DURING my days at 8302 6th Avenue in Bay Ridge from 1957-1982, I spent a lot of time in Tom McDonald Triangle, which looked nothing like this… it was a blacktopped triangle with exterior sidewalks and square patches of dirt where the trees were. I spent hours digging in that dirt. Across the street, hundreds of buildings had been razed for the approach roads for the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, and using toy trucks and other implements of my own making, I was imitating in those patches of dirt the work going on across the street.
I’m shown here around 1962 or so, when all the buildings across the street had been seized and then torn down, as traffic czar Robert Moses was running the Gowanus Expressway, the approach to the Verrazzano Bridge, directly through Bay Ridge. My father shot some photos of the expressway construction; I have included them on my Verrazzano Bridge page linked above.
The women of the immediate area would gather on the benches in the evening during the warm months and chit chat, including my mother and grandmother. But they would go in, however, at 8:30. That was the time Merv Griffin went on TV. The triangle was named in 1994 for Tom McDonald, “longtime Bay Ridge community volunteer, activist and member of Community Board Ten.” For awhile, I had thought it was named for longtime WNYW-TV (Channel 5) sports guy Tom McDonald, but it’s not.
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7/15/26