A sightless musical savant born into slavery in 1849, Blind Tom had an amazing ability to mimic any sound he heard, whether vocally or on the piano. Billed as something of a circus freak, he was put on tour by his owner for many years. Mark Twain attended a few of his performances, recalling:

If ever there was an inspired idiot this is the individual. . . . Every time the audience applauded when a piece was finished, this happy innocent joined in and clapped his hands, too, and with vigorous emphasis. It was not from egotism, but because it is his natural instinct to imitate pretty much every sound he hears. When anybody else plays, the music so crazes him with delight that he can only find relief in uplifting a leg, depressing his head half way to the floor and jumping around on one foot so fast that it almost amounts to spinning . . . And when the volunteer is done, Tom stops spinning, sits down and plays the piece over, exactly as the volunteer had played it, and puts in all the slips, mistakes, discords, corrections, and everything just where they occurred in the original performance! He will exactly reproduce the piece, no matter how fast it was played or how slow, or whether he ever heard it before or not. The second night that I attended, two musical professors sat down together and played a duet, which they had composed themselves beforehand for the occasion. It was wonderfully tangled and complicated, wonderfully fast in movement, and was bristling with false notes. In the midst of it "Yankee Doodle" was interpolated, but so mutilated with intentional discords that one could not help writhing in his seat when they rattled it off. The bass was a brilliant piece of complication, and fitted the composition about as well as it would have fitted any other tune — just about. When the piece was finished, Tom stopped spinning and took the treble player's place alongside the bass performer, and clattered it furiously through, with his nose in the air, and never missed a note of any kind; and when he faithfully put in the ludicrous discords in "Yankee Doodle," the house came down. Then the treble man came back, and Tom took the wonderful bass and played it perfectly.

to Yusuf Hawkins

A great name for a burial section

As head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, the crusading, book-burning Mr. Comstock deemed himself the country's foremost guardian of public morality for more than four decades during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He advocated — and, as a postal inspector with power of arrest, often enforced — the banishment from society of anything his puritanical mind considered indecent (ranging from classic works of literature to information about birth control and birth control devices), with much of his authority springing from a sweeping piece of anti-obscenity, anti-contraception, anti-abortion legislation known as the Comstock Act (full text here, starting at the bottom of the page) that he successfully lobbied Congress to pass in 1873.

In a 1915 letter to the NY Times, the screenwriter and author Daniel Carson Goodman, himself a victim of Comstockery (which George Bernard Shaw described as "the world's standing joke at the expense of the United States . . . confirm[ing] the deep-seated conviction of the Old World that America is a provincial place, a second-rate country-town civilization after all"), eloquently wrote:

If an author feels himself justified in spending a year or two in trying to present life truthfully, it surely is not within the province of one man to suppress his power of expression and his work, to convert the author into a tea-side platitudinizer, and to terrorize the publishers so that through self-defense they must make war upon every manifestation of honest artistic striving. For forty years Mr. Comstock has had practically the power of limiting the reading matter of the American public to his own standard of literary appreciation. That is a long time to have the power of annoying honest publishers and authors, especially when they have no redress under the present law. Aiming ostensibly at what was to him moral degradation and the cause of sensorial metabolism, he has been permitted to crush under his falsely emblazoned shield what was to other people truth and beauty.

Depending on your source, this tomb was originally either a gun turret or a boiler from a ship.

In 2003, this city councilman was shot to death by a political rival/protégé (who was subsequently shot and killed by a police officer) in the Council chamber at City Hall, just minutes before the start of a session in which Mr. Davis planned to introduce a resolution focused on preventing workplace violence. He was originally buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, but his remains were moved here to the Evergreens after his family discovered that his killer's ashes had been placed in Green-Wood as well.

The Actors Fund of America has a burial section here at the Evergreens. Among the many impoverished entertainers whose ashes have been interred here is the Australian-born Sylvia Willes. After she died in 1917, the NY Times wrote:

She weighed exactly 19¾ pounds and stood 25½ inches high, just big enough to permit her to have photographs taken for advertising purposes while standing in the palm of a man's hand.

Mrs. Sarah Willes, the "Princess's" mother, said last night at the Hotel Gerard that during her daughter's stage experience in this country, at home, and in South Africa, she amassed approximately $250,000 in salaries for performances and royalties from her picture postal cards, but this had been dissipated through mismanagement.

Squirrel included!

Eastern Brooklyn's tangled web of transit

(Inc.)

In case you were wondering, the face value of a pound of pennies is anywhere between $1.46 and $1.81. (The weight of the penny has fluctuated over time.)

New affordable housing in Brownsville. As I was taking this photo, a guy behind me yelled out: "You can't live there — you make too much money!" (He's right that I can't live here, but the maximum income limit certainly has nothing to do with it.) Later in the day, I was asked on two occasions if I was planning to buy a building that I was photographing. I must be the most patrician-looking hobo this side of the bean fields.

This is the church — visible in the previous photo — for which the adjacent apartments are named. (The apartments were built on the former site of the parish school.) Because of dwindling attendance, the church was shuttered in 2008, and it came close to being demolished in 2010 before local activists supposedly convinced the Diocese of Brooklyn to convert it into a community center instead (although it doesn't appear that any progress has been made on that front). You can see an awesome 360° view of the interior here.

Standing atop the entrance to the East New York tunnel, we can see the depressed Bay Ridge Branch and the elevated Canarsie Line continuing their journey south together.

to the old Congress Theatre

The Spiritual Israel Church and its Army

It's a z, not a 3 — I checked.

The Bronck family coat of arms, as featured on the flag of the Bronx (and seen here above a doorway in Mullaly Park)

From the Landmarks Preservation Commission's 1981 designation report:

The Park Plaza is one of the first Art Deco apartment houses to have been built in the Bronx. Its designer, Marvin Fine, knew of and consciously synthesized the major elements of the new modernistic skyscraper style being developed in Manhattan by Raymond Hood and William Van Alen, and adapted them to the lowrise apartment houses of New York's residential neighborhoods. One of the handsomest Art Deco buildings in the Bronx, the Park Plaza was a pioneering work which helped change the face of the borough.

This apartment complex (you're looking at the eastern half of it) was the first of five waves of buildings that have been erected above the old Mott Haven rail yard over the past five decades.

There have been many notable graduates of Cardinal Hayes, but George Carlin was not one of them.

on the Cardinal Hayes football field

This shiny new building is a shelter for homeless families.

More salvaged ornaments from the Bronx House of Detention

HWZURS

According to a sign here in Mill Pond Park, this remnant of the Bronx Terminal Market "was built between 1925 and 1927 and was crucial for the preservation of perishable goods. The building housed ice-making equipment and a machine shop, and helped to maintain temperature-controlled food storage in the Wholesale Market and Storage Building." It has since been incorporated into the park, and now contains offices, restrooms, and a café, among other things.

lingering on a Major Deegan support column

as seen from the top of the parking garage at the Bronx Terminal Market shopping center