The large face in the background is part of JR's Inside Out project.

This "full-scale university of work" run by the federal Department of Labor is housed in the old Messiah Home for Children. This photo gives you a good sense of how large and elaborate the building is.

This little stone structure was built around 1890 to serve as a gatehouse on the New Croton Aqueduct, providing access to the water supply system below.

This street makes a rather conspicuous cut through an otherwise elevated, stone-encased stretch of the now-defunct Old Croton Aqueduct (the southern portion of the severed aqueduct embankment is visible above). As you might suspect, Burnside Avenue did not exist at this location when the aqueduct opened in 1842. For 50+ years, the water traveled through a pipe inside a continuous man-made ridge here, with no roadway interrupting its progress.

Sometime around 1897, Burnside was extended westward through the path of the aqueduct, and a bridge was constructed over the street, carrying a conduit that allowed the water to continue south on its elevated course while vehicular and pedestrian traffic passed beneath it through a set of stone arches. A few decades later, Burnside was widened, and the bridge was replaced with an inverted siphon that routed the aqueduct below the roadway, creating the bluffs-on-a-river appearance that has existed here ever since.

In researching this crossing, I found an old photo that sheds some light on the history of a very small and very strange-looking vacant building that stands at the northeast corner of Burnside and University, adjacent to the aqueduct, and just to my right in the photo above. I didn't get a good shot of it, but between my lousy picture and this bird's-eye view, you can get a decent idea of what the place looks like. I'm not sure if this structure originally had some function related to the aqueduct, but, thanks to this photo from the NYPL's historical image archives, I do know that it served as a Tydol gas station during the 1930s. (You can also just make out a "GAS" sign on the building in this image from the 1920s.)

This humble pedestrian path runs along the top of a bygone engineering masterpiece, the lifeline that supplied desperately needed fresh water to a growing 19th-century New York City: the Old Croton Aqueduct.

This truck-like artwork is built into the wall of the Engine Company 75 firehouse. A plaque on the building reads:

Mierle Laderman Ukeles
HONOR, 2000

A fire truck that carries...

Two Carved Hands:
Two hands replace the logo on the fire truck. One is the hand of a three year old girl and the other is the hand of her father. They live in this neighborhood. Their lives were saved by Bronx firefighters.

The Memorial:
The areas of the engraved glass blocks replace five storage compartments on the fire truck. They house the treasured memory of each firefighter who gave his life in the line of duty in the Bronx since the beginning of the last century.

of Tony Baez

Just inside the locked gates of the Jardin de las Rosas community garden

Florally festive in the spring, Our Lady of Guadalupe apparently prefers a much simpler, nocturnally illuminated look for the cold months of winter.

I've passed by this intersection more than a dozen times in my life, but never before have I noticed this odd little monument sitting outside the Bronx County Courthouse. The plaque reads:

Keystone from an arch of the old bridge at Chateau Thierry
Gloriously and successfully defended by American troops
***
Presented to the County of the Bronx by the Grand Street Boys Post No. 1026 of the American Legion
Nov. 11, 1940