While crossing the incredibly unpaved St. Johns Pl (btn Rogers & Nostrand) I noticed the glint of buried trolley tracks. They’re still mostly under another layer of pavement, but they’re there. It’s pretty cool.
Go see it while you can… they may be paving it over very soon, according to posts in Where’s the f***ing asphalt on St Johns Pl? on the Prospect Heights Message Board.
Uploaded by horseycraze in the Prospect Heights Photo Pool:
“the lot of the former vanderbilt products building. to be replaced by a condominium.”
Photo pool founder Frank Lynch: “Gang, the Vanderbilt Products building is now kaput. Underberg is kaput.”
“Get those lenses out: we can be the preservationists of the memories of what this neighborhood was pre-Ratner.
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Susan says: “Crow Hill is really Crown Heights, but I’ve come to love the name and I probably sound a little pretentious calling it that. 🙂 Crow Hill was its pre-prohibition name. My book (The Neighborhoods of Brooklyn
“The book also says that the name could have come from the mid-1800’s when there were African and African American settlements there, and the whites called them ‘crows’. A third story has it that the ‘crows’ were inmates in the Kings County Penitentiary that was there from 1846 to 1907.”
From the WPA Guide to New York City
PHOTO: The Black Lady Theatre / Black Star Recording Studio, Nostrand Ave., Crown Heights [Bridge and Tunnel Club]
LINK: PH Trivia Because I Am Bored [Daily Heights Forums]
From the “stuff you have always wanted to do” file:Corie Trancho and Alexis Robie have documented some of those intriguing and stately ruins over at the Brooklyn Navy Yards. Turns out this is called Officer’s Row, also known as Admiral’s Row. The 10 houses (seven remain), built between 1864 and 1901, served as to high-ranking officers and their families:
“We came into contact with two very special families, both of whom whose siblings had spent small portions of their childhood and adolescence, between the early to late 1970’s in Officer’s Row. As we began to communicate with one another via email, memories flowed. They began to outline invaluable personal histories of life in the yard. Fascinated, we listened, questioned, and began to dig.
“This site is a workbench for our questions and research. We hope to shape it more as our project moves forward.”
Officer’s Row: Memories of the Brooklyn Navy Yard [officersrow.org]
Photographer Percy Loomis Sperr (1890-1964) took this photo of 353 Park Place at Underhill Ave. (N.E. corner) on August 29, 1930.
Image from the New York Public Library (NYPL) Digital Gallery.
Thanks to Roy for the tip…
Filmmakers Joel Sucher and Steven Fischler will be at Union Temple (17 Eastern Parkway, 718-638-7600) next Wednesday to show and discuss their 1-hour documentary: "FROM SWASTIKA TO JIM CROW: Jewish Refugee Scholars in the American South."
This film "tells the previously untold story of the many German Jewish professors
who, expelled from their homeland by the Nazis, found new lives and
careers at all-Black colleges and universities in the South."
META tags at pbs.org reveal that "The story of Black-Jewish relations in the United States is a long and complex one…. Jews were among those who worked to establish the NAACP in 1909. African-American newspapers were among the first in the U.S. to denounce Nazism…. FROM SWASTIKA TO JIM CROW creates hope and reminds us of a time in U.S. history when the two communities came together."
DETAILS: Next Wednesday, March 9; 7 pm. Bring dessert or snacks. FREE. Reservations: [email protected] or 718-638-7600.
From the Brooklyn Daily Eagle archives at brooklynpubliclibrary.org. "DROPPED DEAD OF STARVATION" is the actual title of the article. (Interesting to note that "Ads By Google" aren’t much different than the advertising techniques used back in the 1930s.)
You think you had it bad. CLICK VINTAGE PHOTO to see what Park Place looked like on March 14, 1888.
Can anybody pinpoint the block? Someone should go out and take "now & then" photos.
