Sometime in 2011 or 2012, the northbound lanes on this block of 4th Avenue just south of Flatbush Avenue were eliminated and an expanded sidewalk took their place. Embedded in the sidewalk is a large stylized image of a red rose.

In trying to determine if the rose has any particular significance to this location, all I could come up with is the fact that the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Rose Cinemas is located nearby, one long block away. (The Peter Jay Sharp Building, which houses the Rose, is visible in the background of this photo, behind and to the left of the school bus.)

But that connection seems like a stretch. Perhaps a rose was selected because it's the state flower of New York. The only thing standing on the small triangular block where the rose is located is an old subway entrance kiosk (the Times Plaza Control House), and the subway is run by the MTA, a state agency.

Or maybe they just put a rose here because people like roses.

I'm sure you're now dying to know about other relevant official flowers. How could you not be? The national flower of the US (or the "National Floral Emblem", technically) is... the rose! The official flower of NYC is the daffodil. All of the boroughs except Manhattan have their own official flowers as well:

The Bronx: day lily (previously the monstrous corpse flower)
Brooklyn: forsythia
Queens: tulip and rose (as seen on its flag), representing the Netherlands and England, respectively, the two nations that controlled what is now NYC during the colonial era
Staten Island: pinxter azalea

Firefighter Scott M. Kopytko Triangle

I've now seen two of these trees today, after never having noticed one before in my life.

One Hundred Fifty Ninth Street

Bottle gourds and bitter melons, I believe. You can take a closer look here.

It's looking like this year is gonna be another sad one for NYC's figs. But not as bad as last year: the five or so ripe figs in this photo (zoom in) exceed the total I saw in all of 2014.

Here we see an old pole-mounted fire department call box (retrofitted with call buttons for both the fire department and the police) accompanied by two different types of lights indicating that a call box is nearby.

The older, presumably nonfunctioning, light is mounted on a scrolled bracket that would have once supported an old street lamp. The newer light is the orange-pink cylinder — the thing shaped like a can of tennis balls — on top of the modern street lamp.

(To ward off potential confusion for anyone who starts inspecting street lamps more closely, I should note that you can find on just about every street lamp a shorter cylindrical thing, often colored orange, that resembles a laundry detergent cap. These have nothing to do with call boxes; they're photocells that turn the lamps on and off depending on the amount of daylight. In fact, if you look closely at the newer call box light above — or the one pictured more clearly here — you'll see that it has an orange photocell perched right on top of it.)

The LIRR's Port Washington Branch passes by just beyond the wall.