even on the non-ecclesiastical buildings. Across the street from Francis Xavier Church is what probably used to be…

THE early 1950s saw new lamppost designs appearing on New York City streets. The Art Deco, Machine Age and Art Moderne movements in architecture had given rise to new, streamlined…

In the northeast corner of the Bronx, Pelham Bay Park takes up nearly 2776 acres, the city’s largest park. Its namesake is the Pell family, which had a colonial period…