Inscribed beneath this statue is the following prayer:
You expired, O Jesus, but the source of life gushed forth for souls and an ocean of mercy opened up for the whole world. O Fount of Life, unfathomable Divine Mercy, envelop the whole world and empty Yourself out upon us. O Blood and Water, which gushed forth from the Heart of Jesus as a fount of mercy for us, I trust in You. Amen.
If you examine aerial images of southeastern Queens, you'll find a number of these mysterious metallic disks lurking about. My best guess is that they are actually in-ground storage tanks for the old groundwater supply system, but I don't know for sure. Anybody have a more definite answer?
UPDATE: I'm now confident saying this is an old in-ground water storage tank. The property was formerly owned by the Jamaica Water Supply Company (JWS provided the area with well water before selling its Queens properties to the city) and now belongs to the Department of Environmental Protection (the department in charge of the city's water supply). And it looked the same in 1996, the year the city bought the JWS properties, as it does today.
This guy's civil disobedience takes on a somewhat more orderly form than that of his Hawkeye confederate.
Starting in the 1850s, to meet the needs of its rapidly growing population, the then-independent city of Brooklyn constructed the Ridgewood Reservoir atop the Harbor Hill Moraine in what is now Highland Park and built an aqueduct system to supply it with water from a series of dammed streams and wells located farther east on Long Island, in today's Queens and Nassau Counties.
The abandoned structure above stands at the eastern edge of Queens along the route of the conduits that once carried this water toward Brooklyn. The western portion of the aqueduct was gravity-fed, so this pumping station wouldn't have been needed to move water through the pipes; it must have been used to pump water up from Hook Creek (which once marked this part of the boundary between Queens and Nassau before it was covered over) and add it to the supply heading toward Ridgewood.
As far as I can tell, Hook Creek was not one of the original water sources for the aqueduct.* Lending some support to that claim, the inscription above the doorway ("CITY OF NEW YORK — DEPT OF WATER SUPPLY G&E — HOOK CREEK PUMPING STA") implies that this pumping station was erected by New York City, of which Brooklyn was not a part until 1898. I do know that NYC built mechanical filtering plants for some surface water sources in the early 1900s to increase Brooklyn's supply; perhaps this building was constructed, and Hook Creek finally tapped, at that point.
* Confusingly, what is now called Hook Creek was, in the mid-1800s, sometimes just referred to as the middle branch of Hook Creek. The east and west branches, however, were original sources for the aqueduct. An 1853 NY Times article describing an inspection tour of some of the proposed water sources for the new Brooklyn supply system deemed the pond on the east branch of Hook Creek (later known as Clear Stream and now buried beneath the streets of Nassau County) the finest of the bunch: "This water seemed much superior to that of the other ponds, and could be tasted moderately without the brandy — though the majority still continued to think a little of the latter a decided improvement."
UPDATE: This was a driven well station, meaning it drew water out of the ground, not out of Hook Creek. The wells were put into operation around 1910. In April 1939, residents of Rosedale were begging the city to activate this pumping station, which had been temporarily shut down, in order to lower the area's water table and bring an end to the basement flooding caused by recent rains. (As we've seen, flooding is a perpetual problem in Rosedale.)
The guy just told me to go lie between two pieces of bread...
It's not uncommon to see this guy and his teammates hanging around a Parks Department ballfield.
Two of the five rum bottles artfully arranged on this fence and its immediate surroundings
This house also had a big smiley face projected on its garage door.
Buried inside this open-roofed enclosure (known as the Ohel) in Queens's Montefiore Cemetery are the sixth and seventh rebbes of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, Yosef Yitzchok Schneerson and his son-in-law Menachem Mendel Scheerson (who was also the last rebbe, as he did not name a successor when he died in 1994).
Menachem Mendel (on the left, and often referred to simply as "the Rebbe") oversaw Chabad's worldwide expansion in the latter half of the 20th century. He was a particularly beloved figure in the movement, and some of his followers believed that he was (and some still believe that he is) the messiah.
All the pieces of paper you see lying in front of the gravestones are notes written to him, either by visitors or by people from around the world who have emailed or faxed their messages to the 24-hour visitors' center located at the edge of the cemetery in a house the Lubavitchers purchased after the Rebbe's death.
And what eventually happens to all the paper? "When the pile of shredded notes grows high, they are burned to make room for more; if you happen to come soon after, you’ll see embers of hand-scribbled petitions fluttering around at the foot of the Rebbe’s headstone."
When I stopped by today, there were several people praying in the Ohel, part of a steady stream of visitors throughout the year. On the anniversary of the Rebbe's death, however, thousands of people make a pilgrimage to his grave, and not always to the delight of the neighbors. Cambria Heights, which borders the cemetery, once had a sizable Jewish population, but it's now mostly populated by middle-class black residents, who were quite surprised to find throngs of Hasidic Jews suddenly pouring into their neighborhood to visit the Ohel after the Rebbe was buried in 1994.
Lying just outside the Ohel are the graves of the wives of the last three Lubavitcher rebbes.
Montefiore is, for the most part, a place of fairly humble graves. One of the few exceptions, ironically, is Stark.
is the name of my great-grandmother, who is buried here in Montefiore Cemetery. It is also the name of the woman whose gravestone is pictured above, second from left in the back row. I assumed they were one and the same (despite the fact that I didn't recognize any names on the other stones) until I got home and looked closely at the photo; this Clara died a few decades too early to be my great-grandmother.
Part of a strange little enclave of houses with mismatched peaked masonry entryways
