This honorary street sign marks the location on the Coney Island Boardwalk where members of the Coney Island Polar Bear Club meet every Sunday from November to April for their weekly dip in the Atlantic Ocean. According to its website, the club was founded in 1903 and is the oldest winter bathing organization in the United States.
If this were a summer afternoon, the stalls at left would be open and you'd see people playing all sorts of carnival games, like the bathroom-themed Stinky Feet. The stalls at right, however, would still be shuttered. The property on that side of the walkway, including the 1880s Grashorn Building (said to be Coney Island's oldest structure), has been vacant for several years now, courtesy of Joe Sitt, Coney Island's infamous "un-developer".
Looming in the distance is the Wonder Wheel. If you look closely, you'll notice that all of its cars are missing. It turns out that they get taken down each year during the off-season, and their return to the Wheel "is the first sign of spring in Coney Island. Being there to see the 24 cars go up, the Swinging ones first and then the Stationary, is like seeing crocuses bloom before your eyes."
Do people actually fly from New York to Miami for a butt lift? Don't we have plenty of good butt doctors here?
A 1947 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith and a 2011 Chrysler Pepto-Stretch
Using Street View, you can see that this log appeared here on the fence surrounding Lincoln High School sometime between June 2012 and September 2013. In that same interval, a sidewalk tree near the fence came down. Perhaps Hurricane Sandy brought the tree down onto the fence, and perhaps a little section of the tree was left on display as a reminder of the devastation wreaked by the storm. Sandy not only damaged the basement and the football field here at Lincoln; it also forced several students out of their homes and took the life of one of the school's teachers.
Stepping back a few feet from where I took the previous shot
Nearly invisible from the adjacent street, a ramshackle structure can be seen across Coney Island Creek standing on a small, fenced-off parcel of Parks Department land. If you look closely, you can see a pair of chairs and what appear to be a couple of bird cages; a 2011 Street View image shows some birds (presumably pigeons) roosting on the roof.
A mermaid and the sea god Neptune (along with several pigeons) can be found sunbathing on the side of the subway viaduct at the Ocean Parkway Q train station. These panels are part of Deborah Masters's Coney Island Reliefs, an art installation almost 20 years in the making.
Much to the dismay of some locals, this section of the Coney Island Boardwalk between Brighton 15th Street and Coney Island Avenue is being replaced with a surface of recycled plastic boards and concrete.
As I was walking down the shore of Brighton Beach on a chilly, sub-40-degree January afternoon, I saw this gentleman emerge from a plunge in the Atlantic. His name is Gary, he lives nearby, and he says jumping in the ocean is a daily ritual for him.
(Gary is standing less than 100 yards from here.)
About 15 minutes after I saw Gary coming out of the frigid Atlantic, I spotted another guy out for a swim! This is Felix, an immigrant from Moscow, and he says he's jumped in the ocean every day for the last 15 years.
Shirtless and shoeless and doing some push-ups, Felix basks in the nippy January air after his swim.
Gary and Felix make these once-a-week sissies look pretty silly.
A Russian-Uzbek-Korean cafe. You can thank Joseph Stalin for this seemingly unlikely culinary combination: in 1937, he forcibly relocated some 170,000 ethnic Koreans from the Russian Far East to Soviet Central Asia.
This is one of the many narrow pedestrian alleys (map) crisscrossing Brighton Beach's dying bungalow district, which has been heavily scarred by haphazard development over the past 15 years or so. (Note, for example, the skeleton of the multi-story building-to-be in the background at right. That project, which required the demolition of three houses, has been stalled since at least June 2012. And in the background at left, you can see a shoddily constructed plywood fence, part of which is toppling onto the walkway. That fence surrounds three lots acquired almost a decade ago by a developer who leveled the houses that stood there by 2009 and has left the land sitting vacant ever since.)
This HVACR academy at William E. Grady High School was dedicated on July 17, 2002, the 100th anniversary of Willis Carrier submitting his design for the first modern air-conditioning system, which was installed in a Brooklyn printing plant. According to the NY Daily News, the dedication ceremony here at the school featured a 400-pound ice sculpture of the inventor.
These trailers are parked outside the NYPD's mounted unit Troop E stable. Check out this Street View image of the stable building. The horses are apparently kept on the second floor. Note the (poop?) chute coming out of the second floor and emptying into a dumpster.
Banner is the most obscure of all the Brooklyn street prefixes. Before discovering it today, I would have bestowed that title upon Plumb: there are only three numbered Plumb roadways — Plumb 1st through 3rd Streets — comprising several blocks altogether. But the Banner prefix is even rarer. It exists only in the names of two short dead-end streets: Banner 3rd Road and Banner 3rd Terrace.
According to the NY Times, this circa-1935 building was one of several apartment houses in Brighton Beach named after socialist leaders. Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, eponym of Mother Jones magazine, was a "fiery union organizer" and a co-founder of the Industrial Workers of the World.
This portrait is part of a window-mounted canine art gallery in someone's first-floor Brighton Beach apartment.
