at Baron Hirsch Cemetery

The 121st Precinct station house as seen from Hillside Cemetery

at Hillside Cemetery

across the street from Graniteville Quarry Park

They put up this sign after the infamous "roving emu gangs" incident of 1987.

I found this collection sitting outside of Certified Gasoline. I like to imagine that if one of the gas stations they supply falls behind on its payments, they send out a guy named Tony to "take care" of its signs.

This is only the second ripe fig I've found this year! If this were one of the previous two years, I'd have eaten a million of them by now, but this year's crop is pretty puny. It seems that the harshness of the preceding winter is to blame. A few months ago, lots of people were fretting that their trees had died, but I think in many cases the trees simply didn't start producing leaves and figs until much later in the year than normal. I'm seeing a good number of figs growing at this point; it's just that most of them are not even close to ripe, and I can't imagine they're going to get there before the weather turns cold again.

That heap of metal is what's left of a passenger waiting shelter at the old Elm Park station on the abandoned North Shore rail line. The shelter looked considerably more shelter-like not long ago, although it was mostly hidden by foliage when we looked down on the station from the other direction back in July of 2013. As you can see, the parts of the platforms that were visible then have since been removed, and the area where they stood, beyond the chain-link fence, has been cleared, perhaps for use in the big construction project happening on the Bayonne Bridge (that's the approach to the bridge rising in the background).

As you can see, work has begun on a multi-year project to build a new roadway through the arch of the Bayonne Bridge, 64 feet above the current one. When the higher roadway is in place and the lower one removed, the bridge will no longer be a navigational obstacle to the jumbo-size container ships that are expected to proliferate once the expansion of the Panama Canal is completed in 2016 or so. (One statistic that puts the importance of this project in perspective: some 12 percent of all international shipping containers in the US pass beneath the Bayonne Bridge on their way to Newark Bay.) The Port Authority has a plan to keep the bridge mostly open to vehicle (though not pedestrian) traffic during construction.

The inscription on the pedestal of this Celtic cross outside the Church of St. Teresa reads:

IN LOVING MEMORY OF
OUR PARISHIONERS
WHO DIED
ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
AT THE
WORLD TRADE CENTER

"I Will Not
Forget You! See,
I Have Engraved You
On The Palms Of
My Hands."
ISAIAH 49: 15-16

Looks like just about every schmuck running for office in Staten Island is represented here.