From the NY Times, Feb. 3, 2012:

When the Brooklyn House of Detention reopens next week after being closed since 2003, it may be the only city jail in America located down the block from a Barneys Co-op and a Trader Joe’s.

The building, a 1950s gray behemoth with screens covering its metal-framed windows, looms incongruously over one full block of Atlantic Avenue and rejoins a greatly changed neighborhood.

During the jail’s vacant period, six high-rise apartment buildings were constructed nearby. One boutique hotel now sits directly across from it on Smith Street, and 14 sleek, six-year-old, modern town houses sit next to handsome brownstones, just steps from an entryway covered in barbed wire where prisoners are unloaded when they arrive.

Some nearby residents in the Boerum Hill neighborhood expressed concerns about safety, while others, in typical New York fashion, worried about parking.

On the occasion of the jail's reopening in 2012, the blog McBrooklyn published a list of "notorious escapes" by the facility's inmates over the years, including these two:

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1) From Time magazine, June 16, 1980:

The short, beefy man strolled into the Brooklyn House of Detention, signed the visitors' log—"Michael Schwartz" —and asked to see his client. While the lawyer waited in a glass-enclosed meeting room on the first floor, a guard went to escort the prisoner down from his maximum-security cell on the tenth floor. The prisoner, clad in a jumpsuit and in need of a shave, greeted Schwartz, and the two began conferring in private. During their talk, the guards changed shifts; shortly thereafter, the new guards watched a clean-shaven man in a gray tweed suit sign out—"Michael Schwartz"—and stroll out of the prison and into thin air.

The man in the gray suit was not Michael Schwartz but the jumpsuited prisoner, Howard ("Buddy") Jacobson, 49, successful horse trainer, real estate entrepreneur and convicted murderer. The man he left behind turned out not to be Michael Schwartz either, but Anthony DeRosa, 47, onetime bartender and a longtime pal of Jacobson's. When DeRosa himself tried to leave the prison, a guard asked him where his "client" had gone. Only then did prison officials belatedly sound the alert.

(Jacobson was rearrested about six weeks later in the Los Angeles suburb of Manhattan Beach while talking on a payphone at a restaurant where he had ordered "the house specialty, fried zucchini with Parmesan cheese".)

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2) From the NY Times, July 10, 1991:

A murder suspect escaped from a maximum-security cell in a Brooklyn jail after making a dummy of wadded-up clothes and leaving it under the tattered woolen blanket on his cot, prison officials said yesterday.

It was the second time that the 26-year-old inmate, Edward (Donny) White, had escaped from custody. The last time he did, he killed a man during a robbery, the police said.

The officials had no explanation for how he had escaped from his windowless fifth-floor cell at the Brooklyn House of Detention, 275 Atlantic Avenue in the Boerum Hill section. Thomas Antenen, a spokesman for the Department of Correction, said the lock on the cell door had not been jimmied and the bars had not been bent or broken. Correction officers speculated that he might have slipped into a garbage cart while he was outside the cell around dinnertime.

Mr. White's first escape, in July 1989, came when he hurled a typewriter at a detective at the 67th Precinct station house in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn while being questioned about another murder. He got away by jumping through a second-floor window and shinnying down a flagpole.

A follow-up story ran in the Times on August 31, 1991, under the headline "Escaped Killer Seized in Brooklyn, by Chance":

When police officers investigating the slaying of a bartender at a Second Avenue pub late Thursday knocked on the door of a Brooklyn apartment yesterday, the man in the bathrobe who answered turned out to be an escaped murderer who was one of the city's most wanted fugitives.

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I also learned from McBrooklyn about a riot at the jail in 1970, one of four jailhouse riots in the city that began over a span of three days that October. The inmates, calling for "swifter trials, lower bail and more humane treatment", took a total of 26 guards and other employees hostage citywide, including 3 here in Brooklyn. Despite the lawlessness of their protests, their demands were met with support from some elected officials. Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr., standing outside the jail in Long Island City where the riots began, told reporters, "Those cats upstairs are doing the right thing", and yelled up to the inmates, "Don't give up one inch. Keep up this fight!"

The Brooklyn riot lasted only 12 hours before the jail was retaken by force, but the melee caused what one prison official estimated to be $2 million in damage. Nonetheless, the acting warden at the overcrowded facility, which held 1,591 men in a building designed for 960, sympathized with the inmates, saying that "he did not blame the prisoners for harboring grievances. 'They didn't have anything against the prison itself or the guards,' he said. 'They don't like the court system. It takes too long. And I agree with them.' "

Good thing that's all fixed today!

"The Society of Friends is well known for a dislike of ostentation and their buildings have traditionally portrayed that view with sound construction and unadorned facades. The Friends Meeting House at 110 Schermerhorn Street" — built in 1857 — "beautifully reflects the restrained character of Quaker architecture, and symbolizes the active presence of the Society in Brooklyn."

This is the entrance to the New York Transit Museum, which is located in the former Court Street subway station on the Fulton Street Line.

Here's a photo from that day in 1931. Borough President/Honorary Stonemason Henry Hesterberg is the one holding the trowel.

This building is generally referred to as the Central Courts Building, despite the fact that it clearly calls itself the Central Court Building. You can see a couple of photos of its construction here.

At left, you can see a little piece of Love Letter to Brooklyn.

Gufa Shiv Bhagat and Arya Samaj

Venture House operates on the Clubhouse Model, providing adults with mental illness the opportunity "to live and work successfully in the community, independently and with dignity."

This building was for many years a Walter B. Cooke funeral home. With numerous locations throughout the city and in Westchester County, Cooke proclaimed itself "New York's largest funeral director" in a 1947 ad and said that it handled "one out of every ten funerals in New York City". I found newspaper mentions of a Cooke funeral home at this address (150-10 Hillside Avenue) as far back as 1935, and the company held the lease on the building through the end of 1995. A photo taken sometime between 1983 and 1988 shows the place in its funeral attire (i.e., with a sign and canopy bearing the Cooke name).

The long white trumpets and spiny seed pods lining this walkway belong to datura plants, which contain notoriously potent, and highly toxic, deliriants. The internet offers no shortage of nightmarish stories from people who've tried using datura as a recreational drug.

One species of datura, Datura stramonium, is often called jimson weed, "jimson" being a contraction of "Jamestown", as in Jamestown, Virginia. There's no consensus on the geographic origin of jimson weed, but the plant had reportedly made its way to Jamestown by 1677, when a number of British troops sent to quell Bacon's Rebellion decided to boil up some foraged jimson leaves for a nice salad. An account of their experiences was published in 1705 in Robert Beverley's The History and Present State of Virginia:

The James-Town Weed (which resembles the Thorny Apple of Peru, and I take to be the Plant so call'd) is supposed to be one of the greatest Coolers in the World. This being an early Plant, was gather'd very young for a boil'd Salad, by some of the Soldiers sent thither, to pacific the Troubles of Bacon; and some of them eat plentifully of it, the Effect of which was a very pleasant Comedy; for they turn'd natural Fools upon it for several Days: One would blow up a Feather in the Air; another wou'd dart Straws at it with much Fury; and another stark naked was sitting up in a Corner, like a Monkey, grinning and making Mows at them; a Fourth would fondly kiss, and paw his Companions, and snear in their Faces, with a Countenance more antick, than any in a Dutch Droll. In this frantick Condition they were confined, lest they should in their Folly destroy themselves; though it was observed, that all their Actions were full of Innocence and good Nature. Indeed, they were not very cleanly; for they would have wallow'd in their own Excrements, if they had not been prevented. A Thousand such simple Tricks they play'd, and after Eleven Days, return'd to themselves again, not remembring any thing that had pass'd.

In other news, a jimson weed flower is the subject of what is by far the most expensive painting by a woman ever sold at auction: Georgia O'Keeffe's Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, which was purchased for $44.4 million in November 2014, shattering the previous record of $11.9 million.

This subway power substation at 144th Place and Jamaica Avenue was built around 1966-67 to "[provide] additional capacity to meet higher power demands of the new high acceleration type cars on the Broadway-Jamaica Line". The easternmost portion of that elevated line, which once stood adjacent to the substation on Jamaica Avenue, was closed in 1977 and has since been demolished, along with the rest of the line east of about 127th Street. The Wikipedia page on the Broadway-Jamaica Line (a.k.a. the Jamaica Line) claims that the substation is now used for the nearby underground Archer Avenue extension of the Jamaica and Queens Boulevard Lines that opened in 1988.

Completed in 1927 (1931 photo), this was originally St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church. An online history of the congregation claims that St. Demetrios was the first Greek Orthodox church on Long Island and the first church in all of NYC built by a Greek Orthodox congregation (earlier churches used by other Greek Orthodox congregations were formerly houses of worship of other denominations/faiths).

In 1967, having built a new, larger church about a mile away, St. Demetrios sold its old home to St. Andrew's Ukrainian Orthodox Church. St. Andrew's seems to have been defunct for some time now, however, and the building was recently purchased by St. Andrei Romanian Orthodox Church. A court document attached to the deed of sale (pages 9-10) states that "the property is in distress and . . . there is no operating parish to secure and safeguard the property . . . St. Andrei Romanian Orthodox Church . . . will secure and safeguard the premises and avoid the property from going into further distress."

UPDATE (June 2017): With necessary repairs having been made, the church reopened on November 28, 2015. As seen here, the place is looking pretty good these days, although the congregation is still trying to raise money for additional restoration projects. (Despite its Romanian-ness, St. Andrei appears to belong to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA, as did St. Andrew's before it.)

This regal structure, located at the headwaters of Queens Boulevard, announces in stone and tile its given name: Queen's House. Searching newspaper archives (particularly Tom Tryniski's "weird, wonderful website") for the building's address — 138-21 Jamaica Avenue — led to three discoveries:

1) According to a series of help-wanted ads from the early and mid-1940s, the building was once home to Goosen's Confectionery, a candy and ice cream shop with a luncheonette and soda fountain.

2) Frederick H. Goosen, the proprietor of Goosen's, was arrested and convicted on gaming charges in 1933 for running a "candy lottery" at the store.

3) Thanks to an OCR error, I was led to a page from 1939 that contains no mention of the building's address. What I did find on that page is a brief item about the return of a pet cat who had been missing for almost three years. The cat's name? Lucifer Thomas Katz. "Mrs. Duckworth heard a loud clamor on the back porch and opened the door to find Lucifer."

The Imam Al-Khoei Benevolent Foundation, "one of the largest Shiite Muslim charitable and educational associations in the world", was founded in 1989 by Grand Ayatollah Abul Qasim al-Khoei, "the highest-ranking cleric in Iraq" prior to his death in 1992.

The Islamic center pictured above is the New York branch of the foundation and is home to "New York City's main Shiite Muslim mosque". The center is located in the former I.D. Watch Case Company factory, which has stood here since 1944. You can see an old photo of the factory here.

On January 1, 2012, with dozens of worshipers inside, the center was hit by the "Frappuccino Firebomber", a man with an odd array of grudges who sought vengeance that evening by tossing Molotov cocktails — most of them made with Starbucks Frappuccino bottles — at a series of five unrelated targets. Fortunately, no one was injured in any of the attacks. When questioned by the police, the man expressed a general hatred of Muslims, but also gave a more personal reason for singling out the Al-Khoei center: He had once tried to use the center's bathroom and was turned away. (Another one of his targets was a deli he had visited a few days before. He was angry at the way the owner had kicked him out after he was caught shoplifting milk and... a Starbucks Frappuccino.)

Two police officers who drove by as I was snapping this photo stopped to question me, suspicious that I might be planning to do some kind of harm to the Al-Khoei center. I explained to them that I'm walking all the streets of the city and that I take lots of pictures.

"What do you take pictures of? Mostly mosques?" one of them asked me, still somewhat wary.

"No, all kinds of things. Here, I'll show you." Sensing an opportunity to bore their suspicion into oblivion, I began enthusiastically flipping through my recent photos on my phone. "Here's a sign that got swallowed up by a tree. Check out this old Indian Head penny I found on the ground. It's from 1906! Here's a funny homemade dog poop sign. This sign with a Bible verse was just stuck up above the door of this building. This is Fresh Kutz, K-U-T-Z. I take a photo of every barbershop I see with a Z in its name in place of an S. Look at the birds painted on this SUV!"

It was around this point that the officers' eyes began to glaze over. They were basically stuck watching the world's most tedious vacation slideshow. Realizing that I wasn't going to run out of photos anytime soon, they suddenly became very eager to wrap up the conversation and get on their way. They offered up some hasty goodbyes and promptly sped off, hoping to hell they could get out of earshot before I had time to pull up all my churchagogue and mailbox photos.