Hidden on the second floor of this building adjacent to the JMZ elevated train line in South Williamsburg is Frenchie’s Gym, a slice of authentic old school Brooklyn culture that has somehow managed to avoid the gentrification wrecking ball rapidly swinging toward it. Blink and you’ll miss it. From the ground level, the only evidence…
I love seeing these signs gracing lamp poles in the North Williamsburg area because, to my understanding, they were put up long before the area went through its current day gentrification. Sort of like if you put in shopping district signs, maybe a shopping district will follow? But North Williamsburg is not the only neighborhood…
I was talking with the owner of a building the other day about getting shooting access. As it turns out, his main business is in greeting cards. I never knew it, but apparently, this is the award a group like Hallmark wants to win for designing a perfect greeting card – the Louie Award. I…
I was driving down Bedford Ave around the Crown Heights area in Brooklyn when I passed this great neo-Gothic building at Sterling Place…and noticed something that made me stop and get out to take pictures. Right at the top center of the curve is this emblem: Crazy, right? Apparently, this was once an auto showroom…
I love traveling down Flatbush Ave past Prospect Park because there’s so much history to find hidden on every block. I noticed this Oldsmobile ghost sign (ghost sign: a business sign remaining from a long defunct business) at the corner of Avenue D and Flatbush above a liquor store: God knows how long ago this…
“The sequestered situation of this church seems always to have made it a favorite haunt of troubled spirits…To look upon its grass-grown yard, where the sunbeams seem to sleep so quietly, one would think that there at least the dead might rest in peace.” “On one side of the church extends a wide woody dell,…
The two square blocks bordered by Union and Lorimer Aves. and Devoe and Powers Sts. in Williamsburg are as pleasant a place as any to live in Brooklyn. The streets are tree-lined and relatively quiet, yet only a short distance from everything Williamsburg has to offer. But the area wasn’t always residential. I was looking…
I love Forgotten NY’s Street Necrology section, in which they pour over old city maps to find streets and roads that no longer exist – some having been covered by buildings or parks, others renamed or rerouted, others simply gone. I also love finding evidence of dead streets, and am wondering if I might have…
Two lethargic Golden Retrievers pass the day away in Soho. Doesn’t it look like a mirror image? Another view: If only we were all so lucky. -SCOUT
One of the most beautiful and pleasant places in the city is the campus of Columbia University. It is simply incredible that such a place exists in the tightly packed metropolis that is Manhattan, and I never pass up a chance to visit. Located in the center of campus is the statue of Alma Mater…