At the height of Manhattan’s decades as a maritime shipping hub, there were 99 numbered piers between Battery Park and 59th Street. Each one represented a specific freight, passenger, and…

BAYSIDE Avenue in Queens is nowhere near Bayside, the neighborhood. Instead it runs between Union Street and the intersection of 154th Street and 29th Avenue in Flushing. In what is…

WHEN a website is as old as Forgotten New York, which was conceived in the “stone knives and bearskins” (to quote Mr. Spock) era of the internet in which you…

PRIOR to 2019 or so, the south side of Delancey Street between Essex and Clinton Streets was undeveloped territory, with lots that were empty or given over to parking. That…

If you haven’t read Lewis Carroll’s two books featuring his heroine Alice Liddell, “Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” (I admit I haven’t since I was a kid,…

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…