After leaving the FBI, but before becoming a Staten Island Congressman, Michael "I'll break you in half — like a boy" Grimm opened a health food joint on the Upper East Side with the same name as the unrelated establishment pictured above. He was recently indicted in federal court on a slew of charges stemming from his time running the restaurant; he is accused of underreporting wages and revenue, hiring undocumented workers, and lying under oath in a lawsuit brought by his employees. He has publicly described the investigation into his business practices as a "vendetta" and a "witch hunt". I say drop the charges, but throw him in jail for picking such an awful name for the place. Healthalicious? And the slogan ("better than delicious") only makes things worse.
(Here's Jon Stewart's take on the name.)
I was confused by the clown face at the far left. Does it have anything to do with 9/11? Did someone just paint it on top of the memorial mural? I checked Street View, and the clown is there in the oldest photo, which dates back to October 2007. If it were an act of vandalism, you'd think someone would have painted over it in all the years since.
It turns out that it's the logo of the Fun House, a disco club that was open from 1979 to 1985 on West 26th Street in Manhattan. The place was popular with young people from here in Sheepshead Bay as well as several other outer-borough neighborhoods. Joe Indart, the guy who created this and many other southern Brooklyn 9/11 murals we've come across, had apparently painted a Fun House mural at this street corner before 9/11 ever happened. So, it would seem, what you see above is simply a combined memorial to the loss of lives and the loss of youth.
Yee's represented a new type of restaurant when it opened in 1952: Emphatically located nowhere near any Chinatown, it offered a nightclub ambiance with the Polynesian flourishes that were expected of upscale Chinese restaurants at the time, including flaming cocktails, tiki-hut décor, a separate cocktail lounge, and an evolved Cantonese cuisine perfectly suited to the young families that were flooding the neighborhood in the postwar era. Classic dishes included sliced roast pork with garlic and sherry, steak kew, lobster in scallion sauce, and some of the city's first "sizzling platters." Sadly, the restaurant closed in 2008, and the space will undoubtedly be occupied by some sort of fast-food establishment in the future.Note the animal cannibal on the pork store at left.
Gravesend Neck Road currently terminates at Avenue U. But standing here on the north side of the avenue, you can still make out traces of the road's former right-of-way continuing its diagonal path northeast through the otherwise rectangular street grid. This aerial view makes things especially clear.
I didn't realize it at the time, but this used to look like this.
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The Royal Kingbee's realm has now expanded from the Bronx all the way down to Mill Basin!
See those dozens (hundreds?) of little white splotches just beneath the surface of the water? They're all jellyfish!
The FDNY lost 343 men to the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center, and Firefighter Michael Paul Ragusa was the final one of them to be given an official memorial service. More than a year after 9/11, with his family holding out hope that some of his remains would be identified so they would have something to bury, his parents discovered that they could retrieve a small sample of blood he had given years before when he signed up as a potential bone marrow donor. After several more months of waiting, his parents decided it was finally time to hold his funeral, and on September 8, 2003, they buried a coffin containing only that single vial of blood.
The apparently laughable gas mileage of a Hemi-powered 2006 Chrysler 300C
A weather-beaten old '79 Camaro — looks like it might be from 1879.
This mural is one of two (here's the other; here are photos from their creation) adorning the walls of the old Ryder Station post office. The building is now a delivery station used by mail carriers; the retail operations were split off and relocated a few blocks away.
I was trying to take a picture of a sign on the door in the background when this guy suddenly strode into frame.
This Flemish Renaissance Revival building at 1987 (not 1984 as indicated in the linked article) Flatbush Avenue opened in 1926 as a branch of the Midwood Trust Company.
Only in the world of kosher Chinese food could someone write a restaurant review like this one for Mr. Nosh: "the best chinese since shmulka bernstein".
Brooklyn's Ryder Avenue runs on a diagonal between McDonald Avenue and Ocean Parkway. It ceases to exist for a block and then picks back up at East 7th Street, but with a slightly different name: Roder Avenue. Weird! Check out this map to see what I'm talking about. It seems that Roder was originally Ryder, and acquired its current name sometime in the 1920s.
