Louis Neglia
P.S. Check out the ridiculous mansion across the street to the right.
Gravesend was founded in 1645 (not 1643) by Lady Deborah Moody, an Englishwoman. According to the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission:
The Gravesend town charter was the first in the New World to list a woman patentee, and one of the first to expressly allow freedom of religious beliefs for its inhabitants. . . . It was also the first land document in the New York area to be written in the English language, as the surrounding areas were primarily settled by the Dutch.The original layout of the Gravesend town center, a 16-acre square bisected by two perpendicular roads (map), has survived to this day as a little two-by-two square turned at an angle to the street grid that has emerged around it (map). We're just passing by one corner of that square today; we'll be back another time to walk the streets of the old village and see what's there.
(At the bottom left corner of the monument above, an inscription reads: "OCT. 4, 1987 — GRAVESEND TIME CAPSULE CONTAINING THE HISTORY OF THE GRAVESEND COMMUNITY IS LOCATED 270° AND 27 FT. DUE WEST OF THIS MEMORIAL".)
This parklet memorializes Antonio Meucci, a telephone pioneer. On a previous visit, we took a look at the monument to Meucci standing in the background of this shot, which proclaims him the "father of the telephone".
This peninsula jutting out into Gravesend Bay was constructed from landfill sometime in the latter half of the 20th century (aerial photos: 1951, 1996). I don't know what it was originally used for, but in recent years it served as a school bus parking lot. The edges of the peninsula were once higher and dropped off sharply toward the water, as I discovered in 2009 when I visited with some friends; at the tip of the peninsula (about where I was standing when I took the photo above), someone had secured a long rope to the top of the slope to aid in climbing down to the rocky beach at the base. Starting in December 2012, the site was redeveloped for retail use, and a giant BJ's Wholesale Club just opened here in mid-September. The construction of a public walkway along the shore (pictured above) was required by the city's waterfront zoning regulations.
The city's decision to build a new marine transfer station here on Gravesend Bay, part of an effort to "distribute garbage disposal across the city more equitably", has angered many in the community. No surprise there. Everyone wants to continue producing ridiculous amounts of waste, but no one wants the disposal of that waste to affect them in any way. But the new twist here is that, in addition to the standard NIMBY concerns about such a project — truck traffic, air quality, odor, noise — the transfer station's opponents have come up with a novel argument: that some unexploded anti-aircraft shells that fell overboard in 1954 may be lurking on the floor of the bay and could be accidentally detonated by the dredging that will occur during construction. (Starting at the bottom of this page, the Department of Sanitation explains why this is not a significant issue.)
But really, I'm all for nixing the transfer station. Since nobody wants to live near such a place, I say we should just shut down all the waste handling facilities in the city and let people wallow in their own filth until they find a way to produce less of it.
If you look closely, you'll notice a wine-colored bra fastened to the front of this garbage truck. Is this an indication that a female sanitation worker operates the vehicle? Or is it just a new take on the old chicks-dig-stuffed-animals approach to truck decoration?
From an excellent NY Times article about the "grille-mounted cuddle object[s]" often found on the front of big trucks:
Robert Marbury, an artist who photographed dozens of Manhattan bumper fauna for a project in 2000 . . . said he had once asked a trash hauler why he had a family of three mismatched bears strapped to his rig.
''He said: 'Yo, man, I drive a garbage truck. How am I going to get the ladies to look at me?' ''
I saw a number of blue ribbons in the area today, but I couldn't figure out what they meant — until I passed by what turned out to be the house of Wenjian Liu, one of the two police officers (the other was Rafael Ramos) gunned down in their patrol car in Bed-Stuy on December 20. After seeing a little memorial sign in front of the house, I realized that the ribbons had been put up by neighbors as a tribute to the murdered officers.
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.
