THE New York Surrogates’ Court is one of the most extravagant Beaux Arts buildings in NYC and one building I’d really like to enter one day to see the fantastic…
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HERE’S the front doorway of #5-#7 Ten Eyck Street at Union Avenue. Ten Eyck Street runs in three pieces in East Williamsburg, through the Williamsburg Houses, where it’s reduced to…
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BEFORE Brooklyn was a borough, it was a city; before that, it was a smaller city; before that, it was a small town; before that, a few huts by the…
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NEW York’s first water system was built between 1837 and 1842. Prior to those years, water was obtained from cisterns, wells and barrels from rain. Construction began in 1837 on…
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FINALLY! Your webmaster has come back to the Bronx! It had not been since November 2021 I had set foot in the mainland borough. As many of you know, I…
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FOR years I had hunted Margaret Court. No, not the famed Australian tennis champion in the 1960s and 1970s. I was seeking a short alley in Homecrest, a subdivision of…
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WHILE West 33rd passes the Empire State Building as it nears 5th Avenue, I was more fascinated by the Bawo and Dotter Building across the street at #20 West 33rd,…
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In 1877, the Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Island Railway was incorporated, opening the next year in 1878. It originally ran from the Prospect Park entrance at Flatbush and Ocean Avenues…
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PUGSLEY Creek, an inlet of the East River, forms a fork with the much longer and deeper Westchester Creek in Clason Point, Bronx, with Castle Hill Park at the foot…
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ANCIENT New Utrecht, Brooklyn, now co-terminous with Kings County, was once just one of six towns that made up Kings County, delineated by British rulers in 1683. “Kings” refers to the…
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BAY Parkway, which slots in between 21st and 23rd in the list of southwest Brooklyn avenues from 1 to 28, and I have had an off and on relationship. Oddly…
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THROUGH much of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Penny Bridge was a toll bridge on the Bushwick & Newtown Turnpike (end of Meeker Ave). In the seventeenth century, it…