where people are trying to use apparatus without supervision?
This is one of four handsome houses standing in a row on the grounds of old Fort Schuyler, where perhaps they were once officers' quarters. The fort and the surrounding property now serve as the campus of SUNY Maritime College, and the houses are currently used as faculty residences. There was originally a fifth house standing to the left of this one (compare a 1924 aerial photo to a 1996 photo), but it was knocked down to make way for the Throgs Neck Bridge.
This 60,000-pound propeller on display at SUNY Maritime College originally belonged to the SS United States, the fastest trans-Atlantic ocean liner ever built. According to the NY Times, it "was built for speed because it was meant to be a troop carrier if needed. The Pentagon paid two-thirds of its $78 million construction cost."
The ship has been out of service since 1969 and moored at a Delaware River pier in Philadelphia since 1996, but it looks like it may be moving back home to New York in the not-too-distant future to serve as "a hotel, museum, shopping and restaurant mall, entertainment complex, conference center, educational facility, or some combination of all options for reuse."
Fort Schuyler, at right, is a pentagonal stone fort built in the mid-19th century at the tip of the narrow Throg(g)s Neck peninsula in the Bronx, where the East River meets Long Island Sound. Along with Fort Totten across the water in Queens, Fort Schuyler was positioned to defend the entrance to the East River against enemy naval forces trying to reach New York Harbor. Check out this awesome aerial view, and this more pragmatic map, to get a sense of the area's geography.
The fort never saw any combat, but it was quite active during the Civil War, when troops were trained here and a hospital and prison opened on the grounds. By the 1910s, however, the fort was considered obsolete, and the Army finally decided to abandon it around 1931. After a lengthy reconstruction by the federal Works Progress Administration, the property was dedicated as the new home of the New York State Merchant Marine Academy (now SUNY Maritime College) in 1938, and it still serves as the school's campus today. In addition to the conventional college buildings found here (campus map), the fort itself has actually been converted into academic space. It contains a library and the expansive Maritime Industry Museum, as well as classrooms and offices — a pretty impressive reuse of an old 19th-century fortification!
Along with the Maritime Industry Museum and some classrooms and offices, this library is located inside old Fort Schuyler at SUNY Maritime College.
This former freighter has been SUNY Maritime College's training ship for the past quarter-century. In this photo, it's just two days away from departing on this year's three-month-long Summer Sea Term voyage to Baltimore, Philadelphia, the Canary Islands, Ireland, Denmark, and Portugal.
As part of the nation's Ready Reserve Force, the ship has also been called into duty on a few occasions during its time here at SUNY Maritime, once to bring American troops back from Somalia in 1994, and twice to provide housing for relief workers in hurricane-stricken areas (New Orleans after Katrina and New York after Sandy).
A plaque on the other side reads:
3" GUN USED BY ARMED
GUARD ON WORLD WAR II
MERCHANT SHIP
DEDICATED IN MEMORY OF THE
5,268 MERCHANT MARINERS
WHO MADE THE SUPREME SACRIFICE
IN WORLD WAR II
Passing beneath Battery Gansevoort, just outside the walls of Fort Schuyler
This ridiculously quaint path runs along the western edge of Silver Beach Gardens.
As you can see, the houses of Silver Beach Gardens sit on a bluff up above the beach. Facing this direction (southeast), you can see the Throgs Neck Bridge in the distance.
Here we are one last time in Edgewater Park, where there seem to be just as many little pedestrian alleys as there are roads. Some background on the neighborhood from the NY Times:
In 1923, when Richard W. Shaw Sr., the first of four generations of Shaw landlords, bought the property, only one house stood out: a great stone mansion that overlooked pastures, swamps and, of course, the water.
During the summer he permitted church groups, Boy Scouts and, later, workers from New York City to pitch tents or build rustic cottages on what became known as Edgewater Camp.
"As kids, we'd go see cows grazing and then go down to the farmhouses nearby and steal tomatoes and squash," said John McNamara, a 72-year-old Bronx historian and former Edgewater resident, who recalls lazy summers of courting schoolgirls in canoes and walking three miles to the nearest trolley into town.
"We lived in wooden-sided tents with canvas tops," he said. "We had no electricity, just kerosene stoves. It was a real pioneer community."
In the 1930's, the Great Depression forced many of the summer residents to sell their homes in the city. They winterized their Edgewater bungalows with newspapers, cardboard boxes and other crude insulation. A permanent community was born.
For all its scenic beauty, Edgewater is a planner's nightmare, with neither building codes nor zoning laws. Fire hydrants sprout in backyards, a reminder of how the early residents simply ignored the street grid the city had planned for them.
The result is a jumble of 675 single-family houses shoehorned into 55 acres of land, elbowing one another on 30-by-50-foot plots.
I was just out for a quick stroll when the little white sign in the flower bed here at the Fulton Houses in Chelsea caught my eye. It reads:
Daffodils
In memory of those who perished
at the World Trade Center
on September 11, 2001
A gift of the people of the Netherlands
for the people of New York
Vinca Minor - periwinkle
From the NY Times:
When it was built in 1833 Colonnade Row was the biggest thing in New York since the British occupation, a 200-foot-long sweep of glistening white marble in the form of a Corinthian colonnade, nine houses combined into one great Greek revival statement on what is now Lafayette Street, opposite the Public Theater.Read the rest here!
But five of the houses were destroyed early in the last century, and their graceful fluted columns and Corinthian capitals were carted away, vanished from the city with the dust of demolition. Vanished, that is, until a garden designer and a Benedictine monk solved the decades-old puzzle of a mysterious Lost City in the woods of a New Jersey monastery.
The rightmost house in Colonnade Row is currently home to the Astor Place Theatre, where, as you can see, the Blue Man Group performs. Here's an NY Times piece (with lots of photos) about a guy named Sturgis Warner who moved into a 700-square-foot apartment in the little brick addition built on top of that house back in 1978, when it was a mouse- and roach-infested wreck. He fixed up the place and designed and installed all sorts of clever space-saving devices to make the most of the room he had. In exchange for his work, the landlord only made him pay $250 per month in rent.
By the time the article was written in 2009, he was still only paying $500 per month! (I don't know much about paying rent in New York, but the place would go for several times that amount on the open market. Anyone have a better estimate?) The producers of the Blue Man Group had bought the building in 2001, however, and were looking to kick him out so they could take over the whole place as their own living quarters. I have no idea what's transpired since then, although there is still a whitepages.com listing for Mr. Warner at this address, for what it's worth.
It used to be a church, at least. What you can't quite see in this photo, but which is much clearer from the other side, is that the facade is the only part of the structure still standing. The rest, erected in 1870 by St. Ann's Roman Catholic parish (the church became St. Ann's Armenian Catholic Cathedral in 1983), was demolished in 2005 to make way for the 26-story NYU dorm standing behind it, the tallest building in the East Village. (Not long after the dorm was put up, the City Council approved a rezoning plan limiting building heights in the area to about 12 stories.)
This was actually an example of history repeating itself, to a degree. The extant facade dates to 1847, when the original church on the site was built by the 12th Street Baptist Church. (The building later became a synagogue, home to Congregation Emanu-El.) But in 1870, leaving the facade in place, St. Ann's tore down the rest of the structure and replaced the sanctuary with a new one, which was then in turn replaced by the dorm some 135 years later.
As you might imagine, many neighbors and preservation-minded people were upset with the destruction of the church's body and the subsequent construction of such a bland-looking behemoth in its place. I like the overall effect though, specifically the weirdness of there being a 19th-century stone church facade standing, for no apparent reason, in front of an insipid 21st-century apartment tower. The facade is now effectively a piece of public sculpture and something of an architectural folly (meaning "a whimsical or extravagant structure built to serve as a conversation piece, lend interest to a view, commemorate a person or event, etc."), which I think probably encourages more passersby to interact with it than ever did with the church when it was still intact.
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.
From the website:
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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.
Much less adorable! For what it's worth, a guy sitting on his stoop nearby told me the church started building and then ran out of money, and was left with this bunker-like structure. It looks even weirder from the other side.
