PARKED outside #167 Concord Street in Brooklyn is owner Frank Didik’s car, a hybrid gasoline/electric powered vehicle called the Didik Long Ranger designed in the mid-1980s. It’s 96 inches long, 65 inches wide and 56 inches high and can comfortably seat three people. It can travel about 70-100 miles per charge, but the gasoline engine can power it only to a top speed of 30 MPH. It also contains solar panels to assist in charging the batteries. Didik, who has owned 167 Concord since 1985, took an earlier Citicar, manufactured by Sebring-Vanguard, and modified it; he also designed the Didik Sun Shark, a solar-powered motorcycle, and the Didik Duplexity, a foldable scooter that rides three people. With the government now pushing heavily for electric cars, can this alternative to the expensive Tesla make a comeback?
Didik has, of course, removed the batteries.
#167 Concord Street is a tiny, two-story frame dwelling with two dormers. The house is among the oldest in the neighborhood. According some sources it was built in 1762 (others say 1901), while the land it is built on was deeded in 1674; the land was in Dutch hands until the 1770s, when English names began appearing on the records. It is surrounded by a stone wall dating to about 1820. The house is rumored to have participated in the Underground Railroad in the pre-Civil war era.
This is a section of Brooklyn squeezed between Downtown on the south and DUMBO on the north that has never seemed to acquire a neighborhood name that stuck, and I find “Downtown Brooklyn” to also be rather awkward. Somebody promote some real names!
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8/8/23
11 comments
If you click on the link for 167 Concord it goes to Google Maps for an area near Boone, North Carolina.
Note: at 3,333 feet elevation Boone is the highest city east of the Rocky Mountains.
Kevin, I believe that area is part of Fort
Greene. Many, many years ago, I worked for the NYC Dept of Health on Flatbush
Avenue Extension. It’s about 4 blocks
from this house, and that was Fort
Greene.
Giving names to neighborhoods is strictly the domain of real estate people
so you’ll have to ask them
As to a name for the neighborhood, how about Olympia? Concord Street was part of the property of brothers Joshua and Comfort Sands (as in Sands Street), who owned much of the land between Fulton Street and the Navy Yard. In the early 1800s, the brothers had high hopes for the development of their land as a new city, to be called Olympia. Their vision didn’t take off, rather, the proposed Olympia developed more slowly as a part of the Village and later City of Brooklyn.
“Can this alternative to the expensive Tesla make a comeback”: NO! (please tell this your pal who sounds like the late Professor Irwin Corey (who at least) was only kidding. BTW: Extracted from the NY Post :
But posting Biden’s name won’t prevent the proliferation of boondoggles across the land.
In 2021, Biden declared that his favorite green-energy company, Proterra, would “end up owning the future.”
Proterra’s future ended this week with a bankruptcy filing — the likely fate of many federally subsidized environmental endeavors.
Grandparents lived two houses away and I’ve known this little car for many years. Always called this hood downtown Brooklyn. But, surprised realtors haven’t started calling it RAMBO. Right above Manhattan bridge overpass.
Your link to #167 Concord Street above seems to link to a Concord Street in North Carolina, not Brooklyn 😉
Took it down.
For some reason, I can’t picture myself driving that car, plus it looks as if you can get cramped sitting in there.
Looks better suited to a golf course.
A few months ago, I actually explored this little neighborhood consisting of ancient houses, while looking for a great Nigerian restaurant, Amarachi, just around the corner on Bridge Street. Although I would consider this neighborhood Downtown Brooklyn, it’s the Flatbush Avenue Extension that separates it from what most of us consider true Downtown Brooklyn. Unfortunately, while Amarachi was a wonderful restaurant (the best jerk chicken I ever had in my life), this isolaton and remoteness from the schools and office buildings on the south side of the Extension meant it did very little business, and recently closed. I know for a fact if it was on the other side of the Extension, it would have succeeded. The only thing that I could say is that the neighborhood’s remoteness probably saved it, as if it was on the side, despite its historical houses, it would have been bulldozed over as an extension of Metrotech or other even newer office and/or apartment buildings that have transformed Downtown Brooklyn and Fort Greene in recent years, as I witnessed when Metrotech was first built. Glenn in Brooklyn, NY.