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Houdini’s Grave, in NYC’s Spookiest Cemetery
Are we in Queens or Salem’s Lot? If you pass by a graveyard on the Jackie Robinson Parkway, don’t hold your breath. You’ve got two and half miles of Queens’ Cemetery Belt ahead of you, a burial ground...
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Inside Fort Totten: Part 1
An abandoned battery at Fort Totten Fort Totten sits on a far-flung peninsula of the Long Island Sound, forming the Northeast corner of Queens. The grounds of this defunct military installation turned...
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Inside Fort Totten Part 2: The Army Hospital
A tin ceiling crumbles in an Army Hospital dayroom. Constructed in 1906, the Fort Totten Army Hospital has been vacant since the area was decommissioned as a military base in the mid 70s. Today, this...
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Inside Harlem’s P.S. 186
Dawn breaks in a crumbling classroom. School’s out forever; at least at P.S. 186. This aging beauty has loomed over West Harlem’s 145th Street for 111 years—but it’s been vacant exactly a third of...
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Legend Tripping in Letchworth Village
Ruins of Letchworth Village. Letchworth Village rests on a placid corner of rural Thiells, a hamlet west of Haverstraw set amid the gentle hills and vales of the surrounding Ramapos. A short stretch...
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The Yonkers Power Station, Knocking at the “Gates of Hell”
The abandoned Yonkers Power Station looms over a modern MetroNorth stop. Take a northern train to Yonkers and watch New York City’s urban sprawl give way to the unspoiled undulations of the Hudson...
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The Trapps Mountain Hamlet, Backwoods Ghost Town
A night at the 87 Motel in New Paltz. If you’re like me, city living can wear you down—sooner or later, you’re itching for the woods again. The sleepy college town of New Paltz offers a cheap motel...
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Checking in to Grossinger’s Resort
The ransacked Paul G. hotel, showing the hallmarks of a recent paintball game. Past a deserted security desk, waist-high grasses choke back the yawning entrance to the Jennie G. Hotel, whose toppled...
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Talking Trash in Dubos Point Wildlife Sanctuary
Yellowing remains of a small vessel permanently docked in Dubos Point. Take the A train past JFK. You’ll be one of a handful of travelers left on a car that seemed well over capacity a moment ago; the...
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Wreaking Havoc in the Staten Island Farm Colony
These dormitories are the Farm Colony’s oldest structures. At the center of Staten Island lies a bucolic expanse of ancient forest, a city-owned amalgam of parks, scout camps, and overgrown lots...
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Landing at Floyd Bennett Field, New York’s First Airport
A dilapidated airplane hangar at Floyd Bennett Field. Mrs. Bennett wept as the memorial tablet was unveiled, damping the freshly broken ground of New York City’s first municipal airport. For all time,...
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Ghosts of the West Side Highway
An abandoned 1950s diner on the West Side Highway. New York City isn’t known for its roadside attractions or its motor inns, but along the West Side Highway, you can still find shades of the open road....
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A Baseball Graveyard in Queens
An overgrown overpass at Union Turnpike and Woodhaven Boulevard, part of the proposed Queensway project. Abandoned for half a century, the old Rockaway Beach Branch of the Long Island Railroad is...
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Green Thumbing Through the Boyce Thompson Institute
The abandoned Boyce Thompson Institute in Yonkers. In 1925, Dr. William Crocker spoke eloquently on the nature of botany: “The dependence of man upon plants is intimate and many sided. No science is...
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San Francisco’s Spooky Sutro Baths
Crumbling stairways at San Francisco’s Sutro Baths. When the Sutro Baths first opened to the public in 1896, the west side of San Francisco was a vast region of all-but-unpopulated sand dunes. The...
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Ruins of the ’64 New York World’s Fair
The empty observation towers of the New York Pavilion hover over Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. In Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, the oddball ruins of the “Tent of Tomorrow” are fading into yesterday....
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The Red Hook Grain Terminal
On foggy mornings, nothing can rival the Grain Terminal’s spectral allure. It’s been nearly fifty years since a freighter docked at the Red Hook Grain Terminal; now black mold overspreads its concrete...
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Getting Lost on North Brother Island
A tuberculosis pavilion crowns the treetops of North Brother Island like an Aztec ruin. Most New Yorkers have never heard of North Brother Island, but they should take comfort in the fact that new...
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Beyond NYC: Ghost Hunting in the “Bloody Pit”
Autumn in New England Imagine a picture-perfect October afternoon—white steeples set against a crisp blue sky, apples to be picked, pumpkins to be carved, colonial headstones moldering beneath a gaudy...
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New York, Lost and Found
Through all of my travels in New York City’s neglected parks, waterways, and abandoned buildings, I’ve picked up a few souvenirs. Most of the time, I abide by the “leave nothing but footprints, take...
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