I spotted this building in Bushwick before starting on today's route.

In New York City, "meter-maid vehicles" like this Westward GO-4 Interceptor are generally associated with the NYPD, which owns a large fleet of them, but you also occasionally spot one on the street belonging to an individual or a business. Borough Park seems to be home to a particularly high number of these privately owned three-wheeled buggies; one Hasidic guy here told me that Jews in his community often buy them from the city at government auctions.

According to a supervisor on site, Con Edison needs to repair a failure in an underground electric transmission cable running beneath Dahill Avenue. But because the insulating oil that fills the cable is pressurized, the oil has to be frozen at two points, one on each side of the failure, so that the cable can be sliced open and fixed without all the oil rushing toward the cut. At the "freeze pit" pictured above, as well as at another similar structure located down the road on the other side of the failure, liquid nitrogen (I believe) is being used to freeze the oil in the cable.

Here are two more privately owned three-wheeled buggies: a red Cushman Truckster and, in the background, another Westward GO-4 Interceptor.

A Hasid's hat can be an important expression of his identity. While all such headwear may appear similar to a casual observer, "there are big differences in the hats when you know where to look". According to one Jewish hat wearer:

The male identity is so profound in the community. A visit to [the hat store] is really the one time that they act with vanity. They keep looking at the hat . . . The differences are crucial once they put [it] on . . . Is this brim too big? Does this make me too fat? There is nothing more important than the hat. Nothing. Not even nuclear war.

Looks like someone started renovating/expanding this building and then just gave up.

WHILE ON LSD

in Victorian Flatbush, "in many respects . . . the first suburbs"

These are the first NYC crocuses I've seen in bloom this year, although I'd imagine plenty of others opened up during the warm weather of the past week while I was out of town. On account of the harsh winter, we're about two weeks behind 2013 and close to a month behind 2012.

21 Hinckley Place. Take a look around in Street View.

A Breuckelen take on Dutch architecture

around Bowling Green Cottage, an 1885 addition to Prospect Park's Parade Ground

Of the 45 or so slot car parlors that began springing up in NYC half a century ago, this is the only one left. To learn more about the place and its owner, watch these two videos.