Known for its Romanesque and Renaissance Revival architecture, Sunset Park, part of the western section of Brooklyn, also is known for another architectural first. The neighborhood is home to the city’s first Finnish cooperative. Bou…
Twice a week whether it is on Tuesday and Thursday or Monday and Friday, in every neighborhood throughout the city, you can hear it. Usually before first light you are roused from a sound sleep by the rumbling, beeping and crushing sou…
Nestled by the water on the south end of Babylon, a town in Suffolk County, is the Village of Babylon, a two-square mile incorporated entity that is home to a little over 12,000 residents. Babylon Village isn’t very large, but it is hom…
As a neighborhood, the South Bronx has struggled for nearly three decades under the negative connotations of its name as a flash point for violent crime, drugs, and unchecked urban decay. For many of those who live there, life is bound…
Jane Jacobs, the late, legendary urban planner whose grassroots activism prevented Robert Moses from turning Battery Park into a series of bridges, highways, and on-ramps, wrote at great length of the importance of well-used sidewalks …
For the past year or so, PlaNYC 2030, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s sustainability initiative (“sustainability” being a new buzz word for “environmentally friendly” or “contributing to a better quality of life”) has taken center stage at …
Affordable apartments with fresh air, good light, and attractively landscaped grounds for middle-income people—those were the goods Park West Village was created to deliver in the late 1950s and early 1960s as part of a government-s…
In 1939, when the WPA Guide to New York Citywas first published, South Queens, and particularly the area around what would become Rochdale Village, had little to recommend the visitor. "Springfield, Laurelton and Rosedale, at the so…
The Bronx has quite a reputation. Grim and featureless slums as far away as Catena, Sicily have been dubbed "The Bronx" by their local residents. For decades, the name of the once-promising borough of New York City has been synonymo…
Historical district. Garden sanctuary. Street food paradise. Jackson Heights Queens is all of these things. From its humble beginnings as dirt-paved farmland to its construction renaissance in the 1940s and 50’s, Jackson Heights is re-…