The final remnants of last night's snow hang on for dear life.
This staircase connects the elevated 241st Street viaduct with an NYPD narcotics unit parking lot, and is the only connection between the police facility and the rest of the Bronx. Since the gate at the top is permanently locked, I had to walk through Mount Vernon (a city in Westchester County) to get here. And, of course, even if the gate were open, you would still have to drive through Mount Vernon to get here by car, making this little piece of the Bronx something close to an exclave. This strange geography is reminiscent of the Northwest Angle.
Located on Baldwin Street in the Bronx, just north of the NYPD narcotics unit. The cars parked on the upper roadway (MacQuesten Parkway — which provides the only vehicular access to Baldwin Street), as well as all the buildings you see, are in Westchester County.
This Mount Vernon roadway transitions into a pedestrian path as it enters the Bronx neighborhood of Wakefield. Mount Vernon is named for the Virginia plantation where George Washington lived most of his life; Wakefield is named for the Virginia plantation where he was born.
You can see an older light on a scrolled bracket (the bracket is possibly 100 years old — it would have originally held a streetlight) and a newer one atop the current streetlight.
Outside the gate there is a growing memorial to the unarmed young man shot and killed by an NYPD officer last week. More than a hundred novena candles, many of them burning, line the sidewalk. On the fence hang numerous signs expressing grief and sadness, but the dominant emotion is anger at a police department that is perceived as racist and uncaring. I was standing there in rapt silence with five or six other people when a TV news crew came over, looking to stick their giant camera in the face of those mourning. Everyone immediately dispersed without a word, a collective show of disgust at that disrespectful treatment. The two figures in this photo are the reporter and cameraman.
They're always handwritten, but the text varies from one to the next. I've seen them in other neighborhoods as well, but not in such a high concentration.
Opened 100 years ago as a station on the New York, Westchester and Boston Railway
This is the foundation for a house's patio. You can see a steel I-beam running into the piled stones. Check out Street View for the bigger picture. (The text on the heart reads: "You will not be able to love your children if you do not love your mother".)
1157 Wheeler Avenue.
Judging by the names on the doorbells, his cousin and roommate still live here.
Not controversial anymore. It originally looked like this.
Amadou is also memorialized in the name of this block of Wheeler Avenue: Amadou Diallo Place.
This guy is all over the Bronx — I've probably walked by 20 of his pieces so far. He does a lot of commercial work for businesses, almost all of it featuring at least one deranged bee.
This is the FDNY's Bronx communications dispatch office. When you activate one of those fire alarm call boxes in the borough (the kind with buttons for the FDNY and NYPD — there are no more old telegraphic pull boxes in the Bronx), this is where the signal goes. The borough's FDNY-related 911 calls and building fire alarms are also all routed here.
On the side of the FDNY Bureau of Communications building
from May 18th to May 1st. I guess February 10th does fall in that window. Fortunately for me, the sidewalk (on the other side) was still open!
According to a sign posted on the fence, the name of this project is "East River CSO Retention Facilities, Bronx River Floatables Control" and the objective is "extending the weir length of the existing Regulator CSO 27A (beneath Bronx Park Avenue), and installing two (2) electro hydraulically operated mechanical underflow bar screens."
Wait, what?
Oh, this!
The New York, Westchester and Boston Railway used to run on an elevated track here. You can see its former course through this area pretty clearly in aerial photos. Just a few blocks north of here, the old railway is incorporated into the subway system as the Dyre Avenue Line (5 train).
You can see the reflection of a subway train (2 or 5) passing by.
This will one day be West Farms Park (scheduled for completion in Winter 2011, according to the nearby sign), part of the proposed Bronx River Greenway. That's another 2 or 5 train passing by on the elevated tracks.
That's an elevated subway station (2 and 5 trains) in the background.
I like pickles. I like pickles a lot. I like how they taste, and I like how they smell. But this place reeked of pickles.
United Pickle (run by these guys) fought in the Great Lower East Side Pickle War of 2006-2007.
