Forgotten New York

Forgotten New York is a website launched by Kevin Walsh in 1999 that explores the overlooked and lesser-known features of New York City. It highlights things like vintage building advertisements, old cast-iron lampposts, historic 18th-century homes, deserted subway stations, remnants of trolley tracks, lesser-known neighborhoods, and pockets of nature tucked away in the urban landscape. In 2003, HarperCollins reached out to Walsh to discuss transforming the website into a book, which was ultimately released in September 2006.

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Germania on the Bowery

1 week ago | forgotten-ny.com | Kevin Walsh

THE old Germania Bank building, 190 Bowery at Spring Street, has become a mecca for graffiti birds; its exterior is faded, rusted, corroded glory, with Beaux-Arts hints of another age splattered with the artistic statements of a new one. Beginning in 1966, was the longtime home of photographer Jay Maisel and his family, who occupied the entire building’s 72 rooms. Maisel tolerated the graffitists and street artists who scrawled on the building’s exterior.
James Davis - Forgotten New York

1 week ago | forgotten-ny.com | Kevin Walsh

THE dead of winter is a natural time to commune with the dead and in late January I was stumbling around in St. Paul’s Churchyard, which I’ve neglected over the years in favor of nearby Trinity Cemetery. St. Paul’s Chapel itself is Manhattan’s oldest surviving building as it was raised in 1766; George Washington himself worshiped there. It’s also a notable repository of colonial rule and contains numerous interments of those loyal to the crown.
Jamaica Retreat - Forgotten New York

1 week ago | forgotten-ny.com | Kevin Walsh

In early February 2025, a month that was generally cold with at least some snow, unlike recent winters, I took advantage of a relatively mild Saturday and walked Jamaica Avenue from the Van Wyck Expressway east to 165th Street, the heart of Jamaica itself, a town founded by the Dutch (as Rustdorp. “peaceful village”) in the mid-1600s. Jamaica, an English transliteration of “Jameco,” the Indian tribe that lived near what is now called Jamaica Bay.
FORGOTTENTOUR INDOORS: SUBWAY MOSAICS

1 week ago | forgotten-ny.com | Kevin Walsh

In this Forgotten NY tour we look at mosaics and identification artwork from the subways’ early days from 1908-1940.
Mount Eden Malls - Forgotten New York

2 weeks ago | forgotten-ny.com | Kevin Walsh

UNTIL 1926 the northern end of Claremont Park in the Bronx was bordered by a single lane street first called Walnut, for numerous walnut trees in the area, and then Jane Street. Then, the street, newly named Mount Eden Parkway, was widened and center malls added between Walton and Weeks Avenue. Malls, in the sense of grassy medians or lengthy green tracts, take their name from Pall Mall, a street in Westminster, London, England.
Bloody Cutter's Grave - Forgotten New York

2 weeks ago | forgotten-ny.com | Kevin Walsh

In 2007, on Forgotten New York’s first Douglaston-Little Neck tour, the late great Nigey Lennon, author-musician (The Sagebrush Bohemian: Mark Twain In California, Reinventing the Wheel) gives me a breather and relates the story of forgotten Queens County figure Bloodgood Cutter (1817-1906), a miller, potato farmer, property owner (he once owned the land where my garden apartment complex, Westmoreland Village, stands) and composer of light doggerel.
Bayside Station Interior - Forgotten New York

2 weeks ago | forgotten-ny.com | Kevin Walsh

A very short post today. It looks as if I am ready to embark on another Forgotten New York photo series, Long Island RR station interiors. Usually they are well-maintained and kept clean, and it’s easy to do that because they are open very sparingly, only during the week (closed on weekends), and hours average from 6 AM to about 2 PM, though the one in Little Neck is open a little later.
Sunnyside Doughboy - Forgotten New York

2 weeks ago | forgotten-ny.com | Kevin Walsh

TURNOUT was a bit down, but nonetheless enthusiastic, for Forgotten NY’s Sunnyside tour on a drizzly day in October 2018. Here the group is photographed at the Sunnyside Doughboy in Windmuller (Doughboy) Park in Sunnyside’s hilliest section. Doughboy Park, located on one of northwest Queens’ more imposing unleveled hills, marks an important route taken by travelers from mid-Queens to the East River, where the Hellgate ferry braved uncertain currents.
Armillary - Forgotten New York

2 weeks ago | forgotten-ny.com | Kevin Walsh

I wish I knew how to read an armillary. Its four intersecting hoops were teaching tools that illustrated the geocentric universe. With a model of Earth at their center, the various angled rings represented important cosmic coordinates where one might track the movements of the Sun, Moon, and planets in the sky. The globe is tilted at the same 23-degree angle the Earth has as it circles the sun, along with a pair of rings embossed with signs of the zodiac.
East 88th Street - Forgotten New York

2 weeks ago | forgotten-ny.com | Kevin Walsh

FOR the latest FNY Crosstown, I selected an uptown street in Yorkville/Upper East Side, an area I have neglected over the years and like many neighborhoods around town, a spot I should really see more often. And now that the Q train goes up there and has since January 1, 2017, I have fewer excuses not to, as the Q is just a block away from Penn Station (I find the 6 perennially overcrowded and uncomfortable).