Here at the very edge of Brooklyn (Street View) stands what was once a milk pasteurization plant owned by the W. M. Evans Dairy Company. When Evans took over the property around 1927, the three-story building in the lower photo above already existed; it had been erected in the mid-1910s for the Rusch family's Premium Dairy Company and was "the only milk plant that positively produced uniformly pasteurized milk without the process of baking the same, a condition sometimes occurring in other establishments using the old methods of pasteurizing milk", according to a rather glowing mini-biography of the building's architect, Theobald M. Engelhardt, in a 1917 book about prominent German-American families.

Looking closely at the spray-painted awning, you can make out the name of a house of worship: Noah's Ark Christian Church. Meanwhile, a glance up at the faded sign near the top of the facade reveals the name of a previous occupant of the building: Hide-a-way. My best guess is that the Hide-a-way was a bar, based on both its name and the fact that an entity called "91-01 76th Street Tavern Corp." owned the building from 1981 to 1985.

J train, Q56 bus, truck, foot

(Here we are again at 75th Street–Elderts Lane, one of the city's three bi-county subway stations.)

This bandshell in Forest Park is named for George Seuffert Sr., who "became a music teacher and concert violinist before establishing the Concordia Military Band in 1894, later becoming the Seuffert Band. They performed on a bandstand on this spot until 1920, when the bandshell was built to replace it."

George Seuffert Jr. took over the role of bandleader from his father in 1931 at the age of 19. For decades before his death in 1995, he and the band regularly gave free summer concerts here at the bandshell.

George Jr. also served as the music consultant to five mayors, from Lindsay to Giuliani. In addition to organizing the city's free music programs, he "reportedly knew all the world’s national anthems, and was responsible for performing them at diplomatic functions for the city." He earned a salary of $1 per year in this position, but he never bothered to collect his paychecks. In 1994, to rectify the situation, Mayor Giuliani ceremoniously presented him with a check for $29 — 29 years' worth of back pay.

Constructed in 1905 as the clubhouse for the Forest Park golf course, Oak Ridge is now home to the park's administrative headquarters, the Queens Council for the Arts, and a community center.

(We saw this building from the other side a couple of years ago.)

This course opened with 9 holes in 1901 and expanded to 18 in 1905. One online reviewer says that the current clubhouse "is reminiscent of a muffler shop you might have passed on the Jackie Robinson Parkway on your way in" — quite a contrast to the former clubhouse we just saw.

Editor's note: The Jackie Robinson Parkway is not a good route for spotting muffler shops. The vast majority of the road is surrounded by cemeteries and parks, and the remainder passes through residential areas.

As Kevin Walsh of Forgotten New York points out, this restaurant may have been named for the Belmont Stakes, but its spires seem intended to evoke the grandstand at Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby.

In comparison to the nearby Glendale Diner, the Village Voice described Belmont Steaks in 2003 as "a costlier, fourtysomething divorcée-magnet". The place has apparently been closed since 2012; perhaps there weren't enough fourtysomething [sic] divorcées in the neighborhood to keep it afloat.

Behind me was a sign for Michael A. Marti Street.

This building was dedicated in 1929 as the home of Glendale Baptist Church. It now belongs to Myanmar Baptist Church, the city's only Burmese church. The church puts on a popular annual "Fun Fair", which is primarily a Burmese food festival.

I've never noticed a particularly strong odor emanating from Callery pear flowers, but many people apparently find their scent unbearable. (See, for example, this article entitled "Meet the tree that's making your neighborhood smell like Semenville, USA".)

Smells aside, perhaps the noblest of all the city's Callery pears is the 9/11 "Survivor Tree". After 9/11, it was "the last living thing to come out of the rubble of ground zero — a charred stump that, to an untrained eye, looked dead." The tree was taken to a nursery in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx to recuperate. After almost a decade there, having returned to excellent health (and having survived another brutal assault — by Mother Nature this time), it was moved back to the World Trade Center, where it now stands amid a grove of swamp white oak trees at the National September 11 Memorial plaza.

In 1966, this glacial kettle pond was drained and turned into a pair of baseball fields. The fields proved to be largely unusable due to frequent flooding, however, and the city eventually surrendered and restored the site as a pond.

This is the radio tower that stands behind the FDNY's Queens dispatch office.

This ornate metal pillar (an old fence post?) separates two distinct sections of stone wall (Street View) at the southern edge of Forest Park, beside the abandoned Rockaway Beach Branch.

From top to bottom: the Jamaica Line, the defunct Rockaway Beach Branch, and Jamaica Avenue. That's the cryptic "LET'S NOT LOSE IT!" mural at right.

Tadeusz Kościuszko and Kazimierz Pułaski were Polish military commanders who fought on the American side in the Revolutionary War. Here in New York, their names can be found on neighboring bridges over Newtown Creek, neighboring streets in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and neighboring mustard jars in a Polish grocery store in Woodhaven.

It's only rarely that I come across a surviving street sign from the days when each borough had its own color scheme, before white-on-green became the citywide standard. But what makes this sign particularly odd is that it actually appears to be two signs — one old and one new — mounted side-by-side on the same pole. And, even weirder, it looks like the old sign is the more recent addition. This 2009 Street View image shows a white-on-green sign where we now see the blue-on-white one.

It turns out that the older-looking sign was one of several that were stuck onto existing white-on-green signs in 2011 for the filming of a chase scene in Men in Black 3. The scene took place in 1969, hence the attempt to replicate the appearance of that era's street signs. While I imagine that the city must be pretty strict about requiring any altered street signs to be restored after a movie shoot, the Jamaica Ave sign above was not the only one left in place by the film crew.

I don't know if any footage of this area made it into the final cut, but you can see some shots from farther east on Jamaica Avenue, near 113th Street, in this video about the chase scene. (These signs are visible around 0:22, and these are easily spotted at about 0:25.) In case you're wondering about the geography of the chase: They start out in Flushing Meadows Park. After hanging a right at the Unisphere, they're in Downtown Brooklyn all of a sudden. They pass Borough Hall, then turn and somehow end up on Jamaica Avenue, beneath the elevated subway tracks.

Street View