Sources and method

How the old site was recovered

The starting point was the Internet Archive's CDX index, which lists every URL the Wayback Machine has ever captured for a host. Queried for pizzamotobklyn.com, it returned sixty-one distinct URLs spanning 2009 to 2022.

Most of those are not pages. They are image files, stylesheets, scripts, and — from 2014 onward — the advertising machinery of a parked domain. Filtering to captures that returned HTTP 200 with a content type of text/html, and discarding the parking-page artifacts, left eight genuine pages from the site's working life.

The markup itself identified the platform without ambiguity: Scripts/Widgets/Navbar/navbar.js, Scripts/iWebImage.js, per-page GUIDs and *_files/ asset folders are the signature of Apple iWeb. That is also why the URLs look the way they do — iWeb derived filenames from page titles, which is how a site ends up with The_Dough_.html, trailing underscore and all.

Each surviving page was then fetched in its raw archived form (the Wayback id_ modifier, which returns the original bytes rather than the archive's rewritten version) and the text extracted from the markup.

Legacy URL inventory

Every URL below was confirmed present in the Wayback index. None was guessed, and we have not invented a legacy path because it sounded plausible.

How claims are graded

Every significant factual claim on this site was recorded during research with its source, the source's date, and a confidence grade.

A worked example of the third case is on the Pizza Moto history page. A first-hand account of the closing describes the restaurant's run as "a decade"; the documented dates give October 2015 to February 2023, which is seven years and four months. Rather than pick one, we print both and explain the reconciliation we think most likely — that the phrase counts from the lease rather than the opening, since the build-out took about two years.

Another is the current tenancy of 338 Hamilton Avenue. Farina closed in 2025; a subsequent deal for the space fell through in late 2025. We found no source establishing who is there now, so the site says we do not know.

What we could not get

Stated openly, because absence of a source is itself information:

• The 2008 New York Times dining article. Its URL is recorded on the archived press page, which establishes that Pizza Moto linked to it. The article itself did not return to us. We cite it as a link the historical site made, never as a source we read.
• The Serious Eats New York tag archive. The publication reorganized and the tag page did not survive; the publisher also blocks automated retrieval.
• PIX11's segment on the hidden oven. Returned HTTP 403.
• The original text of /The_Dough_.html and /The_Ingredients.html. The Wayback captures preserve the iWeb layout but not the body copy. Those two pages are rebuilt from what other publications recorded, and both say so at the top.

Quoting rather than linking

Two of the citations on the original press page now point at nothing retrievable. That is ordinary link rot over fifteen years, and it is the reason this site quotes at length rather than gesturing at a URL.

The single most useful thing in the whole archive — the paragraph about the oven — survived twice over: once in the Wayback capture, and once because Mobile Food News quoted it verbatim in 2010 instead of merely linking to it. That redundancy is why we can be confident in the text. We have tried to behave the same way: where a source says something load-bearing, the words are reproduced here, dated and attributed, so that this page remains useful even if the original goes.

Photography: the full license record

Every image on this site is public domain or Creative Commons licensed, stored locally, and credited to its photographer with the license named. The credit line under each photograph is generated from the manifest below at build time, so a credit cannot drift away from the file it describes.

Attribution requirements under CC BY and CC BY-SA are met by the credit line displayed with each image and by this table. Where a photograph's license is share-alike, that applies to the photograph, not to the text of this site.

The research record

The full claim-by-claim record compiled while building this site — roughly fifty numbered claims with sources, dates and confidence grades, including the ones we decided not to publish — is kept with the project source rather than on the site, because it is a working document rather than an article. The editorial policy describes the standard it is held to, and every article here ends with the specific sources it was built from.