and its mesmerizing fountain
On view behind the Brooklyn Museum is an extraordinary collection of architectural sculptures and ornaments salvaged from buildings in the city that have been demolished. The figures in the foreground, for example, once embellished the town house of Hugh J. Chisholm, a pulp and paper baron. In the background, you can see Night, one of several remnants from the original Penn Station on display here.
This sculpture and its counterpart, Day, once flanked a large clock above an entrance to the original Penn Station, one of four such pairs adorning the structure (two of which have survived intact, including this one in Kansas City). Incredibly, there was no formal attempt to salvage the artwork from Penn Station; what remains today can largely be attributed to a scattershot assortment of individuals and institutions rescuing whatever they could from the demolition site and the landfill. Two granite balusters, for instance, owe their continued aboveground existence to a New Jersey man who found them in the Meadowlands, where the station's stonework had been dumped, hauled them out, and drove them home in his sagging station wagon.
When I first caught a glimpse of this chubby version of the Statue of Liberty, I assumed it was a contemporary piece commenting on American obesity. But it turns out it was created over 100 years ago as an earnest replica, and spent the majority of its life sitting atop the Liberty Warehouse on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It's now part of the Brooklyn Museum's Memorial Sculpture Garden, having been donated in honor of the heroes of 9/11.
These old lampposts and luminaires, along with countless other salvaged relics presumably waiting for their big break at the Memorial Sculpture Garden, have, for the time being, taken up residence in a chain-link pen behind the Brooklyn Museum.
During Bobby Kennedy's 1966 visit to the troubled Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, residents challenged the senator to do something more substantial for them than simply show his face and make a couple of speeches. In response, he joined with Jacob Javitz, New York's senior senator at the time, in amending the Economic Opportunity Act to lay the legislative groundwork for community development corporations.
Kennedy returned to Bed-Stuy later in the year to announce the creation of the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, a community organization focused on housing, education, economic development, and the arts. Restoration took over an abandoned milk-bottling factory as its headquarters, and has since converted the entire block into a plaza surrounded by cultural centers, classrooms, and businesses.
While that all sounds very nice, I must admit that I was rather dismayed to find, prominently featured here in the plaza — and adorned with the oversized heads of the politicians and local leaders who made this place possible, no less — the bland antithesis of spirited community development: my arch-nemesis, Applebee's!
Remembering one of the ugliest episodes in New York's recent history
This now-largely-vacant complex began its life as the Bedford Brewery.
This tree, like many of the others lining the parkway, is accompanied by a plaque honoring a Brooklynite killed in WWI.
Installed a couple of years ago on the annex next to 770, this simple plaque (stating only the date that the cornerstone was laid) took the place of a controversial one that had, for many years, symbolized a major rift within the Chabad-Lubavitch movement.
After the death of the Rebbe in 1994, there arose within the movement a vocal faction that believed he was not actually dead and would return as the messiah. In 1995, when the leadership of Chabad installed a plaque around this cornerstone memorializing the Rebbe (implying he had passed away), it was immediately defaced by messianists. The vandalized plaque remained in place until 2004, when another group, under the cover of night, managed to remove it from the wall entirely.
Despite the presence of this rather inoffensive replacement, the feud between the two groups continues. Just last fall, the anti-messianist Chabad establishment, which owns the building, tried to evict the messianist leaders of the congregation, who control what goes on inside the synagogue, continuing a rather surreal spectacle that has been playing out for years now: a secular American court arbitrating a contentious religious dispute over whether or not a seemingly deceased man is actually the messiah.
Jutting out from Atlantic Avenue, this skewed, block-long stretch of pavement (labeled slightly differently on the western side of the street) is the only remnant of Hunterfly Road that still bears its name, and the last surviving piece of its right-of-way within the historic bounds of Weeksville.
The local version (scroll to the second question) of this guy
This short street runs alongside the New Lots Line at the point where trains emerge into daylight.
This monument honors the servicemen from Brownsville who died in World War I. The neighborhood was largely Jewish at the time, hence the Star of David carving to the left of the steps. (I believe this is the third time now that I've seen religious imagery in a public park.)
596 Acres is an organization that facilitates the creation of community spaces on vacant city-owned lots.
Like 20 other branches of the Brooklyn Public Library, this one was built with a grant from Andrew Carnegie. By the time he died in 1919, Carnegie had funded almost 1700 libraries in the US — nearly half of all the libraries that existed in the country at that time. He also instituted an innovation that has proven influential in shaping the modern library experience: the open stacks, which encourage the public to browse and explore the collection of books on their own.
The years have not been kind to this monument honoring area residents who died in World War I, nor to the man who created it. Its two bronze plaques bearing the names of the fallen soldiers were stolen in 1970, and then, in 2000, a couple of thieves made off with the half-ton statue that stood at the center of the memorial. Police later found parts of the statue, which had been cut into hundreds of pieces, in two different Brooklyn scrap yards.
This is the home base of the coordinator of Shomrim, a local Jewish civilian patrol group. We recently learned about a rift within the Lubavitch community of Crown Heights; Shomrim itself is engaged in a feud (an often petty-sounding rivalry with some overtones of that same messianic dispute) with a similar neighborhood patrol group known as Shmira.
This inclusive annual community get-together was first held in the aftermath of the 1991 riots.
They may look like they're just lazing about, but these hard-working chefs apparently managed to crank out several thousand (kosher) hot dogs and hamburgers for the hungry picnickers of Crown Heights.
