In June 2024, in nearly perfect shooting conditions and low humidity, I was able to execute a walk of several miles in Bay Ridge. My plan was to concentrate on the one-block streets in the western part (which will wind up on their own page) and then walk Third Avenue (I haven’t done that since a post-heart surgery walk in 2007) and Fifth, winding up at the N train on 8th and 62nd. Today’s Part 2 will pick up from where I left off, at 3rd Avenue and 97th Street.
GOOGLE MAP: BAY RIDGE WALK 2024
Two examples of new residential constuction, on 3rd Avenue and 97th and 4th Avenue at 95th. Large picture windows (which I favor, depending on if blinds or curtains big enough to cover them are available) ande balconies are emphasized.
97th Street near 4th Avenue, an example of new brick architecture (2017) I would favor, though it replaced a much older house with gables and bay windows.
Barwell Terrace is one of Bay Ridge’s many pleasant cul de sacs (or is it culs de sac?) on 97th Street between 3rd and 4th Avenues, one of a legion of such that were built in Bay Ridge by real estate companies in the early 20th Century. Some allow vehicular access, some don’t. Barwell Terrace, built by the Barwell Homes company in 1926, boasts 18 small single family brick homes, 9 on each side, arranged to face each other across a walkway. Brooklyn Dodger shortstop Pee Wee Reese was a resident in the late 1950s, but that was before he had to move to Los Angeles.
The Roman Catholic St. Patrick’s Church, 4th and 95th Street, is one of the oldest Catholic parishes in Brooklyn; the church was instituted in 1849 to serve the Fort Hamilton area’s many Irish laborers and their families, and has also served Catholic military men and their families stationed at the fort. The present church building was completed in 1925, the same year the BMT was extended to 95th Street; its school building on 4th Avenue and 97th Street opened in 1958.
Bay Ridge’s Catholic population has flowed and ebbed, but the area has enough to require four separate parishes: St. Patrick’s, St. Anselm’s (mine, as a kid); Our Lady of Angels; and St. Ephrem’s, which is on the undefended Dyker Heights border.
If you’re not careful, you’ll miss the 4th Avenue and 95th Street BMT R train subway entrance which is in a recess in a building with a car service on the ground floor.
The location formerly (and I mean formerly, in the 1940s) hosted a shoe and hat repair shop. How do I know? When FNY Tour #20 in Bay Ridge arrived in 2005, we found an uncovered sign for that very shop.
That tour was in the top five best attended Forgotten New York tours with about 50 participants. We wore out shoe leather that day and may have needed the shop to reopen, as the tour took about six hours!
Eh, youth.
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There are no shortage of World War I Memorials in Bay Ridge, including two within a few blocks of each other. The first is here at the triangle formed by 4th and 5th Avenues and 94th Street. The names of those soldiers who trained at Fort Hamilton and served or passed away during World War I are inscribed on a granite shaft erected in 1917.
For years the triangle was known as Pigeon Park, both for the fowl that flocked in the park and for the homing pigeons used to carry messages during WWI and WWII, but it was formally named Fort Hamilton Triangle by Parks Commissioner Henry Stern in 1998. It is currently surrounded by a locked gate to discourage vagrancy in the park.
When Bay Ridge streets were laid out in the 1800s, 4th and 5th Avenues came to a meeting place here, with only one avenue proceeding south to the Narrows. 4th Avenue was selected to proceed south, presumably because it’s the “senior” number.
In the spring of 2017, Forgotten NY led a tour in Bay Ridge in which I pointed out still-extant locales from the 1977 blockbuster, “Saturday Night Fever.” In this building, in the Fisherman’s Corner coffee shop, Tony (John Travolta) meets Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney) to discuss entering the 2001 Odyssey dance contest. She talks about her job in Manhattan where she meets famous names. Both talk about their desire to get out of Brooklyn, though Stephanie angers Tony when she refuses his offer to walk her home.
Since the restaurant went out of business, the space has played host to a group of car dealerships.
Kelly’s Tavern appears in the Bay Ridge-set classic, Saturday Night Fever, when Tony Manero and Stephanie are walking along 4th Avenue. The bar fronts on both 4th and 5th Avenues and you can walk in on 5th, sit at the bar, have a drink and exit on 4th. Kelly’s has been there for quite awhile as it was founded by Pat Kelly in 1932; her husband arrived soon after. The Nolan family owns the bar now.
Engine 242 has served Bay Ridge since 1896, two years after the Town of New Utrecht in which Bay Ridge sat was annexed to the city of Brooklyn; which in turn became part of Greater New York in 1898.
For the first time in years, construction netting is off PS/IS 104 at 5th Avenue and 92nd Street, though a construction fence is still in place. Unfortunately the building isn’t landmarked and there’s little online about its construction and history. NYC DOE websites are tight lipped about building information. I gather it was constructed in 1908, and there are newer and older sections. For you Facebook folks, there’s a few interior photos here.
I spotted a painted ad for the now-defunct Austin’s Steakhouse on 5th Avenue near 89th Street. The latest Yelp review was in 2010, so it’s over a decade since it’s gone, but the vertical ad “Austin’s” is still there in black and white. You have to go to the other end of the alphabet for its replacement, Zamaan, a restaurant and hookah bar.
Pizza Wagon, 5th Avenue and 86th Street, has been a Bay Ridge staple since 1966, as the sign says. Somehow, I naver had any pizza here when I lived in Bay Ridge until 1993.. My friends may marvel at this but I did not become a real NYC pizza slice aficionado until rather later on, at the cusp of my teen years. I was a fussy eater as a kid and didn’t like the dripping oil from pizza slices. That said, now that places like Zeke’s and Nathan’s have closed (and a nearby Blimpie as well, not that that place was a jewel) Pizza Wagon is a stop for me when I want lunch. The pizza is terrific; the interior, though, is a bit jammed and messy and, of course, hot in the summer.
This institution, 5th Avenue east of 86th Street, has gone by many names. Even as a kid, I did not go into Hinsch’s that often. It’s not that I had a dislike of the place. It’s just that there was an old fashioned candy shoppe named Pohl’s that was closer to where I lived, on 5th Avenue and 83rd. I’d go in with friends, or with my mother or grandmother, and eat ice cream and chat in the big leather booths. And, what I remember was the quiet of the place. From the movies, you think of ice cream shoppes as brightly lit places, jukeboxes roaring, dancing teenagers. Not Pohl’s. Anyhow, Pohl’s closed in the 1970s and is likely remembered only in my own brain lobes, as there’s nothing about it on the internet.
When word came that the Logues, who had owned Hinsch’s for decades (it had first opened under that name in 1948) had decided to close the place after their lease expired (word was that the landlady had asked for a substantial increase in rent) I felt a definite pang, though it wasn’t of surprise. Franchises are increasingly filling voids left by family-owned lunch counters and candy shoppes because only the franchises can afford the rents.
Henry Hinsch purchased Reichert’s Tea Room (which had already been in business for decades) in 1948 and it remained a staple until 2011, when it became Stewart’s (a Stewart’s sign covers the old iconic neon Hinsch’s billboard sign) and it’s now called the Blossom Diner.
Skinflint’s has been a Bay Ridge institution since 1975, so this year, it turns 50. I seem to recall it under a different name back then, Horse-something, but I could be wrong. Like Hinsch’s, it was one of those Bay Ridge institutions I was rarely in because in the 1980s I did all my drinking in Manhattan and rarely in Brooklyn. I do recall my one visit to Skinflint’s but it was a sad occasion, as the family had a lunch there soon after the death of my father in 2003. Today it’s more of a restaurant than a bar and closes at midnight at the latest.
In the 1940s, this location was an ice cream/candy shoppe called Meyer’s.
Oof, what did they do with the Reliance Cleaners sign on 5th Avenue and 78th Street? No doubt, that classic vinyl sign is underneath that garish awning sign. New management desired a sign more appropriate for 2024, no doubt.
At this point I wanted to get to the N train so I turned east on 73rdStreet. This was a section of Bay Ridge with which I am quite familiar as I lived at #654 73rd Street, alongside the Gowanus Expressway. on the top floor of one of a series of row houses. It was a ‘railroad flat’ in the true sense, as it was a rough rectangle divided into rooms. Though I loved that apartment (I furnished it with a blue carpet and blue venetian blinds to effectively mask the sun, since I worked nights and arrived in the morning between 4 and 7 AM) it was poorly insulated and at a time when winters were colder, I could never heat it effectively.
Thus I saw quite a bit of the area as I got up around 1 PM, giving me hours of light before I had to get back on the subway to midtown for Photo-Lettering, at the time the city’s biggest type shop. The immediate area is dotted with series of attached homes such as these at 6th Avenue and 73rd Street with gently curving fronts, likely meant to parcel out sunshine and shade to the front rooms depending on times of day. Remember, these homes were built long before the introduction of air conditioning.
When I moved here in November 1982, this corner store at 6th and 73rd was still a candy store, albeit on its last legs as one; I bought newspapers here, but its marble and chrome “ice cream bar” was still in place. I wasn;t thinking like a Forgotten NYer at that point and it didn’t dawn on me to get any interior photos, and soon enough, it became a caterer, which remained for many years. The space is currently for sale.
There are few “candy stores’ left; they have become grocery stores and bodegas. Awhile ago, I postulated why so many drugstores also had soda fountains as the two businesses seem otherwise unrelated. This wasn’t a drugstore, but it also provided goods other than ice cream sodas, as it sold stationery (writing paper) and cigars, which I wouldn’t associate with dessert.
This very fuzzy 1980 tax photo shows the candy store as I found it in 1982. The city did major photographic surveys of taxable properties in 1940 and 1980 and in almost every case the 1940s black and white photography is in much better shape than the 1980 photos, which are all very poor quality.
Getting a bit late on Sunday night and I want to move thngs along, so I’ll show a few locales on 8th Avenue en route to the N train that have changed over the years. What was Zeke’s Roast Beef from the 1970s to the 2000s, 8th Avenue and 66th, is now dim summery Park Asia in a new building constructed after the diner-style Zeke’s was torn down. This was in teh shadow of two massive Brooklyn Union gas tanks that could be seen for miles.
Were you aware that starlings and sparrows, two avian staples in NYC skies, are not native to the northeast but were introduced to get rid of bug pests? They proceeded to settle in and make the area their own. The same thing happened with small green Quaker parrots, who were apparently smuggled in but are now quite frequent in spots around town, preferring to build nests in tall structures like trees and light towers…like the ones found at the former Dust Bowl Park at 8th Avenue between 65th and 66th Streets, that has had its dust hidden beneath Astroturf or something similar. I have a photo in the archives of my mother and I watching a soccer match here when I was five, but I have no time to dig around for it.
The corner of 8th Avenues and 64th Street is the former location of two long-vanished touchstones: the 3-story mixed-use building replaced the 2001 Odyssey disco (when it was named, 2001 was some far-off year that sounded like science fiction), used for exteriors and interiors for Saturday Night Fever; and the market building replaced Bay Ridge Lanes, which was a smoky, down-at-heel bowling alley the first time I was in there in 1984 (I usually bowled at the equally vanished Leemark Lanes on 88th Street.
The NYC subway has its share of “station houses” originally built to let people wait for trains, if they didn’t want to do so on the platforms, if they chose. The ones constructed at Bowling Green and 72nd Street in the initial phase of subway construction in the 19-aughts have gotten the most ink and attention from train buffs. They’re fine creations.
But I also like the ones added later on BMT lines built by Brooklyn Rapid Transit (later the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit) in the initial rollout of the “Dual Contracts,” a large subway initiative in 1911 that saw the majority of IRT and BMT subway lines constructed over the following decade.
I am unsure that these simple, basic “Arts and Crafts” stationhouses were the work of Squire Vickers, who took over as chief subway station designer after Heins & Lafarge passed the baton in 1908 and continued on through the IND era of the 1930s, but no matter who designed them, I’m a big fan of the tiled interiors with subtle coloration differences. They should get all the honors and praise that the Heins and LaFarge stationhouses did. This one at 8th Avenue and 62nd Street was a mess of construction for 3 or 4 years, but it’s whole again.
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More Forgotten NY in Bay Ridge
3/16/25