at the Tower Buildings

Zoom in to check out the mermaids and (what I'm guessing were once identifiable as) seashells floating between the corbels at the top of the first-floor facade.

This building is known locally for the OBAMA❤ mural painted on its upper stories.

Now home to Friends of Firefighters, this building was an active firehouse from 1872 to 1960.

(That's the R of E.J. TRUM in the background.)

This World War I memorial was dedicated in 1921 in nearby Coffey Park. It was moved here, outside VFW Post 5195, around 1972 after having been vandalized in the park on multiple occasions. One such incident occurred in 1948, when the doughboy "was torn down by a gang of about 40 young toughs . . . [who] shoved at the statue until it broke off just above the ankles and toppled face down to the ground".

The doughboy was sculpted by Augustus Lukeman, who was later hired to carve what would become the country's largest Confederate monument on the side of Stone Mountain, the Georgia landmark where the modern Ku Klux Klan was born. (Lukeman took over at Stone Mountain after the departure of Gutzon Borglum, who would go on to carve Mount Rushmore.)

Built 1899-1900

UPDATE: The church is apparently for sale. Check out the online listing for photos of the interior.

This piece was installed in 2006 (photos) by the artist and self-described "fat dyke" Max Airborne, a fat activist and disability justice activist.

May we learn to love ourselves, and may we show each other how. May we be free.

I took this photo outside Dell’s Maraschino Cherries in Red Hook. Dell's was in the news a few years ago when a couple of local beekeepers discovered that their bees' honey, not to mention their bees' stomachs, had turned "an alarming shade of Robitussin" — if you can even use the word "honey" to describe "a red concoction that tasted metallic and then overly sweet". Meanwhile, unusually large numbers of bees had been seen buzzing around the cherry factory...

Dell's made headlines again more recently, in a much more tragic fashion, when the head of the company shot and killed himself after a team of investigators, visiting the factory on an unrelated matter, began to suspect he was secretly growing marijuana here. As it turns out, he was, big time. His basement farm was "the largest indoor marijuana growing operation any of the investigators had ever seen in New York City".

Tin Cans, Galvanized Iron and Terne Plate Drums for Export and Domestic Trade

Founded in 1903, Le Comte & Company manufactured "a specialty general line of metal cans and metal waste baskets". The company apparently managed to stay in business until 1993, though it had long since left Red Hook at that point.

This building is part of a late-19th-century industrial complex that was in pretty rough shape when it was bought in 1998 by its current owner, a man named... Rhett Butler. Mr. Butler, who moved with his wife into the top floor of the building above, spent years restoring the complex to house production studios for the "meticulously crafted, often jewel-like hinges, locks, levers, escutcheons, pulls and the like" that have made his business, E.R. Butler & Company, "one of the most prestigious hardware companies in the world". He also built an impressive-looking walled garden on the property and installed a rooftop hot tub (which I believe you can see here).

There's not much in the way of greenery at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal — just three perfunctory little planted areas surrounded by acres of pavement. But growing in these tiny patches of dirt are some tomatoes and what look like acorn squash (as well as lots of purslane and lamb's quarters).

When it was completed in 2003, the Queen Mary 2 was the world's largest passenger ship. It has since been surpassed in size by a number of other cruise ships, but it's still the largest ocean liner ever built. (Unlike the QM2, a normal cruise ship is not designed to make transoceanic voyages.)

The QM2 is so tall that it had to be built with a shorter-than-usual funnel so it would be able to pass beneath the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and enter New York Harbor. It's still a tight fit (video); at high tide, the ship has only 13 feet of clearance beneath the Verrazano.

From atop the shipping container tower at Pioneer Works, we can see the Queen Mary 2, in port at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, and the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan.