of the Staten Island Railway's abandoned North Shore branch. That's the beautiful Bayonne Bridge spanning the Kill van Kull off in the distance.
Across the Kill van Kull in New Jersey, you can see what I believe is the metropolitan area's first large-scale wind turbine. (We saw a much smaller rooftop array in the Bronx last year.) Operational since June 2012, the 262-foot-tall turbine was built by the Bayonne Municipal Utilities Authority to power two of that city's sewage pumping stations. (Compare to Washington.)
Dr. Samuel MacKenzie Elliott was a pioneering ophthalmologist who counted John Jacob Astor, Peter Cooper, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Horace Greeley, and John James Audubon among his patients. He built this house around 1840 from locally quarried stone, and supposedly designed more than 21 other similar structures (which are no longer standing, as far as I can tell). Dr. Elliott was a fervent abolitionist, and is said to have sheltered fugitive slaves in the cellar of his house (although I'm not sure if he ever lived in this particular building, or if he just designed it).
After Dr. Elliott's death in 1875, the New-York Tribune (founded by Mr. Greeley) remembered him as "emphatically one of the men who impart the element of the picturesque to common affairs. A person of very strong, original, eccentric character. A man of positive genius in his profession."
I'm standing on the elevated stage of what appears to be an overgrown woodland amphitheater; the stump-like seats visible in this photo constitute maybe a quarter of the total spread out before the stage. I stumbled across this odd scene on the grounds of the Goodhue Center, a century-old, 42-acre recreational/educational/summer-camp facility for kids that was formerly the estate of the Goodhue family. The city is currently in the process of purchasing most of the property from the Children's Aid Society for use as a public park.
Now part of the Children's Aid Society's Goodhue Center, this former residence, built around 1845, "shows its age, but still conveys some of the elegance it possessed when it was a villa commanding the vast acreage of the Goodhue estate."
This is one of several abandoned buildings standing among the trees on the Goodhue Center's acres of wooded property.
The World Trade Center Medical Monitoring and Treatment Program has been superseded by the more comprehensive World Trade Center Health Program.
John Fischer died at the World Trade Center on 9/11. (I'm not including this in the official tally of 9/11 memorials because there's no mention of the event here.) This street corner was also renamed for Captain Fischer.