These houses on the south side of East 140th Street were built in 1889 and are part of the Mott Haven East Historic District. From the Landmarks Preservation Commission's designation report for the district:

Though common in Manhattan and Brooklyn, rowhouses from the nineteenth century are relatively rare in the Bronx.

Within the area of the district are three groups of single-family rowhouses . . . and two groups of tenements. Erected between 1889 and 1903, these buildings serve as a virtual catalogue of speculatively-built housing types common to the South Bronx building boom of the 1880s and '90s.

You can hardly see it in this photo, but there's an actual kitty cat snuggled up behind the Pikachu in front of the door.

Captain Charles A. Mastandrea of the FDNY was awarded the Columbia Association Medal for his valor in rescuing a man from the third floor of this burning building in 2010.

Civilian auto manufacturing in the US was halted during World War II as the nation's automakers devoted themselves to building vehicles and weapons for the military. When civilian production resumed in 1945, Chrysler "did what most Detroit manufacturers did right after the war: It simply reissued its [1942 models] with mild face-lifts", and then it continued building those same models largely without change until early 1949.

A 2005 NY Times article about the explosion of a hot-water tank at this laundry plant said that the workers here "wash roughly 30,000 pounds of linens and uniforms for several Manhattan hotels every day".

(It's an El Camino.)

A while back, I posted a photo of the Siamese sprinkler connection at left, focusing on the improvised metal cage attached to it: "It's not one of the more vicious anti-butt devices I've seen, but at least it's trying harder than this one."

It somehow didn't occur to me at the time that this connection is located way too high on the wall for any reasonably sized person to sit on without leaping. Does this mean the little cage has some other purpose that's beyond my imagination, or is it just the result of a paranoid property owner's overzealous crusade against loiterers? For what it's worth, I saw several other anti-sitting fixtures on sprinkler/standpipe connections today; most were at comfortable lounging heights, but one other was also located up above butt level.

A simple, elegant solution to the problem of people sitting on your building's sprinkler/standpipe connections

It's Guiomar from the Manolo Valdés: Monumental Sculpture exhibition we saw at the New York Botanical Garden.

to make a hot dog.

On a somewhat related note, the Wikipedia article on hot dogs once began with one of the world's greatest sentences: "A hot dog (also known as a frankfurter, frank, wiener, or weenie) is a moist sausage of soft, even texture and flavor, often made from advanced meat recovery or meat slurry."

This is one of the two hot dog factories, both in the Bronx, operated by Marathon Enterprises, the company that makes New York's ubiquitous Sabrett hot dogs, as well as (at least as of 2005) the essentially identical ones served at Katz's Deli, Gray's Papaya, and Papaya King. At one point, Marathon was even the manufacturer of Nathan's Famous.

at St. Luke's Park (Street View)

Painted on the side of the Engine 83/Ladder 29 firehouse (the former home of Kerry the Fire-Engine Dog). Here's an unobstructed view of the mural.