Day 1258

9/11 memorial #255

June 10th, 2015



After finishing my walk and heading to Brooklyn, I came across this sidewalk memorial in Park Slope.

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The Thunderbolt

June 12th, 2015









Opened in June 2014, the Thunderbolt replaced a roller coaster of the same name that operated here in Coney Island from 1925 to 1982. You can take a virtual ride on the new Thunderbolt here.

Standing beneath the original Thunderbolt was a large house (photo) — a former hotel — occupied by the family that owned the roller coaster. The house was briefly but memorably featured in the movie Annie Hall as the childhood home of Woody Allen's character, Alvy.

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Christmas in June

June 12th, 2015



A Sing for Hope piano on the Coney Island Boardwalk

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Coney Island's long-defunct Parachute Jump was originally built for the 1939-40 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, where, in addition to serving as an amusement ride, it was put to use as a monumental flagpole, securing the United States a victory over the Soviet Union in the battle for altitudinal supremacy at the fairgrounds.

The things that look like ropes or cables running vertically up the structure are actually strips of programmable LEDs, part of the Parachute Jump's $2 million lighting system.

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Portal of the day

June 12th, 2015



at PS 188

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Sea Gate

June 12th, 2015



Sea Gate is a large gated community at the western tip of Coney Island (aerial view). To keep the grubby public out, each of the two street entrances has a guard on duty at all times. I asked if I could enter as a visitor and walk around, but the guard said no. You can sneak into Sea Gate from the beach, but I figured it would be wise to try to get official permission if I was going to spend hours walking every block in the neighborhood. Walking Sea Gate isn't a necessity for me, since it's a private neighborhood, but I'd do it if I got the chance.

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Canal Avenue

June 12th, 2015



This street is named for the Gravesend Ship Canal, also known as the Coney Island Ship Canal. A noteworthy feature of this canal is that it never existed.

By the late 1800s*, and continuing on through the late 1920s, there were plans to turn the meandering waters of Coney Island Creek into a straight, navigable channel connecting Gravesend Bay and Sheepshead Bay. Maps from that era show the proposed canal flanked by a pair of roadways named Canal Avenue running along its north and south banks.

While the canal never ended up getting built, a few blocks of the southern Canal Avenue were constructed here (1951 aerial view). About one and a half of those blocks remain today (2012 aerial view), still bearing their historically misleading name. There's also one short block named Canal Avenue (formerly two blocks) about a mile east of here, although it's a few hundred feet north of where the proposed northern Canal Avenue appears in the maps linked above.

* The canal can be seen in this map from 1895. This 1879 map makes no mention of the canal itself, but it shows a proposed Canal Avenue.

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Heading over the dunes

June 12th, 2015



to Gravesend Bay. That's the Verrazano Bridge in the background.

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Unknown artist

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Hollowed out

June 12th, 2015



Looks familiar...

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From Poplar to Polar

June 12th, 2015



This chain-link fence topped with barbed wire is the barrier between the gated community of Sea Gate (behind the fence) and the public streets of Coney Island. As you can see if you zoom in on the street signs or look at a map, Sea Gate's Poplar Avenue loses a P when it reaches the edge of the neighborhood; it turns into Polar Street on the public side of the fence.

It looks like the entire street was once Poplar, according to maps from 1920 and 1943. This 1949 map is the earliest one I've seen in which Polar makes an appearance. The dashed lines of the 1943 map suggest that the whole street was formerly part of Sea Gate; if that's true, perhaps the eastern portion became Polar when it was excised from the neighborhood and made public.

(According to the NY Times, the red brick structure above is Sea Gate's "one true apartment building".)

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The ice cream hole

June 12th, 2015



Right after I took the previous photo, a Mister Softee truck drove by. I wasn't paying close attention to it at first, but then I realized that someone inside the gated community of Sea Gate — on the other side of the fence — was calling out to the driver for an ice cream cone. But how would the driver get the man his ice cream? There are no gates in this area, and you can't just throw someone an ice cream cone over a fence... can you? I watched the scene unfold with bated breath.

The driver piled a cone high with chocolate soft-serve, dipped it in chocolate cookie crumbles, then exited the truck and walked over to a particular spot along the fence. There was a small, inconspicuous hole there that someone had cut, just big enough to pass a frosty dessert through. The cone went in, some cash came out, and the truck went on its way.



Fascinated by the whole transaction, I started talking to the guy who bought the ice cream, Robert. He said the Mister Softee trucks don't go into Sea Gate — either because they're not allowed in or because they don't want to pay a fee that Sea Gate would charge them — and so he and other nearby residents make their purchases through this hole in the fence.

I told Robert that I wanted to walk around Sea Gate, but that the guard wouldn't let me in. Robert said yeah, you have to be visiting someone to get in if you're not a resident. So I asked Robert if I could visit him, and he said sure. It was too late to walk the whole neighborhood today, so I made plans to call him up and schedule a visit sometime in the next few months. In other words: Stay tuned for more captivating tales from the forbidden land of Sea Gate!

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Cyrus, the one and only

June 12th, 2015



Listen below.

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“Peace! Friendship!”

June 12th, 2015



Papo and Freddy

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Curbside broccoli

June 12th, 2015


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When you think of Woody Guthrie, the legendary folk singer from Oklahoma, it's easy to picture him as an itinerant Dust Bowl balladeer, roaming and rambling through the rural landscapes of "This Land Is Your Land". But that song also mentions "the New York island", and Woody, who spent most of the latter half of his life in the Big Apple, was just as much of a city dweller as he was anything else.

Foremost among his urban residences was 3520 Mermaid Avenue, a brick row house in Coney Island that stood on the site now occupied by the senior-citizen apartment tower pictured above. He lived here from 1943 to 1950, sharing a one-bedroom apartment with his second wife Marjorie and their children (including Arlo, born in 1947). Among his favorite Coney Island activities: building sand castles on the beach with the kids (his own and others) and going to Nathan's Famous for hot dogs and "hot patooties" (french fries).

Woody lived out his last relatively healthy years here on Mermaid Avenue. In the late 1940s, when he was in his mid-to-late 30s, his behavior started becoming "increasingly erratic, moody and violent"; these changes were early symptoms of what turned out to be Huntington's disease, the vicious neurodegenerative disorder that killed his mother. By 1954, he was in the hospital for good; he would remain in one institution or another for the next 13 years while the disease gradually ate away at his brain. Woodrow Wilson Guthrie finally died in 1967 at the age of 55 at Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens.

A prolific songwriter, Woody left behind a vast trove of unrecorded lyrics. Over the years, his daughter Nora has invited a number of artists to comb through the archive and write music for his orphaned songs. The first of these collaborations, with Billy Bragg and Wilco, resulted in 1998's beautiful and critically acclaimed album Mermaid Avenue, and generated enough material for two subsequent releases. You can listen to all three Mermaid Avenue records here: the original, Vol. II, and Vol. III.

Let's close with Woody's own tribute to his Coney Island street, a song he called "Mermaid's Avenue":

Mermaid Avenue that’s the street
Where the lox and bagels meet,
Where the sour meets the sweet;
Where the beer flows to the ocean
Where the wine runs to the sea;
Why they call it Mermaid Avenue
That’s more than I can see.

CHORUS:
But there’s never been a mermaid here
On Mermaid Avenue
No, I’ve never seen a mermaid here
On Mermaid Avenue
I’ve seen hags and wags and witches;
And I’ve seen a shark or two
My five years that I’ve lived along
Old Mermaid’s Avenue

Mermaid Avenue that’s the street
Where the saint and sinners meet;
Where the grey hair meets the wave curls
Where the cops don’t ever sleep;
Where they pay some cops to stop you
When you hit that Sea Gate* gate;
Where them bulls along that wire fence
Scare the mermaids all away

Mermaid Avenue that’s the street
Where the sun and storm clouds meet;
Where the ocean meets that rockwall
Where the boardwalk meets the beach;
Where the prettiest of the maidulas
Leave their legprints in that sand
Just beneath our lovesoaked boardwalk
With the bravest of our lads.

CHORUS

Mermaid Avenue that’s the street
Where all colors of goodfolks meet;
Where the smokefish meets the pretzel
Where the borscht sounds like the seas;
This is where hot Mexican Chili
Meets Chop Suey and meatballs sweet;
Mermaid Avenue she’s a nervous jerk
But, still, she’s hard to beat.


* Woody lived in Sea Gate for at least two short periods of time. In 1943, not long before his first stint in the Merchant Marine, he moved in with Marjorie and their infant daughter in "a tiny room above [Marjorie's] parents' apartment". And in 1948, he rented a room in the gated community during a brief separation from Marjorie.

UPDATE: When they left Mermaid Avenue in 1950, Woody and his family moved to the Beach Haven apartment complex, a development near Coney Island built and operated by Fred Christ Trump, Donald Trump's father. Woody wasn't a huge fan of his new landlord:

I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project


Read more here.

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A look down the beach

June 12th, 2015



The stone groin jutting into the water in the distance (with the fishermen standing on it; zoom in) is where Woody Guthrie's family tossed his ashes into the ocean after he died in 1967.

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Beside and beneath

June 12th, 2015





Steeplechase Pier

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The Parachute Jump

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Getting there…

June 14th, 2015



Lap 1 of 5,649 is complete at this year's running of the Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race, a 3,100-mile race around a single block in Jamaica Hills, Queens. First around the block was Ashprihanal (blue shirt, dark blue shorts, blue shoes), who would go on to lead the pack today with 172 laps — 94.39 miles!

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The runners’ garden

June 14th, 2015



The chicory is in bloom across the street from the Self-Transcendence 3100 racecourse, in a narrow, unkempt strip of greenery that runs alongside the Grand Central Parkway.

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Shade and shelter

June 14th, 2015



Because of work being done on Thomas Edison High School*, about a quarter of the Self-Transcendence 3100 racecourse is covered by sidewalk sheds this year. I assumed the runners would see these dreary, constricting structures as an ugly pain in the butt, but then one of the runners pointed out to me that the sheds will provide respite from the sun and the rain all summer long.

* Edison's website features an inadvertent tribute to the race. At the top of the home page is a picture of the school pulled from Google Street View. Taken in July 2012, the image shows two competitors in that year's race making their way around the block. (I believe the two runners are Pushkar and Baladev; Baladev is also taking part in this year's race.)

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These candles, photos, flowers, and mementos were placed here in memory of Dillon Charles and Glenn Wade, two 23-year-olds who died in early April when their car crashed into this sidewalk shed outside Thomas Edison High School.

By the end of today, the first day of this year's Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race, all the runners will have already passed this memorial more than 100 times each.

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ALL NEW

June 14th, 2015


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GGGGGG’S

June 14th, 2015



According to the barber inside, the G stands for George.

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Cars Magazine

June 14th, 2015



That's an apple core resting on the hood.

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SUBWAY et al.

June 14th, 2015



169th Street on the F train

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Retail noise pollution

June 14th, 2015



A relentless robo-barker hawks various goods ("Any two [pairs of?] shoes for $35") and services ("Tattoo, body piercing in the back") at the 165th Street Mall in Jamaica. It's kind of mesmerizing if you just focus your attention on the short, gasping breaths tucked in between the verbal barrages.

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The building on the corner is a former control tower that stood beside the 168th Street terminal station on the now-demolished eastern portion of the elevated Jamaica Line. In addition to its ground-level storefronts, the building also contained an entrance to the station.

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Sounds familiar…

June 14th, 2015


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The old Valencia Theater

June 14th, 2015





Standing here on Jamaica Avenue in Jamaica, Queens, is the former Valencia Theater, the first of the five spectacular "Wonder Theaters" opened by Loew's in the New York City area in 1929-30. (We've previously seen the other three Wonder Theaters in NYC: the Paradise in the Bronx, the Kings in Brooklyn, and the 175th Street in Manhattan. The fifth theater, the Jersey, is located in Jersey City.)

According to David Dunlap of the NY Times:

A "Spanish patio garden in gay regalia for a moonlit festival," as early publicity releases described it, the Valencia was an atmospheric theater, designed by John Eberson, in which 3,500 moviegoers at a time found themselves seated under a blue night sky filled with twinkling stars and drifting clouds. [The clouds were projected onto the ceiling.]

Rising to the sky was a Spanish village, or rather a Spanish village as envisioned by an Austrian-born architect working in the Baroque Churrigueresque style from an office in Chicago to satisfy Hollywood tastes. Around the auditorium a half-dozen diminutive structures -- a gazebo here, a loggia there -- were arrayed in cascading tiers as if set on a hillside.

That was the payoff, but the experience of the Valencia began in the gleaming lobby, where moviegoers lined up between a long colonnade and a row of scalloped balconies. From there it was into the two-story grand foyer, with a vaulted ceiling and a fish pond with tinkling fountain.
When the Valencia closed in 1977, Loew's donated the building to the Tabernacle of Prayer for All People, a Pentecostal church, which has done an outstanding job of maintaining the place over the years, as evidenced by these breathtaking photos of the interior. The Tabernacle has made a few notable alterations, however, turning the figures of nude goddesses atop the proscenium arch into robed angels, installing a massive chandelier in the auditorium, changing some of the paint colors, and displaying a collection of discarded crutches from people said to have been miraculously healed at the church.

(In case you're wondering, I took the video above during what appeared to be a bible study being held in the auditorium before the Sunday morning service.)

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A business card mishap

June 14th, 2015





What kind of business card is this, anyway? No first name? No email or website?

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DELICATESSEN

June 14th, 2015



NO PARKING ON SIDE-WALK

CIVILIZATION BEGAN IN AFRICA

STEP IN AT YOUR OWN RISK

(Zoom in.)

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The Eagle has landed

June 14th, 2015



Adding some Apollonian flair to a classic gatepost guardian

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A tight fit

June 14th, 2015



Martin House

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1960 Lincoln Premiere

June 14th, 2015


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A park no more

June 14th, 2015



Studded with the bones of old benches, this vacant parcel of land was once a private park for an apartment complex across the street. The unusual shapes of this lot and its two neighbors to the east — the northern boundary line of the three properties runs diagonally across the street grid — can be traced back to the swath of farmland that once existed here and the dirt road that ran along its northern edge, as seen below.



Links for further inspection: tax map, 2012 aerial, 1951 aerial, 1924 aerial.

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Proctor-Hopson Circle

June 14th, 2015



This boulder can be found at Proctor-Hopson Circle, a tiny piece of parkland in Jamaica named for John Proctor and Arthur Hopson, the first two area soldiers to die fighting for the 369th Infantry — the famed African-American regiment known as the Harlem Hellfighters — in World War I. A bronze tablet was mounted on the boulder prior to the park's dedication in 1932, but it has been removed (stolen?) in the years since.

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Former portal of the day

June 14th, 2015



As seen through a bus stop

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and neighbor

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Beneath the tracks

June 14th, 2015



of the Long Island Rail Road

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Limey

June 14th, 2015


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Prem Bhakti Mandir

June 14th, 2015



Here are a few photos from inside this Guyanese Hindu temple.

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Shri Surya Narayan Mandir

June 14th, 2015



Shri Surya Narayan Mandir, another Guyanese Hindu Temple, stands just down the block from Prem Bhakti Mandir.

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No weirdos allowed

June 14th, 2015


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3G Cleaners

June 14th, 2015



Just a block away from GGGGGG's.