Second Saint James Church of Christ, née Congregation Ahavas Achim B’nai Abraham. In converting this shul to a church, these guys went so far as to cover over the Ten Commandment tablets up near the top of the building, giving them the appearance of the twin towers.
I guess this one counts, even though it was never used as a headstone.
The students here get hands-on experience working on real subway cars — inside the school!
At first, I assumed this was another churchagogue. But then I noticed that there were no Christian symbols on the building, and that the Jewish motifs of the old Talmud Torah Atereth Israel had seemingly all been retained, and perhaps even augmented: the entrance gate topped with the Star of David looks like it might be a recent addition. It turns out that the organization to which the Tabernacle belongs, the Church of God and Saints of Christ, is, despite its name, a denomination of Hebrew Israelites.
The city started building this 20-acre facility back in 2001 to serve as the main composting site for Brooklyn and Queens (it sits just on the Brooklyn side of the border between the two boroughs). However, it has only been able to process a limited amount of compost since then (you can see the small number of compost windrows at the site, most of them quite overgrown, here) because its application for an operating permit, which is needed for large-scale composting, has been held up by residents of nearby neighborhoods, who claim that the facility already produces significant levels of odor and dust, and that these conditions will only worsen if operations at the site are increased.
Just this past summer, after years of departmental hearings and procedural wranglings, the commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Conservation finally granted a permit to the facility, rejecting the largely unfounded claims of the locals:
Given the other sources of odors in the vicinity of the facility, including the scavenger waste pit used by septic haulers to discharge raw sewage, the City's combined sewer overflow tanks, and the nearby creek and marshes, it is more likely than not that many of the odors identified by the opponents' lay witnesses were from sources other than the composting facility. In fact, Department inspectors detected odors from those other sources during an inspection conducted in 2007. . . .As one Department of Sanitation official says about this classic NIMBY problem: "Everybody supports composting, but no one wants anything near them."
As with odor, dust conditions were more likely than not the result of other activities in the area, including construction activities, and bus and truck traffic, and not composting activities. With respect to the "black dust" identified by lay witnesses for the intervenors, black dust was more likely the result of soot from idling diesel engines at the neighboring bus depot than the composting of yard waste at the facility.
New York no longer burns any of its garbage; this facility, now smokestack-less, is currently used as a Sanitation garage, with a large salt shed on site.
A short remnant of a thoroughfare that perhaps once ran to, I don't know, an old mill?
The famous muscleman Charles Atlas was reportedly the model (photo) for this sculpture, the last of Pietro Montana's three Brooklyn World War I monuments. You can see the other two here and here.
This was one of the city's early 20th-century farm gardens, where, as a vehicle for personal development, children learned how to grow crops and flowers. Fannie Parsons, the pioneering force behind the program, put it this way: "We teach them honesty in their work, neatness and order, justice as well as kindness to their neighbors. I assure you that all the virtues can be taught from a little patch of ground not eight feet square."
After enjoying decades of popularity, the movement finally lost its steam, and by the 1970s all the farm gardens in the city had closed. This one in Highland Park, however, was revived in 1989 for the students of PS 140 here in Brooklyn, and it remains open to this day, although it seems to be more of a family garden at this point.
In reading about the farm garden program, I came across a couple of great historical images: this 1936 photo of kids hard at work here at Highland Park, and this terrifying Children of the Corn shot from a Manhattan garden in 1902.
Welcome to the melancholy life of Queens chrome. Is all that flashiness just a futile attempt to cover up some deep-seated self-esteem issues?
The fine establishment in the foreground is not the only pawn shop located on Rockaway Boulevard outside the casino. Well, technically it's a racino, because it's connected to...
The casino is not even 15 months old, but the Big A has been here since 1894.
Here at Aqueduct, you can put money on simulcast races taking place around the country. Since the collapse of the city's OTB parlors in late 2010, Aqueduct has been the only place in NYC where you can go to (legally) bet on the horses in person.
I can't say I saw much in the way of collars around here. Perhaps this restriction dates back to the days when you actually had to pay to get into the Club. Since the fall of 2008, admission to the entire facility has been free.
This was much less dramatic than I had hoped. I didn't even see a single person angrily rip up a ticket!
The NY Times published a piece contrasting the patrons of the racetrack and those of the casino. I don't know how representative it is of the two clienteles, but it is a good read.
You can see the silhouetted ghost of the Rockaway Beach Branch running across the top of the embankment.
Part of a patchwork of more than 10,000 acres of parkland ringing Jamaica Bay
You can see some apartment towers rising in the Rockaways off in the distance.
I used to wonder why I would often find coconuts lying in the sand on out-of-the-way beaches in NYC. Now I know!
I love the juxtaposition of the alluring, money-laden model and the car being torn to pieces by a giant metal claw. Here's a closer look.
