Overlooking the waters of New York Bay from the dead end of 51st Street in Sunset Park, tucked in between a slew of snowplow blades and stacks of upside-down litter baskets and protected from the trucks of the adjacent Sanitation Department garage by a row of red, white, and blue bollards, a flagpole with a weathered plaque attached to it memorializes "all the men and women who gave their lives for this great nation".
Written entirely in Latin, this diploma (close-up) from Collegii Manhattanensis was awarded to Joannem Josephum Fitzgerald in MDCCCLXLI. I don't know why it was sitting here beside a Sanitation Department garage; perhaps it was rescued from the trash by a garbage collector.
UPDATE: Ben has discovered that the mysterious Mr. Fitzgerald was in all likelihood Congressman John Joseph Fitzgerald from Brooklyn!
This building doesn't look much like an old stable. Which makes sense, because it never was a stable. It just played one in an episode of Boardwalk Empire. Here's what it looked like back in 2007.
Clem Snacks Inc, distributors of Utz potato chips & snacks (according to the door), is one of several businesses located on the dead end of 53rd Street by the Brooklyn waterfront. This area is still sometimes referred to as Whale Square, an appellation given to it by the Whale Oil Company, which once had a facility here. Despite its name, Whale Oil had nothing to do with whale oil, but was rather a distributor of fuel oil.
I got the information above from this 1950 Brooklyn Eagle article. The article is an odd fit in the "What Women Are Doing" section of the paper, which also features (on the next page) headlines like "Disc Star Rickie Likes Gals Quiet, Down-to-Earth" and "At 23, Girl Feels Left Out of Old Crowd Now Mostly Paired Off".
Believe it or not, you can still occasionally spot a train chugging down the center of First Avenue here in Sunset Park (video). I've even seen a locomotive have to stop and wait in the road because someone left a car parked on the track, presumably not considering that the rails might still be active. All the engineer could do was honk his horn until the driver came and moved the car.
This line is operated by New York New Jersey Rail (NYNJ), the last railroad still floating freight cars to and from New Jersey across New York Harbor (video*). It's a small-time operation, but NYNJ's car floats do provide a convenient alternative to the roundabout rail-only route known as the Selkirk Hurdle, so named because a freight train bound from, say, New Jersey to Brooklyn must travel all the way up to Selkirk — some 140 miles north of here — in order to cross the Hudson River by rail. There used to be a rail bridge over the Hudson at Poughkeepsie, much closer to NYC, but it was shut down after a fire in 1974. (It has since reopened to foot traffic and is now the longest pedestrian bridge in the world!)
In 2012, NYNJ shifted the Brooklyn terminus of its car float operation from the Bush Terminal rail yard (a few blocks north of here, i.e. behind me as I was taking this photo at about 54th Street) to the 65th Street Yard (about half a mile south of here). As the 65th Street Yard is directly connected to the Bay Ridge Branch freight line, freight cars floated across the harbor no longer have to move down First Avenue to get to the Bay Ridge Branch. But the First Avenue track still sees some use: it provides a connection between the 65th Street Yard and the recently rehabilitated South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, where rail service to the new Sims Municipal Recycling Facility began in February, and it also allows new and rebuilt subway cars that have been floated over from New Jersey to be hauled up First Avenue (photo) toward a rail connection** with the subway system around 38th Street and 4th Avenue. (Similarly, old subway cars can be sent down the line and barged across the harbor for scrapping or rebuilding.)
* The video, from 2012, is already a bit out of date. It was shot before the more modern landing site at the 65th Street Yard in Brooklyn opened. Additionally, the old Brooklyn pontoon bridge shown in the video has been relocated to the New Jersey landing, which was badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy.
** This is one of only two connections between the subway system and the national rail network. The other, as we've learned, is near the Linden Shop in eastern Brooklyn.
Here's what the place looked like in 1928.
Walking in kindness at the Monastery of the Precious Blood
with some artfully placed gump.
Check out the driveway in the background at left, leading to the peeling garage door, in Street View. There are at least two things to take notice of: a very inconveniently located sidewalk tree and a blurred-out yellow blob — a taxicab? — that someone wants to keep hidden from the world.
Out in front of someone's house, this sidewalk display case (close-up) of "Fine Disposable Tableware For Your Affair" is aimed at potential Jewish customers here in Borough Park.
Check out these cute pictures of kids who lived here in the 1950s.
The market is still in operation, but the building pictured has been taken over by the Fire Department's Bureau of Fire Investigation.
