North Brother Island lies in the East River, between The Bronx and Queens, just west of Rikers Island and directly under the flight path of departing jets from LaGuardia. It was once the site of Riverside Hospital, a tuberculosis facility later converted to GI housing after WWII. Previously, it was home to the infamous “Typhoid” Mary Mallon during her years of quarantine. Throughout the 1950s, the city operated a drug rehab center for adolescents there, but the hospital closed in 1963, and North Brother was abandoned. Nature slowly reclaimed the island. Read More …

Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island was New York City’s primary landfill from 1948 to 2001. Thousands of tons of daily garbage composed the largest man-made structure on Earth. Read More …

Putting this piece together, I often found myself trying to describe the United Palace Theater to people who had never seen it. “It’s sort of Neo-Classical Cambodian, with influences of Hindu, Mayan, and Moorish architecture. Gilded and covered in red velvet.” I sounded ridiculous, but my description isn’t that far off the mark. Read More …

The Hunterfly Road Houses of Weeksville are the discovered remnants of a free African-American enclave of urban trasdespeople and property owners.  The community provided safety for fugitive slaves and those later fleeing the Civil War draft riots of lower Manhattan.  By the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, Weeksville was a thriving area with its own doctors, teachers, publishers, and social services. Read More …

Students of New York’s literary history ought to be familiar with our latest location, the Fulton Ferry Hotel, at 92 and 93 South Street on Schermerhorn Row. Joseph Mitchell, author and chronicler of the five boroughs’ extraordinary ordinary citizens, immortalized the building in his 1952 New Yorker story, “The Cave,” later titled, “Up in the Old Hotel.” Read More …

Brooklyn Navy Yard is one of NYC’s largest pieces of intact — though decaying — history. Sprawling over nearly 300 acres, it has both current industrial tenants, and plans are in the works for adaptive reuse projects for some of the buildings. It’s living history, dotted by pockets of contemporary industry. Read More …

For this installment of The City Concealed, I ventured to the southern tip of Staten Island, near the ruins of the old Raritan Bay clamming industry. There, a lifelong Staten Islander, Doug Schwartz, has been creating rock sculptures on the beaches of Mount Loretto State Park for over a decade. Read More …

Green-Wood Cemetery is best known as the final resting place of famous New Yorkers like Boss Tweed, the Steinway family, and Leonard Bernstein, but it’s also a treasure trove of hidden sculpture and architecture. Read More …

Major David Bates Douglass, Green-Woods designer and engineer, was to some degree, a ‘renaissance man’ of the 1800s. His early career was spent in the Army, but in some unusual roles: he not only had military successes, but accompanied an exploration/journey (The 1820 Cass Expedition) to the Michigan/Minnesota area, brought along to survey land and catalog both the geology and flora of the regions. He spent a stint in academic roles at West Point (as Professor of ‘Natural Philosophy’) and at the early CUNY, and later became (short-lived) President of Kenyon in Ohio. Green-Wood was his greatest success, but his impact was felt throughout the New York region. Read More …

You might catch a glimpse of Newtown Creek by traveling over one of its many bridges. But that glimpse doesn’t give you the scope of the creek’s importance to New York City’s development, or exactly why it has become a zone of contention in the NYC landscape.

The Creek is most-known for the well-publicized oil spill, to which it lends its name, that sits under a swath of Greenpoint, its neighbor to the south.

The creek runs a full 3.5 miles, bisecting Brooklyn and Queens. Most people barely know it exists. So what happens there, how did it become so overlooked, and was it always this way?

What we found was both beautiful and grotesque, heartening and depressing. Read More …