Entries tagged with “Brooklyn” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York

If you've been digging Alex's downtown then-and-now photos, check out these archival images from Harlem -- paired with what's (not) there now. [Harlem Bespoke]

Parks Department calls for volunteers on Saturday to clean up and help preserve the old New York State Pavilion in Queens. Meanwhile, Queens Crap readers raise their eyebrows. [HDC Newsstand; Queens Crap]

Or you can spend the weekend on one or more Brooklyn gallery tours. [Bed-Stuy Blog]

Brooklyn bonus from Brooks! "FYI, there is still room for a few more on the Nov. 29, Thanksgiving weekend walking tour of Carroll Gardens West/Columbia Heights Waterfront District. Please let me know if you'd like to join us." [Lost New York]

Or you can get ready for Thanksgiving by giving thanks with "Native American Circle" on the Harlem River. [Bronx Mama]

And plan ahead for a post-Thanksgiving tour of historic Richmond Town with the Staten Island Historical Society [NYC Arts]

Photo of the old Corn Exchange Building from Harlem Bespoke: "This was the section that was largely visible from the Metro North platform for the last 100 years until the city demolished it in the past six weeks."

Bloomie's $100 million land grab at Coney Island [Brooklyn Paper]

I'm not even in town and I can do my Friday outside-the-neighborhood blog update:

The following things are happening somewhere other than Manhattan below 14th street:



Forget bedbugs ... Queens Crap's readers debate the great ladybug invasion of 2009! [QC]

Miss Heather's Greenpoint-based New York Shitty wins the VOICE's "best of NYC" award for neighborhood blogs [VV]

Roosevelt Islanders want the Google Trike to come before it's too late! [RI]

Boogie Downer reminds readers that Saturday is It's My Park! Day throughout NYC [BD]

Move over Meatpacking! When Madonna ruled Staten Island's North Shore ... [SIL]

Okay, that last story deserves its own YouTube link. Now that's some New York nobody else is singing:

What's happening outside my neck of the woods?



The queen of food porn takes a trip to Woodside, Queens. [TGWAE]

Brooklyn by Bike plans a street vendor odyssey for Sunday (rain date the 25th). [BbB]

Jackrabbits at JFK [Queens Crap]

72-year-old Harlem small business owner blasts would-be robbers with shotgun, provokes admiration and reasoned discussion of gun rights in comments section. [City Room]

City Lore's blogger makes a pilgrimage to see rock sculptures on Staten Island's southeastern shore. [Sense & The City]

More Staten Island, in case you missed this in last week's paper: DIY St. George outing! [NYTimes]

Bronx teen gymnast takes third national title in Dallas. [Dallas News]

What's going on out there?



Brooks reports on $13 lobster rolls coming to Red Hook ... less than half the price of those found in my neighborhood! (I'll admit, though, that I've never had a better one than Ed's, which is worth the bucks.) [Lost City]

More from Brooklyn: Have you been following Jeremiah's dispatches from Coney Island? [JVNY]

Celebrating Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation. [Bronx Latino]

Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival comes to Queens. [NY1 and hkdbf-ny.org]

Have you checked out the blog for Staten Island PS 22's 5th grade chorus? They're the kids singing in the background on one of this summer's guilty pleasures, as seen on Fader.

Free Thursday evening yoga in Inwood Park. [Manhattanspeak]

Closer to home, I loved this:



Have a nice weekend!

Getting out of Lower Manhattan and cruising the Greater New York blogosphere ...



Historic taverns of the Old Post Road in Inwood [My Inwood]

More uptown stories: Tweeting a Caddy car chase in Washington Heights! [The Streets Where We Live]

Bronx Flavor featured in the Times. [via BoogieDowner]

Carroll Gardens Basil Wars have ended. [Lost City]

When Beer Gardens Ruled Queens [Queens Courier via Queens Crap]

Biking the Staten Island Greenbelt: Where are the bikes? [SI Notebook]



Bonus: Free Camping in City Parks: Ranger Kathy added: "You'll see a lot of crabs and ocean life [in Pelham Bay]. But, for instance, if you did family camping at a Brooklyn park, it would definitely focus on bats. There are a lot of bats in Brooklyn."  [NYTimes] 

It's been a while since I've written this feature, but the idea is to pretend I'm not such a lazy downtown chauvinist and that I actually notice what's happening in other parts of this great city -- or its blogosphere. So ...



Andrew Kelley contemplates leaving the Shire -- er, Park Slope -- for the wilds of Red Hook. What part of Middle-Earth would that be? [The Great Whatsit]

I had such a great time rowing in Central Park the other day -- a cliche, I know, but an underrated one! Next I'd like to try paddling through the New York Botanical Garden with the Bronx River Alliance. [Bronx Bohemian]

Stranger than fiction department: "A former teen underwear model who made headlines bedding a second-grade Queens teacher was busted Thursday for being part of a gang of bandits." [Queens Crap]

The most neglected green space in St. George, Staten Island [Walking Is Transportation]

Free weekend tours of Little Red Lighthouse and Highbridge Water Tower [Uptown Flavor]

Sunday some friends and I donned sensible shoes, grabbed flashlights, and headed to the Trader Joe's at Atlantic and Court in Brooklyn, where we stood in line in the rain waiting to climb down a manhole and enter the world's oldest subway tunnel, which remained hidden from New Yorkers for over a century.



Down we go!





The half-mile long tunnel was built by Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1844 as part of the Long Island Railroad. The idea was to get the train off the downtown streets, where accidents were apparently too common as locomotives chugged to and from the waterfront. The tunnel remained in operation until 1861, when developers had the bright idea that sealing it off and removing train traffic from the area would raise property values, a plan that backfired when commerce shriveled up along with the thoroughfare.

Among the old timers who complained about the travesty being wrought by this would-be wave of gentrification was, believe it or not, Walt Whitman, who wrote about the tunnel in his "Brooklyniana" column for the Brooklyn Standard. Like most Brooklynites, he believed incorrectly that the tunnel had actually been filled in; he lamented the passing of the polyglot culture that had sprung up around the train tracks as engines plunged into the tunnel:

We were along there a few days since, and could not help stopping, and giving the reins for a few moments to an imagination of the period when the daily eastern train, with a long string of cars, filled with summer passengers, was about starting for Greenport, after touching at all the intermediate villages and depots. We are (or fancy will have it so) in that train of cars, ready to start. The bell rings, and winds off with that sort of a twirl or gulp (if you can imagine a bell gulping) which expresses the last call, and no more afterwards; then off we go. Every person attached to the road jumps on from the ground or some of the various platforms, after the train starts -- which (so imitative an animal is man) sets a fine example for greenhorns or careless people at some future time to fix themselves off with broken legs or perhaps mangled bodies. The orange women, the newsboys, and the limping young man with long-lived cakes, look in at the windows with an expression that says very plainly, "We'll run along-side, and risk all danger, while you find the change." The smoke with a greasy smell comes drifting along, and you whisk into the tunnel.

Our tour was led by Bob Diamond, the president of the Brooklyn Historic Rail Association, who discovered the tunnel's location around 1980, when he was not quite 20 years old. Between the 1860s and 1980, the tunnel had been a thing of legend: The Times printed a "romance" about pirates living in the tunnel in the 1890s; H.P. Lovecraft wrote about "Persian vampires" roosting there in his story "The Horrors of Red Hook"; German saboteurs were feared to be plotting enormous explosions there during WWI; bootleggers were supposed to be distilling there; and an old-fashioned engine was supposed to be sealed in somewhere, possibly containing the missing pages of John Wilkes Booth's diary. Authorities believed the tunnel no longer existed, but Diamond persisted, scouring maps in the public library and hounding city officials and local historians until he located a small crawl space under the Atlantic Ave manhole cover and convinced the gas company to help him check it out. The gas folks, seeing that the hole appeared to be filled, were ready to bag the effort, but Bob climbed inside and crawled on his stomach below the street for several feet until he hit a dead end. He removed enough dirt with his bare hands to realize he'd found a brick wall, which he eventually knocked a hole through big enough to poke his head inside and see that he'd finally found the tunnel. Here he is describing the tunnel's construction:



And here's another quick video produced, apparently, by tunnel enthusiasts:



Diamond gives tours a couple times a year; judging from the turnout Sunday they're fairly popular. According to his website, the next one's scheduled for June 28. He has a lively style, a pocket full of entertaining anecdotes, a thorough-going knowledge of the area's geology and history, and a sense of adventure that doesn't appear to have diminished in the last 30 years. Highly recommended for folks who like a taste of the underground now and again.

The tunnel's been thoroughly blogged elsewhere, including Forgotten NY. For a bunch of better photos than mine, check out these sites.

Channel 13 has a new episode of The City Concealed, dealing with the nineteenth-century African American village Weeksville, now swallowed up in Central Brooklyn. By way of prose intro, here's some background from the Weeksville Heritage Center:

In 1838, only eleven years after slavery ended in New York State, free African American James Weeks purchased a modest plot of land from Henry C. Thompson, another free African American. That land in what is now Central Brooklyn became Weeksville, a thriving, self sufficient African American community. Weeksville quickly became a safe haven for southern Blacks fleeing slavery and free northern Blacks fleeing racial hatred and violence, including the deadly Civil War draft riots in lower Manhattan.

Established as a suburban enclave on the outskirts of Brooklyn, by 1850 Weeksville became the second largest known independent African American community in pre-Civil War America. Weeksville was also the only African American community whose residents were distinctive for their urban rather than rural occupations, and the only one that merged into a neighborhood of a major American city after the Civil War. Moreover, Weeksville had a higher rate of African American property ownership than 15 other U.S. cities and more job opportunities than ten other northern cities.

By the 1860s, Weeksville had its own schools, churches, an orphanage, an old age home, a variety of Black-owned businesses and one of the country's first African American newspapers, Freedman's Torchlight. Almost 500 families headed by ministers, doctors, teachers, tradesmen and other self-reliant citizens lived in Weeksville by the 1900s. Its citizens included Alfred Cornish, a member of the 54th Regiment whose story was told in the film Glory; Dr. Susan Smith McKinney-Steward, the first female African American physician in New York State and the third in the nation, Moses P. Cobb, the first African American policeman in Brooklyn's Ninth Ward, and Junius C. Morel, a well-known educator, journalist and activist.

Weeksville covered seven blocks and was a model of African American entrepreneurial success, political freedom and intellectual creativity. Its residents participated in every major national effort against slavery and for equal rights for free people of color, including the black convention movement, voting rights campaigns, the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, resistance to the Draft Riots in New York City; Freedman's schools and African nationalism. According to one historian, Public School 83 in Weeksville became the first public school in the nation to integrate fully its teaching staff.

The community still existed through the 1930s, but by the mid-1950s, Weeksville was all but forgotten, with many of its structures and institutions replaced by new roads and buildings. In the 1960s, Weeksville was only an historical footnote that historian James Hurley and pilot Joseph Haynes set out to research--from the air.

The rest of the historical piece can be found here. And here's the episode from The City Concealed:

The City Concealed: Weeksville from Thirteen.org on Vimeo.

WNET Channel 13, our local PBS affiliate, recently launched a blog/online video series/vlog, "The City Concealed," in which they send film crews and producers into New York's hidden nooks and crannies. (They also take requests for where to go next; and they have a distinguished blogroll to boot!)

Two episodes have appeared so far, the most recent a fascinating underground tour of Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery:

Green-Wood Cemetery is best known as the final resting place of famous New Yorkers like Boss Tweed, the Steinway family, and Leonard Bernstein, but it's also a treasure trove of hidden sculpture and architecture.

Established in 1838, Green-Wood Cemetery became a destination for American and European tourists. Every year, thousands flocked to the cemetery to enjoy its lush gardens, rolling hills, and stately tombs. Unfortunately, during New York City's financial woes of the late sixties and early seventies, the cemetery restricted public access and lost its reputation as an urban oasis of art and nature.

Over the last decade, however, the cemetery has made efforts to invite the public back inside, hosting concerts, film screenings, and tours. Still, access to the most fascinating sites -- inside the tombs and catacombs -- remains extremely limited. That's why we called Jeff Richman, Green-Wood Cemetery's historian, who wields the massive, dungeon-like key ring that unlocks the granite portals behind which lie the dead.

Viewers may be most interested in the peek inside the cemetery's vault system, whole rooms of family coffins stacked like that final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. (Okay, so not quite that bad; and though the cemetery does host "catacombs," they're not quite on the scale or model of the ones in Paris.) The vault system features prominently at other old NYC cemeteries -- notably Trinity Church (which is why the graveyard towers so high above Church Street in the rear: it's hollow and filled with bodies, not the secret underground tunnels of the Illuminati!) and one of my favorite small, private cemeteries, the New York City Marble Cemetery on East 2nd Street (between First and Second), where a good friend was married -- not buried -- last fall.

In case you were wondering, though: You won't find Melville at Green-Wood, in spite of the fact that the cemetery's chapel hosted readings of the Father Mapple sermon last year. No, for a Melville pilgrimage (you know you've always wanted to make one!) you'll have to head up to Woodlawn, in the Bronx, the city's other magnificent "rural" cemetery.

To arrange your own (live!) tour of Green-Wood, click here. Photo from the Times's Paper Cuts blog.

A friend from Kingsborough Community College's English department sends the following:

The Dreamland Pavilion: Brooklyn and Development
 
October 2-3, 2009, Kingsborough Community College, CUNY

 
CALL FOR PAPERS

How has Brooklyn become what it is--a place of nostalgia, imagination, or fantasy as much as a territorial space, an "outer borough" of New York City? Isn't it time to assess critically the rapid changes in the borough over the last decade? With tremendous growth comes certain costs, but how do we evaluate the present moment, poised between Brooklyn
past and Brooklyn future? How is "development" defined differently by different groups in different contexts? Finally, how do Brooklyn's diverse localities and populations reflect or even shape the future of New York, a global metropolis? This conference aims to be a space within which these and other questions will be addressed, discussed, even answered. The two-day gathering will combine moderated panels (in both traditional academic and roundtable formats), guided visits to local sites, artistic performances and discussion.

We welcome proposals from all relevant academic disciplines, including history, literary studies, political science, geography, and sociology. We are equally interested in proposals from those outside academia, including architects, artists, journalists, activists, urban planners and others concerned with Brooklyn in particular and urban space in general.

The primary areas we will focus on in the conference are:

• The Arts and Cultural Practices: the borough's relationship to film, literature, and the performing arts.
• Development Projects: the conflicts and controversies surrounding Brooklyn's most important contemporary development projects.
• Demographics and Diversity: the broader forces that have reshaped Brooklynites' lives in past and present, including migration, education, housing and urban politics.
  

Possible topics for panelists to address within these areas could
include:

• Renters and homeowners
• Decision-making processes
• Relationship of arts and culture to neighborhood geography
• Case studies of particular neighborhoods
• The Atlantic Yards project or Coney Island redevelopment
• Dynamics of race and/or ethnicity
  
• Environmental impact of development
  
• Access to local institutions
  
• Privatization and public space
  

Proposals should be submitted by February 1, 2009 and should include:

• A one-page description of your topic
• Contact information: Name, position and affiliation, telephone numbers (home and cellphone), mail address and e-mail.
  

Please email completed proposals to Dr. Rick Armstrong, Department of
English, Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York,
at: stephen.armstrong@kingsborough.edu.

For more information, contact:

Dr. Eben Wood, Department of English
Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York
2001 Oriental Blvd.
Brooklyn, NY 11235
(718) 368-5229
eben.wood@kingsborough.edu

or

Dr. Libby Garland, Department of History, Philosophy, and Political
Science
Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York
2001 Oriental Blvd.
Brooklyn, NY 11235
(718) 368-5624
libby.garland@kingsborough.edu

Please also visit the conference website.

I know you're probably tempted to regard the McCain campaign as comedy, say in it attempts to paint Obama a socialist for supporting a graduated income tax -- the same sort of tax plan McCain himself has defended in the past. And certainly their campaign -- the moose-hunter in particular -- has provided fodder for humorists (including NY's finest -- well, this season at least).

In case you need a little more humor to fill those gaps between refreshing fivethirtyeight.com a dozen times a day, consider this terrific bit about Park Slope parents from my friend A White Bear:

I keep hearing parents around here making a new threat when their kids misbehave, and it's working. They don't threaten not to take them to Balthazar or not to buy them that Eames chair they so wanted. They threaten them with Barack Obama's disappointment in them.

"What would Barack Obama say if he saw you treating your brother that way?"
"If you don't stop hitting me, you won't get to watch the Barack Obama debate tonight."
"Do you think Malia and Sasha act like that? No, they don't."

The rest of the post here (and yes, that's me she references in the first paragraph).

For more Park Slope election oddities, check this out. I'd bet those houses don't get a lot of Halloween action this year: too scary for the kids!

The American transplant of the British series Life on Mars premieres tonight on ABC. The title of the series refers to the David Bowie song, which was playing on NYPD detective Sam Tyler's iPod, when he is hit by a car and suddenly transported back thirty-five years to 1973. When Tyler (Jason O'Mara) wakes up, the song is playing on an 8-track. Tyler returns to his station to find people whom he doesn't know: Chief Detective Gene Hunt (Harvey Keitel), Detective Ray Carling (Michael Imperioli of The Sopranos), Detective Chris Skelton (Jonathan Murphy of October Road); Chief Detective Gene Hunt (Harvey Keitel), and policewoman Annie Norris (Gretchen Mol), who becomes his 1973 love interest. His present-day (2008) love interest is played by Lisa Bonet, and the series mixes past and present through dream sequences. According to the Los Angeles Times, the opening episode "closely follows the model, not only in plot and dialogue but often in specific shots." The series, originally set in Los Angeles, was drastically reconceived after David E. Kelly dropped out and turned the series over to the producers of October Road and Alias. Only O'Mara returns from the cast that appeared in the pilot.

During a recent walking tour to Brooklyn Bridge, my Modernist New York class came across a scene from the series being filmed near the Brooklyn Heights Esplanade:




It was a kick to see the cars and clothes of my pre-teenage days. I'll be watching the pilot just to see Harvey Keitel do his thing. After that, we'll see: perhaps I'll add it to my TiVo's Season Pass list, where it can join Mad Men (set in New York in the 1960s) and replace New Amsterdam, another show that evoked New York's past, but was cancelled by Fox last spring.

Meanwhile, here's a preview of the series from the Los Angeles Times:

blast from the past -- Bowie as Ziggy:

As of last Monday, the New York City Waterfalls project, created by the artist Olafur Eliasson, has had its hours of operation cut from 101 to 50. The reduction is the result of a complaint by The Brooklyn Heights Association that the salt water from the installations was damaging waterfront plantings along the Brooklyn Promenade. The group had originally asked that the installations be dismantled after Labor Day, but October 13 remains the final date.

You can see the waterfalls now from 12:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, and 5:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays and Wednesdays.

BY JESSIE MORGAN-OWENS
BROOKLYN CORRESPONDENT

This is my third post in a row to start out by reading the Sunday paper, but today I've got a little story we shot for the New York Times Magazine: "Hipster Replacement" (ha!), a map of the newest old scene in Brooklyn. (You can find it on page 110 of the Men's Fashion special issue of today's magazine.)

Allow me to introduce "B.E.L.T." to the readers of AHNY. The acronym stands for "below the elevated train" (the J/M/Z) in South Williamsburg. The neighborhood was "nameless" until the New York Times, the writer Cator Sparks, and Andy from Yoko Devereaux came along.  We weren't told what they were going to call the story or the neighborhood when they assigned us the piece for fear we might accidentally leak it or have it beaten out of us with vintage Air Jordans.

Frenchie of Frenchie's Gym on 303 Broadway, a 67-year old Puerto Rican body builder, deserves a story in the Times all his own.  You can see the old school, no nonsense, no a/c gym from the B.Q.E. He's been in there coaching and cajoling giant young men from the neighborhood to "Do it with Love!" since 1976.

Maybe you need to spend an afternoon with the "community organizers" down at Frenchie's, Mr. Rudy Giuliani.

Follow this link to an online version of the Magazine piece, featuring an interactive map of B.E.L.T.