I found this collection sitting outside of Certified Gasoline. I like to imagine that if one of the gas stations they supply falls behind on its payments, they send out a guy named Tony to "take care" of its signs.
They put up this sign after the infamous "roving emu gangs" incident of 1987.
across the street from Graniteville Quarry Park
This Rafael Viñoly-designed structure was Staten Island's first new police station in over 50 years when it opened in the summer of 2013 as the home of the nascent 121st Precinct, the youngest of the island's four precincts.
My first thought when I saw the building was "Whoa, that's cool!" But then, as is often the case with such things, the designer's description of it ruined it for me:
The second floor cantilevers ninety feet toward Richmond Avenue in a symbolic gesture of community engagement that defines the main entrance and creates a visual link between the main lobby and the street.A symbolic gesture of community engagement? Come on. This is a giant stapler of doom looming ominously above anyone who dares make the 200-foot trek from the sidewalk to the entrance. It's intimidating, not engaging.
The 121st Precinct station house as seen from Hillside Cemetery
Take a closer look and see if you can spot a groundskeeper dozing behind a couple of headstones here at Baron Hirsch Cemetery.
followed by a horse trailer and a similarly colored '79 AMC Spirit AMX. These vehicles are located just around the corner from the ones in the previous two photos (and a couple of other interesting ones as well). You can see most of them in Street View. I can't believe I didn't notice what's on the trunk of the purple Pontiac!
Many of them are faded and hard to read, but the legible ones all appear to be $250 tickets for litter on the sidewalk — "a large accumulation of scattered bottle(s), cigarette pack, cup(s), napkins, paper bags(s), piece(s) of paper, wrappers", for example.
Dedicated in 1938. Father Eugene Carrella, the pastor of this church until recently, has an impressive collection of 300 to 400 religious statues and relics.
featuring Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico's most popular religious icon. The guy who built it told me he started working on it nine years ago but that it was much smaller at first (as you can see in this 2007 Street View image). He also invited me to his annual party here in December. He said there would be a mariachi band and that everyone would be welcome, Mexican or not.
Check out this little ball of pep on a dreary January day.
This house was built in 1880-82 for Mr. Schoverling ("one of the world's foremost importers and distributors of firearms") and his almost identically named wife.
2014: a bad year for figs, but a good one, at least in my world, for sorghum.
This house (which is named Portview, according to another tablet opposite the one above) is located at the intersection of Sunrise Terrace and Occident Avenue, and its current address is 6 Sunrise Terrace, implying that it once stood like Istanbul or Damascus at the crossroads of Orient and Occident.
(This 1907 map [look at the bottom left] confirms that this block of Sunrise Terrace used to be called Orient Avenue.)
Worked into this gate at the dead end of Pearl Street are the house's address ("Pearl St No 41") and "Much heat & Love 1980". Here's what the other door looks like.
This hillside nature preserve, established and maintained by a local community group, is named for the type of rock that forms the spine of Staten Island (last paragraph).
Mounted at the foot of the Serpentine Commons nature preserve
The Serpentine Commons nature preserve contains a serpentine barren with a spectacular view out toward the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
This seemingly vacant house, on the market since at least 2007, stands amid a large congregation of mansions on Grymes Hill. We're looking at it from behind, where a Serpentine Commons trail passes by its backyard on the way out to Howard Avenue.
This belongs to the next-door neighbor of the house in the previous photo.
Here's a look at this treehouse in its glory days a year earlier.
Why have actual food for breakfast when you could be eating more candy? It's refreshing to see a major corporation taking a public stand to address the dire lack of sugar and fat in the American diet.
