Located next to Barretto Point Park, this recreational pier is made of recycled plastic, and was apparently "the first all-plastic lumber civil structure of major significance". An important advantage of plastic is its imperviousness to the wood-eating shipworms and gribbles that have returned to New York as the city's waterways have once again become clean enough for them to survive. This pier replaced its deteriorated wooden predecessor in 1995, but it caught on fire and had to be rebuilt after it was struck by lightning several times during a storm the next year.

If you zoom in, you can make out the silhouette of a couple of the abandoned buildings on North Brother Island, the small treed island out past and to the right of the pier. Now a bird sanctuary, the island was formerly home to a quarantine hospital (where Typhoid Mary spent her last two decades), college dorms for veterans, and a drug rehab center, and was also where the burning General Slocum ran aground and sank in New York's worst pre-9/11 disaster. This page has some recent photos of the ruins on North Brother, which has been uninhabited (by humans) for the past 50 years.

Jails, pools — you can put anything on a barge in Hunts Point. This is the Floating Pool Lady, a 100,000-gallon portable swimmin' hole that has spent the past few summers anchored at Barretto Point Park. She has been known to head out of town during the colder months, but apparently she's weathering this winter right here in the Bronx.

An 800-bed jail barge moored just off of Hunts Point

I've always thought this was the perfect name for a generic grocery brand.

This is just one tiny section of the whole complex.

Spread out across 329 acres on the eastern side of the Bronx's Hunts Point peninsula is one of the largest (some say the largest) food distribution centers in the world, home to the city's main produce, meat, and fish markets, as well as several other wholesalers, processors, and distributors. The sign above hasn't been updated in a while: the Fulton Fish Market moved up here in 2005 from its original location at the end of Manhattan's Fulton Street, where it had been operating since 1831.

Here's a great peek inside the produce market by two brothers from South Carolina who, when they were new to the city and looking to make their Lower East Side apartment feel a little more homey, set out for Hunts Point in search of raw peanuts to boil.

Beverage container redemption

Part of the Transit Authority's Infrastructure Division, this Hunts Point facility fabricates structural steel for the subway, and its entrance is marked with an old subway station signpost. Standing in the parking lot on the other side of that friendly-looking fence is a tiny, isolated stretch of elevated subway track, presumably used for training, with a couple of Redbirds perched atop it.

In an effort to preserve the early 20th-century suburban character of this community, the Broadway-Flushing Homeowners' Association has been pushing — thus far unsuccessfully — to have the neighborhood declared a historic district by the city.

Things have warmed up at Bowne Park since last week.