FOREST PLACE, BAY RIDGE, 1923

BORN and raised in Bay Ridge Brooklyn, me. And from the time Robert Moses dug a trench across the street from my house that wound up as the Gowanus Expressway, I have pored over maps, first paying attention to Brooklyn, then the five boroughs and then…all over, as my street map collection now numbers in the hundreds. All of them completely outdated since I obtained them in the 1970s!

Forest Place, an alley connecting 4th Avenue and 90th Street at a Volkswagen dealer, was a mere dot on my first 1968 Hagstrom, so it piqued my curiosity like no other street in the area. When I was a kid, it wasn’t paved, as it isn’t in this 1923 image from Al Ponte’s Time Machine on Facebook. As I explained on this FNY page from 2020, it’s likely one of Bay Ridge’s oldest routes and predated the overall street grid. What saved it were the few residences on the street whose owners refused to sell. Two survive today, #42 and 44, altred beyond recognition from what they looked like when I was around in the Swinging Sixties. The fact that the two homes are numbered #42 and 44 bespeaks that Forest Place used to be longer; about three blocks longer, shortly before this photo was taken. 4th Avenue erased some of it, as did 90th Street. Today, the Volkswagen dealer stores some of the vehicles in the alley. Note the angle in the building across the street to match the angle of Forest Place. When it was named…this was a forest.

I should have saved this for the Brooklyn One and Done series; consider this a head start.

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2/27/24