Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
Southern Brooklyn stations in Midwood and Sheepshead Bay on the BMT Brighton line have all been rehabilitated with new windscreens and lighting, as well as a spruce-up of fare control areas — a lengthy process that took the better part of 3 years. I was passing through Sheepshead Bay and caught a train back home [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Subways & Trains Tagged with: Brooklyn Sheepshead Bay
Actually a four-shot today, as I found this battered but unbowed Checker on Gravesend Neck Road east of the el station. What year? The Checker logo depicts land masses that resemble none on the current globe. A look back to the prehistoric past, or perhaps a look into the far future after continental drift has [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Tagged with: Brooklyn Sheepshead Bay
I’m kidding, naturally — Avenue Z is no sleepier than any of its brother lettered avenues in south Brooklyn. It runs mostly through the neighborhoods of Homecrest and Sheepshead Bay, with a very small piece running a few blocks east of the Belt Parkway in south Bath Beach. The bulk of Avenue Z runs from [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Avenue Z Sheepshead Bay
Categorized in: Walks Tagged with: Coney Island Midwood Sheepshead Bay
CONTINUED FROM PART 1 WAYFARING: CONEY ISLAND TO MIDWOOD At East 14th Street, the BMT Brighton Line bridges over the Belt Parkway and in an unusual arrangement, a pedestrian walkway adjoins it, with barbed razor wire preventing miscreants from entering the tracks. Remnants of a previous lighting arrangement have been left in place, as these [...]
Categorized in: Walks Tagged with: Brooklyn Coney Island Midwood Sheepshead Bay
There are two Sheepshead Bay Roads in Brooklyn. To add to the muddle, one of them comes in two pieces. The first Sheepshead Bay Road runs from Neptune Avenue and West 8th east one block to West 6th Street. As we’ll see, it used to be quite a bit longer. The other, more important Sheepshead Bay [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Roads Tagged with: Brooklyn Sheepshead Bay
Sometimes, NYC history can be preserved in the unlikeliest of ways and in the most unusual places. Take a large mural along East 15th Street in the shadow of the BMT Brighton line (B, Q) just north of Sheepshead Bay Road. The mural, entitled “Sheepshead Bay’s Historic Future,” depicts Emmons Avenue as it was in 1994 [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Sheepshead Bay
The naming of Brooklyn streets – well, NYC streets — is a topic of constant fascination. Well, for your webmaster, at least. A glance at the Brooklyn map in the Sheepshead Bay area reveals a couple of score* short “places” and one-block streets. They’re not alleys, per se, since they’re wide enough for cars to be [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Sheepshead Bay
Coney Island Avenue is among Brooklyn’s lengthiest routes, extending from Ocean Parkway and Parkside Avenue where Prospect Park meets the Parade Grounds and runs generally straight south all the way to the Coney Island boardwalk (officially called the Riegelmann Boardwalk for the borough president when it was completed in the 1920s). As this 1873 map [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Tagged with: Brooklyn Coney Island Sheepshead Bay
What’s the longest street that runs entirely in Brooklyn? It seems there are two candidates: Flatbush Avenue and Bedford Avenue. (Any drivers out there want to decide the matter using their odometers?) Some roads running east-west are pretty lengthy, but they extend all the way to Queens and beyond: Linden Boulevard, Myrtle, Metropolitan, Atlantic, and [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Roads Street Scenes Walks Tagged with: Bedford Avenue Brooklyn Flatbush Midwood Sheepshead Bay
When I first started researching NYC history I assumed that Sheepshead Bay was named for its one-time resemblance, in outline, to a sheep’s head. After all, that’s how a peninsula on the North Shore in Nassau County, Cow Neck, was named. Only later did I discover that it was named for a fish that can no longer [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Sheepshead Bay
CONTINUED FROM SHEEPSHEAD BAY, PART 2 We’ve run out of letters The town of Flatbush, absorbed into Brooklyn in the 1890s, had its own tidy street naming system: East and West numbered streets, which run north and south, separated by Gravesend (now McDonald) Avenue, with east-west streets named for letters of the alphabet, A to Z. [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Sheepshead Bay
CONTINUED FROM SHEEPSHEAD BAY, PART 1 Up in the old hotels Brian Merlis, in the title of his Sheepshead Bay book, calls Sheepshead Bay “Brooklyn’s Gold Coast.” After Austin Corbin built the magnificent Manhattan Beach and Oriental Hotels in the 1870s and 1880s, enterpreneurs filled the gap for people who couldn’t afford anything quite so lavish [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Sheepshead Bay
Heavy snow in NYC winters is unpredictable. A series of winters with little snow can be followed by years of blizzardy winters. But a fearsome, freak blizzard in early March 1888 caught New York City completely unprepared, and caused property damage, injuries and death. It also changed how telephone and telegraph wires were connected to Manhattan homes [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Bronx Brooklyn East New York Jamaica Avenue Morris Park Queens Radial Wave Ridgewood Riverdale Sheepshead Bay Staten Island Van Cortlandt Park West Brighton
Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay, named for the fish that used to be abundant there, has been occupied by Europeans since the 1640s when English noblewoman Lady Deborah Moody planned the village of Gravesend. Some of the first roads in the area, Gravesend Neck Road and Sheepshead Bay Road, still survive today, and roads that became streets like [...]
Categorized in: Alleys Neighborhoods Tagged with: Brooklyn Sheepshead Bay
Constructed exclusively to light the network of parkways that Robert Moses constructed beginning in the Twenties, these distinctive poles are made of both wood and iron. Some are still in New York City but you have to know where to look! Once upon a time, wooden lampposts like this one dominated NYC parkways constructed by [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Bayside Belt Parkway Brooklyn Queens Sheepshead Bay
