Now that's how you decorate for Christmas.
In an effort to preserve the early 20th-century suburban character of this community, the Broadway-Flushing Homeowners' Association has been pushing — thus far unsuccessfully — to have the neighborhood declared a historic district by the city.
Part of the Transit Authority's Infrastructure Division, this Hunts Point facility fabricates structural steel for the subway, and its entrance is marked with an old subway station signpost. Standing in the parking lot on the other side of that friendly-looking fence is a tiny, isolated stretch of elevated subway track, presumably used for training, with a couple of Redbirds perched atop it.
Spread out across 329 acres on the eastern side of the Bronx's Hunts Point peninsula is one of the largest (some say the largest) food distribution centers in the world, home to the city's main produce, meat, and fish markets, as well as several other wholesalers, processors, and distributors. The sign above hasn't been updated in a while: the Fulton Fish Market moved up here in 2005 from its original location at the end of Manhattan's Fulton Street, where it had been operating since 1831.
Here's a great peek inside the produce market by two brothers from South Carolina who, when they were new to the city and looking to make their Lower East Side apartment feel a little more homey, set out for Hunts Point in search of raw peanuts to boil.
I've always thought this was the perfect name for a generic grocery brand.
An 800-bed jail barge moored just off of Hunts Point
Jails, pools — you can put anything on a barge in Hunts Point. This is the Floating Pool Lady, a 100,000-gallon portable swimmin' hole that has spent the past few summers anchored at Barretto Point Park. She has been known to head out of town during the colder months, but apparently she's weathering this winter right here in the Bronx.
Located next to Barretto Point Park, this recreational pier is made of recycled plastic, and was apparently "the first all-plastic lumber civil structure of major significance". An important advantage of plastic is its imperviousness to the wood-eating shipworms and gribbles that have returned to New York as the city's waterways have once again become clean enough for them to survive. This pier replaced its deteriorated wooden predecessor in 1995, but it caught on fire and had to be rebuilt after it was struck by lightning several times during a storm the next year.
If you zoom in, you can make out the silhouette of a couple of the abandoned buildings on North Brother Island, the small treed island out past and to the right of the pier. Now a bird sanctuary, the island was formerly home to a quarantine hospital (where Typhoid Mary spent her last two decades), college dorms for veterans, and a drug rehab center, and was also where the burning General Slocum ran aground and sank in New York's worst pre-9/11 disaster. This page has some recent photos of the ruins on North Brother, which has been uninhabited (by humans) for the past 50 years.
Run by Tita, Radiator Woman is said to be the only female-owned auto business in Hunts Point. It also reminds me of a scene from Futurama that takes place at the Miss Universe pageant:
LEELA: Sigh. I almost had that tiara.
BENDER: Hmm. Me too.
FRY: Well, you guys might both be losers, but I just made out with that radiator woman from the radiator planet.
LEELA: Fry, that's a radiator.
FRY: Oh. [Clears throat.] Is there a burn ward within ten feet of here?
It's hard to picture now, but here's a long-time Bronxite's description of Hunts Point in the early years of the 20th century, told to John McNamara and published in McNamara's Old Bronx:
My three uncles liked fishing and often took their creel and went, either by foot or horse and carriage, to Hunts Point for a day of angling. They brought home flounders, flukes and crabs and I can still remember how sweet they tasted. My aunts took me to Hunts Point by a little stagecoach from the corner of Southern Blvd. and Hunts Point Rd. for a wonderful day of picnicking and bathing. The water was clear as crystal, for no sewers were built yet to befoul the river.
I remember when the area around Randall Ave. was filled with fruit orchards, and there were several dairy farms. The Duffy brothers used to round up the cows, cowboy-style, on the Springhurst Dairy meadows.
This mysterious house-in-a-wall sits on the property of the Corpus Christi Monastery, the oldest Dominican monastery in the US.
Completed in 1911, the American Bank Note Company Printing Plant produced "stock certificates, foreign currency, letters of credit, postage stamps and, of course, bank notes" for governments all over the world. The company left town for the Philadelphia suburbs in 1985, and the building has been home to many different tenants since then. It is currently being redeveloped into a higher-profile space for creative firms and nonprofit organizations.
An untitled sculpture on the wall of the Hunts Point Middle School
The United States of Hot Dogs, a.k.a. The World of Spooky Creepy Effects Horrorland
I found this cut-out lying face-up on the street nearby. It's from the American Museum of Natural History's "Theodore Outdoor" photo contest. You're supposed to plan an "expedition to a local, state, or national park, an outdoor space in your community, or anywhere else you experience nature" and then take a picture of Teddy while you're out exploring. Done and done! I've submitted this photo, and I think the lush, verdant landscape of Hunts Point in the background should all but assure my victory.
The vast majority — somewhere around 95% — of the freight coming into the Hunts Point food markets arrives by truck. Neighborhood residents have long complained about the onslaught of traffic, noise, and diesel fumes produced by the thousands of trucks that ply the streets of Hunts Point every day. Meanwhile, about two trains per day chug their way down this dinky little track that serves as the markets' only rail connection to the outside world. In a bit of good news for those who'd like to see more train traffic, the produce market recently received a $10 million federal grant to improve its rail facilities, although it's not entirely clear that the produce market is still going to be located in Hunts Point after 2014.
This park, a rare green (and blue — Rocking the Boat is headquartered here) space in Hunts Point, was completed in September 2006, but was subsequently kept under lock and key after the city decided it was too dangerous for people to cross both the street that runs in front of the park and the single-track rail line (traveled by two extremely slow trains per day) that runs parallel to the street.
Why hadn't they thought of this before? Understandably, the community was upset that all they could do was stare longingly through locked gates at this beautiful new park. Finally, in May 2007, after a traffic light had been installed, crosswalks had been painted, and the Parks Department had stationed extra staff on site to watch for approaching trains, Hunts Point Riverside Park opened to the public.
Meanwhile, the city still needed to install automatic gates at the railroad crossing to replace the people monitoring it. As it happens, I ended up working on this project at my old engineering firm. On our site visits, it seemed as though the Parks Department track watchers literally just sat in their truck all day until the rare occasion when a train would come ambling down the line, at which point they would spring into action and make sure no one tried to cross until the iron stallion had passed on its way.
At any rate, it's good to see that the gates have not collapsed onto any children or anything. My favorite of the four was always the hilariously short one visible above, designed to block pedestrians on the sidewalk. That'll stop 'em!
This variegated row of rectangles is part of Nehemiah Spring Creek, a development within Gateway Estates, which itself is a new neighborhood of affordable housing, decades in the making, that is finally being built on a formerly empty expanse of landfill in East New York. Designed by the renowned architect Alexander Gorlin, these homes consist of prefabricated modules that are assembled in a factory at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and then trucked across the borough to Spring Creek.
The non-profit group putting up these houses, Nehemiah, is named after the biblical leader who rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem. It is backed by East Brooklyn Congregations, a consortium of local churches that banded together in 1980 to revitalize the blighted neighborhoods of Brownsville and East New York, places where other developers wouldn't even think about building. Nehemiah's focus has always been on keeping costs as low as possible by erecting large batches of houses at once, in the hope that a concentrated influx of new homeowners could provide stability to a formerly deteriorated area. They have been largely successful in this approach, but, as a result, their architecture typically lacks much in the way of character.
Spring Creek, however, offers a striking departure from the blandness of previous Nehemiah projects. The facades are still quite minimalistic, but their irregularly alternating patterns and colors are anything but boring. Walking around here on a foggy Sunday afternoon was a surreal experience; I felt at times like I was stuck inside an endless alien suburb, but I was simultaneously captivated by the arresting visual landscape. It's unlike any other place I've seen in NYC. Adding to the strange vibe was the fact that there weren't any stores or restaurants to be found — there is a gigantic mall on the south side of the Gateway development, but it's not accessible to pedestrians in the residential area — but apparently that's going to change soon.
With the intention of encouraging interactions among neighbors, all the driveways at Nehemiah Spring Creek are placed behind the houses, allowing the front doors to open directly onto the sidewalk.
A freshly minted row of town houses at Nehemiah Spring Creek looks to be almost ready for its new occupants.
Built 20-some years ago when the city first started planning to develop what is now Gateway Estates, this stretch of Vandalia Avenue and its associated infrastructure have been lying dormant ever since, just waiting for their chance to shine.
Unit conversions on the jungle gym! Here's a closer look.
The elevated subway line in the background, separating Elton Playground here from Linwood Playground on the other side, is the New Lots Line.
Like the South Bronx, East New York was once a heavily Jewish area, and many of its synagogues have now become houses of worship for other faiths. This one was originally Congregation Chevra Tehillim Nusach Ashkenaz.
