NOT many physical relics or manifestations remain of the original World Trade Center Twin Towers (1971-2001), except in photographs and memories. However, here’s a remembrance, in a very old peak-roofed wood frame building at #975 McDonald Avenue under the Culver elevated at Webster Avenue. My bet is that the bagel shop was founded soon after 9/11/01 and the owners are memorializing it and the many victims of the terrorist attack in their own way.
In a July 2024 post, I discussed place names of barely remembered people in NYC such as Horace Harding and Henry Bruckner. Well…there are two of them right here in this obscure Brooklyn corner. The elevated Culver Line was named for a rail entrepreneur named Andrew Culver (1832-1906). In 1875, Culver founded and built a steam railroad that ran from the Green-Wood Cemetery entrance at Prospect Park West and 20th Street and then ran straight down 20th Street to 10th Avenue and then south on Gravesend Avenue, later named McDonald Avenue, to Coney Island. After experiencing poor heath he sold the Prospect Park and Coney Island RR, as it was called, to the Long Island rail Road in 1893. When a third rail was added in 1899, the LIRR ceased operations on the line and the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Co. was reorganized into the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Company, later the BMT, which took it over. As the region became more built up the line was elevated over Gravesend Avenue in 1919 and in common parlance became “the Culver Line.”
When the IND extended its line in Kensington to connect with the Culver Line in the 1950s, the section of the el connecting with the West End Line was orphaned and became the Culver Shuttle, which ran until 1975; its structure was torn down 10 years later.
Meanwhile, what had been previously named Gravesend Avenue was renamed McDonald Avenue in the 1930s. John McDonald was Chief Clerk of the Kings County Surrogates’ Court who died suddenly in 1932 when a chicken bone perforated an intestine. With apologies to the surviving McDonalds, by 2024, it’s an obscure man in an even obscurer office that’s remembered today.
As a kid, I was amazed when I took a bus ride (The B9?) with either mom or dad down 60th Street and discovered an elevated train over McDonald Avenue! I knew it only from its open-air section where the B16 bus on Caton Avenue crossed it.
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7/31/24