BUILDING on yesterday’s post about the long-forgotten Dubose Lane in Cambria Heights, I was tipped by a Forgotten Fan named Danny about one that’s closer to home, in Dyker Heights, not too far away from where I lived for 35 years in Bay Ridge. He sent me an except from an 1899 Kings County map on Old Maps Online, a resource from the New York Public Library. I’ll use it as a resource, but it’s devilishly hard to use, with nonstop popups and schmutz on the screen obscuring the actual maps.
Never go a day without learning something new and heretofore, I never knew there was a road called Waters Avenue in Dyker Heights. It went at an angle against the yet to be built street grid from 83rd Street SW to Benson Avenue between 13th and 14th Avenues. This was long before Dyker Beach Park and the golf course were built in the 1920s, and originally, streets were gridded there. This explains why the numbered “Bay” streets begin at Bay 7th: the park and the golf course were built atop where Bay 1st through 6th had been laid out. Were they ever built? I suppose anyone who can answer that question is gone now.
On the 1899 map, note that the streets that were colored gray or pink, like 83rd and 86th, were already built. The little yellow squares represent houses. You can see a couple on 83rd, 86th, and on the right side of the map (north) on State Road, a western extension of Kings Highway that wound through Dyker Heights. But most of this area was still open country. When the grid was built up, State Road was closed; most of it disappeared by the 1910s. You can see some of it in the widened section of 84th Street between 16th and 18th Avenues in what was New Utrecht Village.
So what’s left of Waters Avenue now? A property line. In the aerial view at the top, I have circled a fence that runs along a diagonal line south of 83rd and east of 13th Avenue. Often building angles and property lines mark old roads, and that’s what happened here.
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9/17/25