Crub a Dog [I'm pretty sure that's what it says]
Poop Scoop
This store has been declared a city landmark since our last visit. Here's the full landmark report.
I have no idea what this place is/was, but it's looked the same since at least 2007.
"THOMPKINS" and "1989" are written in the sidewalk outside this building, the letters and numbers formed from stones embedded in the concrete. It turns out that the owner of this property from 1978 to 2013 was named Thompkins.
A lingering sign from the days when Gaines Motors occupied this building
Incongruously sited amid the enormous old homes of South Midwood in Victorian Flatbush, this is the first Tenseishinbikai temple built in the United States. Tenseishinbikai is a Japanese "super-religion" whose teachings "specify precise and detailed means, methods, plans and designs to actualize Paradise on Earth. These teachings transcend and encompass all other religions . . . and are worthy of belief by the whole of humanity." You can read much more about Tenseishinbikai on its website — actually, you don't have to read at all, because after starting out with a performance of the "Organization Song", the site will speak aloud to you the full text of each page before automatically advancing to the next one.
Mokichi Okada was the founder of Tenseishinbikai and the developer of Johrei, which the Tenseishinbikai website describes as "the rational and advanced science of the future. Johrei is the method of radiating rays of spiritual light, the light of the fire element, towards the clouds in the spiritual body which are the very cause of disease and other sufferings. . . . Johrei is the sole method for saving people from the great purification action that will engulf the world."
Here's a photo from 1928, the year after this bank opened.
One of the metropolitan area's five "Wonder Theatres" opened by Loew's in 1929-30, the Kings went out of business in 1977 and had been deteriorating for years (interior, exterior) before its recent renovation. It had its grand reopening a few months after I walked by.
Check out these spectacular shots of the restored interior, and scroll down a bit in this NY Times article to view a set of gorgeous 360-degree panoramas, one from each of the five Wonder Theatres.
Like the former Ward bakery in the Bronx, this building has been converted into a self-storage facility.
As we learned when we passed by the Snyder Avenue side of this bakery complex a while back, Ebinger's was a Brooklyn institution most famous for its beloved blackout cake, but also had a long history of racial and religious discrimination.
Tucked behind a rose bush at the back of Building 3S on the campus of the College of Staten Island, beneath a faded number 19 painted inside a circle, is a plaque that reads: "To Honor Those Who Struggled Here on the Grounds of the Willowbrook Institution We Preserve This Former Building Number In Their Respectful Remembrance".
The Willowbrook State School was the country's largest state-run institution for the mentally disabled. By the 1960s, it had over 6,000 residents, 2,000 more than it was designed to accommodate. Underfunded and understaffed, it "offered a mean, often desperate existence" to the people who lived there. After a visit in 1965, Bobby Kennedy described the place as "border[ing] on a snake pit".
But it wasn't until 1972 that the wretched conditions at Willowbrook were brought into the national spotlight, when a TV reporter named Geraldo Rivera snuck into one of the wards with a handheld camera and documented the awful scene: "children lying naked on the floor, their bodies contorted, their feces spread on walls".
This prompted a lawsuit that led to the eventual closing of the institution in 1987. Many of the buildings were taken over and renovated by the College of Staten Island, which opened a new campus — the largest college campus in the city — on the site in 1993.
This one is located at the Institute for Basic Research in Developmental Disabilities, which was built on land that formerly belonged to the Willowbrook State School.
The Staten Island Developmental Disabilities Service Office, like the College of Staten Island, has taken over some of the old Willowbrook State School buildings. This building is home to Lifestyles for the Disabled, hence all the pumpkins from the Lifestyles Woodshop.
For some reason, there is an International Year of Older Persons time capsule on the grounds of the College of Staten Island.
This memorial includes two steel beams from the twin towers and a stone monument listing the 27 alumni of the College of Staten Island who died on 9/11.
This is the College of Staten Island's central plant. It originally served the same role for the Willowbrook State School; the brick tower now bearing the college's initials (as well as a bunch of cell antennas) was the smokestack.
Heavy on the Caribbean, but still a pretty worldly collection! From what I can see, we have Antigua and Barbuda, the Dominican Republic, Albania, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, St. Lucia, Grenada, Guyana, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Australia, Uruguay, the United States, Thailand, Egypt, Slovenia, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Ghana.
(Spotted in Crown Heights on my way to the subway this morning.)
Jews are biblically prohibited from wearing garments that contain shatnez, which means a mixture of linen and wool. Clothing labels can be imprecise or untrustworthy, so many observant Jews will have their garments inspected by an expert with a microscope to ensure that they are acceptable to wear.
It sounds like this banquet hall, the former Aperion Manor, is going to be torn down to make way for a new 10-story hotel/synagogue building.
TUITION CRISIS refers to the high cost of a private Jewish education.
DOV HIKIND is a state assemblyman who was baffled that people were offended when he wore blackface on Purim to complement his "black basketball player" costume.
Catering to Orthodox Jews, this kitchen accessories store has its own mikveh (ritual bath), which is used for toveling (the consecration, by immersion in a mikveh, of dishes and utensils that were manufactured by or acquired from non-Jews).
This is one of many enormous houses (satellite view; Street View) in a section of Gravesend populated by some of the wealthiest members of Brooklyn's extremely insular Syrian Jewish community.
I was surprised to learn that Eddie Antar is a longtime resident of this community (not counting the years he spent in federal prison). Mr. Antar was the head of the Crazy Eddie retail electronics empire of the 1970s and '80s that was famous for its over-the-top TV commercials ("His prices are insane!"). Once a seemingly thriving business, Crazy Eddie collapsed in the late 1980s following years of tax fraud and securities fraud perpetrated by its psychopathic management. In the words of Sam Antar, the company's CFO and Eddie's first cousin:
The first fraud was designed to evade taxes before we went public, by understating our profit. And after we went public, we did the opposite—we overstated our income to inflate the stock price and sell stock based on that inflated price. We committed our crimes at Crazy Eddie for fun and profit and simply because we could. We had no empathy whatsoever for our victims. During my 16 years at Crazy Eddie and two years spent covering up our crimes after being terminated from the company, I never had a single conversation with any of my co-conspirators about morality or the suffering of our victims. Our conversations focused solely on the successful coldblooded execution of our crimes.
This field house and the adjacent athletic field, now owned by the Parks Department, were acquired from Brooklyn Friends School, a Quaker school, in 1973.
According to the Parks Department:
The focal point of the playground is the Rivka Greenberg Trencher Swing Area, named for Rivka Greenberg Trencher, who was instrumental in the reinstallation of the swings.
This Midwood residence is surrounded with nautical paraphernalia, including bollards (such as the one above), cleats (background at left in front of the door), a lantern (background at right), an anchor, a red thing I can't identify, and another red thing I can't identify.
UPDATE: This statue stands in the yard of an Uzbek immigrant who sculpted its pedestal by hand with the help of a Turkish neighbor.
