Walking through the South Bronx on a Sunday morning, you're bound to hear the sounds of worship emanating from the sanctuaries of numerous storefront churches. I like that these private experiences have a way of leaking into public, giving you just a little hint of what's going on inside as you continue on your way. Today, however, I was stopped in my tracks by the gospel music issuing forth from a small Baptist church. A couple of people were chanting, but it was mainly the keyboardist and drummer that drew me in. Their playing was really expressive and powerful, and I just stood outside and listened.

Maybe a minute later, a woman and her young son came around the corner, heading into the church. "Why don't you come inside?" she asked. I was hesitant to intrude, but her face and voice were so kind and warm that I couldn't say no. So I sat through the rest of the service with her and her son, taking in the music, the preaching, the dancing — one woman even started speaking in tongues in the middle of the sermon. I was very obviously out of place there, but the pastor and many of the congregants went out of their way to make me feel welcome.

And that amazing drummer I mentioned earlier? Turns out it was the thirteen-year-old gentleman you see standing in the photo above.

They're not quite as cosmopolitan as their Fordham Road counterparts.

Unlike the author of that sentence.

It looks a little different than it did in 1977.

A mural whose day has come and gone

This half-dirt, single-block street is a remnant of an old colonial-era road. According to this mini-memoir about Old Kingsbridge Road, the parking spots here were once a prized commodity because there was no alternate-side parking. (It didn't occur to me to look for parking signs while I was out there, but I'm guessing this is now a private street with restricted parking.)

or a broken ankle.

Cock-a-doodle-pinch.

The very colorful home of four different high schools

I missed this one on two previous passes through the adjacent intersection, only to notice it today from a block away.

Play streets — blocks of local city streets that are closed off to vehicular traffic during certain hours to give kids a safe place to play — date back to at least 1915. You can see old photos of play streets here and here.

Play streets currently seem to come in two distinct varieties. Summer, or community, play streets operate during the, well, summer, mostly "in neighborhoods where money and open space are scarce. Play streets often serve children who cannot afford day camp, much less sleep-away adventures." School play streets, on the other hand, operate during the school year and provide extra recreational space for "schools with limited or no access to a gymnasium, multi-purpose space, or outdoor recreation facilities."

Here's a short video of a summer play street in action. The kid at 0:36 just can't restrain himself.

The sign above is located outside an elementary school (PS 55), but it looks to me, based on its hours, like it's for a summer play street. (If that is indeed the case, I have no idea what it's doing on the sidewalk here in January.)

Reminiscent of some other apartment buildings we've seen, this strangely named public-housing complex is built atop Metro-North Railroad tracks.

To the south you can see the Park Avenue Bridge, a lift bridge that carries the Metro-North Railroad, including the line beneath Morrisania Air Rights, over the Harlem River between Manhattan and the Bronx. The Madison Avenue Bridge, on the other hand, is a swing bridge. When open, its turning span aligns with the wooden structure visible here, which provides both protection from oncoming vessels and easy access to the underside of the bridge for maintenance.

Built in the 1890s, it had begun to attract a gay clientele by the 1930s. It survived the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 80s, when the city shuttered many other gay meeting places, but was closed in 2003 after failing a building inspection.

There was a big uproar a couple of years ago when residents of new luxury apartment buildings bordering Marcus Garvey Park began lodging complaints against the drum circle, which has been a community fixture since 1969.

That's 120th Street at the southern edge of Marcus Garvey Park, formerly known as Mount Morris Park.

But it must've gotten board.

See all those colored squares out front? They're selling sheets and towels!

This is the office of Marshal Biegel. He has the best phone number of the bunch, but is still out-earned by his colleague Martin Bienstock.

A onetime climbers' mecca

Outside the 50th Street A/C/E subway station

A rare surviving cigarette ad

If you look closely at the very top of the lamppost, you might be able to make out two taut pieces of fishing line, one running toward the top and one toward the left side of the photo. They are part of the Manhattan Eruv, an eruv being a ritual enclosure in which observant Jews are allowed to carry things in public on Shabbat (the Sabbath), which would otherwise be forbidden. Eruvs are inspected regularly, and a break was found in the Manhattan Eruv a few months ago on a Friday afternoon, hours before the start of Shabbat, in an area near the United Nations where access was restricted because the UN General Assembly was meeting.

I took this photo at the intersection of 8th Avenue and 56th Street, looking north. All the maps I can find online show the eruv running straight along 56th Street here, but you can see in the photo that it turns south onto 8th Avenue. Perhaps it was recently altered to include a larger area?

Monument honoring the sailors who died in the USS Maine explosion

Your two main sandwich bread options at a typical New York corner deli: hero (sub roll) and roll (kaiser roll). I guess that makes the roll an antihero.

Another tribute to the victims of the Happy Land fire

I can't believe it's taken me this long to find a second one of these. I must have obliviously passed by several others. Nonetheless, the search continues...

This centerpiece of an otherwise empty lot was formed more than a billion years ago.

This picture would have been boring without him anyway.

St. Anthony of Padua Church

After photographing this wall in bewilderment, I turned around to find four gnarly-looking dudes dressed in leather sitting outside a building across the street. All appearances to the contrary (including the swastikas), the guy I talked to (wearing a backwards baseball cap in the fifth image of this slide show) was actually quite friendly. He and his comrades are members of the Ching-a-Ling Nomads motorcycle club, an offshoot of a 60s-era Puerto Rican street gang.

The owner of a former — you guessed it — Chevy dealership on Fordham Road, he was apparently one of the first business owners to appear in his own TV commercials, paving the way for brilliant salesmen like these.