2020 has been a strange year to say the least. I haven’t been in Staten Island at all for the first time since I began initial site photography in 1998, and my visits to the Bronx have been limited to two areas: Riverdale/Spuyten Duyvil and City Island. Needless to say, I plan much more extensive work in both boroughs when the health emergency lifts.
From a few years ago in Norwood…
Norwood was originally part of the Varian family’s dairy farm. The Varians, who produced a New York City mayor, owned the oldest house in the area, which is still standing. The name either comes from “North Woods” or from Carlisle Norwood, a friend of Leonard Jerome, the grandfather of Winston Churchill who owned the nearby Jerome Park Race Track in the 1860s. The neighborhood was laid out in 1889 by entrepreneur Josiah Briggs.
For a couple of decades in the late 20th Century, Norwood and its immediate neighbor to the south, Bedford Park, were major Irish enclaves, after immigrants from Northern Island during the era of The Troubles fled the auld sod and settled here, in Woodlawn Heights to the north, and in Queens’ Woodside. For a time Norwood became known as “Little Belfast” and was a hotbed for supporters of the Irish Republican Army, which sought to sever Northern Ireland’s ties with the United Kingdom by violent means. Eventually the Irish influence in the area lessened, as many Irish returned home to participate in the homeland’s roaring economy in the 1990s and early 2000s.
St. Brendan’s is a Catholic parish and boasts an imaginative piece of architecture on Perry Avenue between East 206th and 207th. The parish was organized in 1908 and gained this church building, built in the form of a ship, in 1967.
According to legend, St. Brendan, who lived in the sixth century, was a sailor and navigator and journeyed to what he called ”the island of the blessed” or St. Brendan’s Island, considered by some to be the Faeroe Islands, Iceland, or even further west to Newfoundland, making him the first European to visit North America, centuries before the Norse made it. At this remove, anything can only be speculation.
Check out the ForgottenBook, take a look at the gift shop, and as always, “comment…as you see fit.”
12/18/20