FOR years I had hunted Margaret Court. No, not the famed Australian tennis champion in the 1960s and 1970s. I was seeking a short alley in Homecrest, a subdivision of the larger Sheepshead Bay. The alley was shown on some maps to be on East 13th Street between Avenues Y and Z. Sheepshead Bay, like Canarsie, is full on tiny side streets chockablock with one-story bungalows, and though named, they’re strictly walkways with no room for motor vehicles (unless it’s an e-bike used by some deliveristas).
For about 20 years, 1973-1993, I bicycled the borough of Brooklyn with occasional forays in Queens and Nassau, even more rarely into Manhattan and Staten Island. On some of these expeditions, I hunted obscure alleys I found on maps. Try as I might, I could never espy Margaret Court. It turns out I was looking for a roadway when I should have been seeking a walkway.
Margaret Court isn’t a roadway at all but a walkway lined on both sides with charming small houses too big to be true bungalows. They are numbered #1 to 21, with odd house numbers on the north side and evens on the south.
The kicker is that Margaret Court was here before anything on the west side of East 13th Street was in place. In this excerpt from a Belcher Hyde atlas from 1929, unpaved or planned streets were left in white, with established paved roadways shown in purple. Framed houses are in yellow.
Margaret Court has not been given a green and white street sign by the Department of Transportation, so I’m providing one here. The alley is identified by a handwritten sign on its gate, which precedes a shallow staircase that drops to Margaret Court itself. It was probably named for a relative of its long-ago developer.
Update: Joseph Ditta sends this Street View, in which a DOT sign is visible.
Looking at Margaret Court from West 13th, it’s no surprise I could not find it on my trips to Homecrest all those years ago. I wasn’t looking for anything that looked like this.
The modern Google map shows Margaret Court lke this. You have to look hard to locate it.
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5/17/24