Not nearly as elongated, though
You may remember this bizarre structure from a previous post; you can examine it for yourself in Street View. The last time I stopped by, this was the word on the street:
A man I met outside today told me it's a kosher dairy restaurant by the name of Klein's. He said the owner used to operate out of a trailer on this little triangle bounded by Bedford Avenue, Keap Street, and Williamsburg Street West. The land, he told me, was owned by the Parks Department, but the restaurateur had been stationed there more than seven years when they came around to evict him, and there's some law that says that if you've occupied someone else's property that long, they can't kick you off.That sounded fairly dubious to me, but I did discover that the tiny triangle on which it sits is actually parkland, even though it bears no visible indication of this. And there is a legal doctrine, known as adverse possession, under which someone can obtain possession of someone else's property after a certain period of continuous use (ten years in New York State).
I mentioned this all to my buddy Dan (of Verizon trailer fame), who is a real estate lawyer. He didn't think the adverse possession explanation held water, and so we wondered if perhaps Mr. Klein had struck some kind of deal with the city that would allow him to remain on this "park" operating as a vendor, like the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park or the Wendy's in Keltch Park.
Dan found a list of Parks concessionaires, but Klein's is nowhere to be seen. There is a mention, however, of a Golden Ring, Inc., whose description (falafel, etc.) and address (595 Bedford Avenue) match those of Klein's. The map on the description page points to this spot here in Williamsburg, although, strangely, the park listed as the site of the restaurant (Pierrepont Playground) is located a couple of miles away in Brooklyn Heights. If you search Google, you'll discover that Klein's is often also listed as Golden King, which sounds an awful lot like Golden Ring...
I decided to make a little detour today to visit Klein's once more. An employee, or perhaps Mr. Klein himself, was entering the building when I got there, and I asked him what the story is with this place. He said to come inside and he would tell me. But that proved to be a cheap ruse to get me into the restaurant, because all he ever told me was: "Eat, eat. The story is the food." It wasn't a total loss, however, because on the way out I found a Health Department certificate on the wall that positively identified the place as Golden Ring, Inc.
So it seems fairly certain that Klein's exists as an official Parks concessionaire on a plot of parkland that serves no park-like function whatsoever, and which is entirely occupied by the restaurant itself. But why? And how? What's the story, Mr. Klein?
The circular speaker-looking thing on the roof, roughly in the center of the photo, is one of the air raid Shabbat sirens located around South Williamsburg. It's powered by a cable running from the synagogue on the left, but it's mounted atop the adjacent apartment building, which would seem to nullify its exemption from the city's noise code, as it is not "on or within" a house of worship (unless, of course, the apartment building is somehow part of the synagogue).
A "still-flourishing tradition" no more, this former fortnightly live auction has forsaken its spot at the Brooklyn Navy Yard for the greener pastures of the internet.
These racks for the city's upcoming bike-share program, whose start date was recently postponed until next spring, will have to wait out the winter here at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Or at least it used to be. The service members buried here have since been disinterred, and there are now plans in the works to turn the site into a park.
Before stumbling upon this monument, I had never heard of the Battle of the Barrier Forts, fought early on in the Second Opium War.
to the Grand Central Parkway. (That's LaGuardia Airport's control tower lurking in the background.)
of Aeronautics and Technology — located just across the street from LaGuardia
from atop an administration building at LaGuardia's Marine Air Terminal
Pardon the out-of-town news, but the world's most exciting insurance sign has recently undergone a serious and — in my opinion — tragic renovation.
A sign posted here in the parking lot of the Hampton Inn (adjacent to the Crowne Plaza and across the street from LaGuardia) reads:
The Ditmars Boulevard / Crowne Plaza
Pet Rock
This 1000-ton boulder was brought to its present location (probably from southern Westchester) by an ice sheet about 10,000 or 12,000 years ago. Although the boulder is impressive, it is only a small part of the ice sheet's load. Long Island is built almost entirely of materials (boulders, sand, gravel, and clay) that were brought here by the ice.
The rock is granite pegmatite. It contains pinkish white crystals of potassium feldspar up to two feet long and smaller grains of the minerals quartz, plagioclase, biotite, muscovite, tourmaline, and garnet. The black tourmaline and the clear quartz are intimately intergrown on the northwestern face of the rock.
The pegmatite closely resembles the numerous "young" granites that intrude the metamorphic rocks of the Manhattan Prong between Long Island Sound and Putnam County. In Westchester County the granites of this kind were originally formed between 335 and 360 million years ago during the waning stages of the growth of the Appalachian Mountain system.
In the early 1940s, the Rockaway Freeway (which, with its many at-grade street intersections, is a freeway in name only) was built on the former right-of-way of the Long Island Rail Road, which had recently been elevated above street level on the structure you see here. It's a notoriously dangerous road, although it was made considerably less so in the late 1990s when it was reduced from two lanes in each direction to one.
The rail line was abandoned by the LIRR in 1955, but it reopened the following year as part of the subway system. The section in the photograph is currently served by the A train; the Rockaway Park Shuttle operates on the western portion of the line.
Like many of the vehicles lining the streets along the beach, this one looks like it arrived in town this morning bearing a surfboard or two.
Take a gander at the latest Chick tract to hit the streets.
This preserve is named for René and Jean Dubos, a husband-and-wife pair of microbiologists and environmentalists. René, who discovered "the first clinically tested antibiotic agent", was also a Pulitzer-winning author "who brought a profound humanity to the study of man's harm to himself through environmental pollution", and he's often given credit for coining the phrase "Think Globally, Act Locally."
I keep seeing them every 100 feet or so along the edge of the wildlife sanctuary.
A million miles away from the faint skyline of Manhattan
Indeed!
That bridge in the background carries the A train over Jamaica Bay from Subway Island (yes, that's what it's called!) to the Rockaways.
if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team.
On display outside the Engine 265/Ladder 121/Battalion 47/EMS 47 firehouse ("Best on the Beach"), this 1897 bell dates back to the old village of Arverne-by-the-Sea, which was once a happening beach resort before it was leveled by the city in the late 1960s and then resurrected, without the hyphens, as a new mixed-use development over the past several years.
That's gotta be rough on business at the liquor store.
