Sheepshead Bay

Sometimes, NYC history can be preserved in the unlikeliest of ways and in the most unusual places. Take a large mural along East 15th Street in the shadow of the BMT…

The naming of Brooklyn streets — well, NYC streets — is a topic of constant fascination. Well, for your webmaster, at least. A glance at the Brooklyn map in the Sheepshead…

Coney Island Avenue is among Brooklyn’s lengthiest routes, extending from Ocean Parkway and Parkside Avenue where Prospect Park meets the Parade Grounds and runs generally straight south all the way…

What’s the longest street that runs entirely in Brooklyn? It seems there are two candidates: Flatbush Avenue and Bedford Avenue. (Any drivers out there want to decide the matter using…

When I first started researching NYC history I assumed that Sheepshead Bay was named for its one-time resemblance, in outline, to a sheep’s head. After all, that’s how a peninsula on…

CONTINUED FROM SHEEPSHEAD BAY, PART 2 We’ve run out of letters The town of Flatbush, absorbed into Brooklyn in the 1890s, had its own tidy street naming system: East and West…

CONTINUED FROM SHEEPSHEAD BAY, PART 1 Up in the old hotels Brian Merlis, in the title of his Sheepshead Bay book, calls Sheepshead Bay “Brooklyn’s Gold Coast.” After Austin Corbin built…

Heavy snow in NYC winters is unpredictable.  A series of winters with little snow can be followed by years of blizzardy winters.  But a fearsome, freak blizzard in early March 1888…

Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay, named for the fish that used to be abundant there, has been occupied by Europeans since the 1640s when English noblewoman Lady Deborah Moody planned the village…

Constructed exclusively to light the network of parkways that Robert Moses constructed beginning in the Twenties, these distinctive poles are made of both wood and iron. Some are still in…