street scenes

The Return of Tony Manero

Submitted by Steve on Tue, 10/21/2008 - 8:55pm
You forty and fifty-somethings will undoubtedly remember the 1977 anthemic film about the disco era, Saturday Night Fever. What you may not know is that it put my neighborhood on the map. "Fever" was about the disco days and the lives of several blue collar kids in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

I love talking with my neighbors about those days. They say the movie was an accurate depiction of what life was like here, at least for the disco heads. In 1977, I was a hardcore jazz poser at Berklee College of Music in Boston so I missed it all, geographically and socially.

The disco portrayed in the movie, 2001 Odyssey, really existed and was only a few blocks from here. In fact, it didn't shut down until 2005, although by then it had become a seedy gay bar. But it still had that famous lighted dance floor.

After "Fever", Bay Ridge's glory as a nightlife destination gradually disappeared. Brooklyners began migrating to trendy gentrifying Manhattan neighborhoods for their late night fun at clubs like The World, Infinity, Kamikaze, Tunnel, Limelight, Danceteria and music venues like CBGBs, Mudd Club and The Ritz. I lived in the center of that though. We referred to those people (now, people like me) as "the bridge and tunnel crowd".


This would make an awesome train set.

Submitted by Steve on Fri, 08/29/2008 - 8:42pm
My older brother was the model train buff. Me, I always liked the real thing. As a little kid growing up in Japan, my friends and I used to sneak across the mulberry fields and sit by the train tracks to Yokohama. But the local koban police always took notice of the little white kids and hauled us back home with a stern warning never to do it again. As if.

Bay Ridge is in south Brooklyn, on lower New York Harbor. One the benefits of living here is dozing off to fog horns and big ship engines in the harbor. But I was always curious about one horn I'd hear occasionally that sounded like a locomotive. It was months before I realized that I had a small rail yard only three blocks away. In my defense, you have to climb up on a cement wall on a bridge overpass to get this shot.

This yard is between me and the Brooklyn Army Terminal. During WW2, 85% of the soldiers bound for Europe arrived on trains in this rail yard before being processed at BAT and boarding ships in the harbor beyond.

In the olden days, Brooklyn had lots of small railroads: the Sea Beach and Coney Island Railroad, the Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Island Railroad, the Prospect Park and Coney Island Railroad... it seemed like every Brooklyn neighborhood had its own rail line. After 1896, most were assimilated into the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Corporation (BRT). The NYC subway system would eventually make dinosaurs of most of them.


She Talked. This Happened.

Submitted by Steve on Wed, 08/27/2008 - 6:45pm
Next up in my "Meet The Neighbors" series is one of the largest buildings in NYC, the Brooklyn Army Terminal. It's not large in vertical terms but as far as the footprint goes, there are few NYC buildings to match it.

BAT is located four blocks north of me. Surprisingly, for a complex of its imposing size few people around here know much about it. About the only information I could glean from the locals was, "The Army used to own it. It's something else now."

With its Pentagon-like utilitarian bulk, the closed-to-the-public perimeter security, the NYPD K-9 facility on premises and its roof cluttered with high-tech satellite dishes, the rumor was that it contained some super-secret CIA/NSA/Men In Black facility. I thought there might be something to that.

On 9/11, barely 90 minutes after the towers were hit, Doc Karen was summoned to work triage at Lutheran Hospital just down the street. As I drove her past BAT I was amazed to see that the entrances to the complex had been blocked by sand-filled DOT dump trucks. Wow, that was quick. What were they protecting? Not satisfied with these impressions though, I did some research.


Can This Be This?

Submitted by Steve on Tue, 08/26/2008 - 5:56pm
This past Saturday I went pedaling around the neighborhood with my digital camera. I've been wanting to do a series of articles about the neighborhood so I needed to stock up on bad pictures. I'm from the Grateful Dead jam school of photography: just keep snapping crap and sooner or later you'll stumble on something almost interesting.

I live just south of one of NYC's oldest and most dilapidated industrial sprawls, on the western edge of an area called Sunset Park. I know, the name sounds like sipping Mai Tais on the veranda while watching the ocean swallow up the last fading rays of daylight. Well, in a way, the metaphor fits. The sun set on this place about 75 years ago. I'll get more into that later.


I Wanna Drive

Submitted by Steve on Fri, 08/15/2008 - 9:42am
Last year, NYC DOT repaved several Brooklyn avenues. Last month, they began ripping up some cross streets, mine included. Even though my street was in good condition, people who have lived on the block for 40 years can't remember the last it was repaved. I figured this might make a good photo archive moment for my planned neighborhood blog.

When I saw the yellow signs pop up all over the street I thought it was going to be yet another annoying film shoot. Over the past couple of years Brooklyn has gotten to be a hot location with Hollywood.

You might even see me in the background of an Ashton Kutcher/Cameron Diaz flick, "What Happens In Vegas", which was shot earlier this spring in the park down the block. I guess they wanted someone walking dogs so the PA pulled me out of the crowd of rubbernecks and told me to walk slowly and not look at the camera. I obeyed but Auggie became obsessed with a squirrel and caused a scene so we probably got left for dead on the cutting room floor.


As promised: Dyker Heights Extreme Christmas

Submitted by Steve on Mon, 11/27/2006 - 11:05pm
Forgive two blog posts in one day but I'll be off the air for a few days and I know that some of you are cursing the knots in your string of outside Christmas lights right about now. Prepare to be overwhelmed.

Dyker Heights is next to my beloved Bay Ridge here in Brooklyn. In most respects, it's pretty much indistinguishable from Bay Ridge except during the Christmas holidays, when you can spot it from the moon. I don't know what they put it in the water over on 11th Avenue but subtlety ain't it.
















Here's a little YouTube video travelogue of Dyker Heights.



What's Bay Ridge?

Submitted by Steve on Wed, 09/20/2006 - 1:53pm
BrooklynRowHouse is located in south Brooklyn, or Brooklyn South for the locals, in an area called Bay Ridge.

For Google Maps fans, here we are. We sit on lower NY harbor on the narrows between Brooklyn and Staten Island, connected by the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, which was the world's longest suspension span bridge for about five minutes when it opened in 1964. One of the coolest things about this neighborhood are the big ships and the lonely foghorns at night which are obliterated only by low-flying helicopters from NYPD's heliport three blocks away.

Bay Ridge is a generally quiet, increasingly upscale bedroom community. It's close enough to Manhattan to be reasonably friendly to daily commuting but far enough away to have it's own distinct community feel. In fact, many Bay Ridgers have no interest at all in Manhattan. I've met people who haven't visited "the city" in a decade or more.

Why should they? For one, Bay Ridge offers one of the best "restaurant rows" in NYC with excellent restaurants like Cebu, Meze, Bay Ridge Sushi, Tuscany Grill and some of the best Italian food in the city. This neighborhood being Irish and Italian, there's certainly no shortage of pubs either, from pretentious wine bars to old school neighborhood tap rooms, like Three Jolly Pigeons.

Housing here runs the gamut from funky, low-rise apartment buildings along Third Avenue to $5 million Shore Road mansions owned by big retailers, judges, old money and the nouveau riche...

to everything in between, like the arts-and-crafts "Gingerbread House", which is located a few blocks from here.

But up until the past ten years or so Bay Ridge has been known mainly as a blue collar community: cops, firefighters and young families with first homes.

Bay Ridge was immortalized as a middle class area in the movie Saturday Night Fever. The disco portrayed in the movie actually existed: 2001 Odyssey Disco on 64th Street. The club and it's lighted dance floor closed only last year. It was mostly filmed on location and I like seeing my neighborhood thirty years ago.



Another well-known Bay Ridge area denizen is the now-ubiquitous Sbarro restaurant. It began as a popular local salumeria (Italian grocery store), years before it grew into the highway rest area chain monster it became. This original store closed two years ago. If you think Sbarro's origin is a bit weird, I was surprised to learn that yet another chain restaurant was started by a Bay Ridger: Boulder Creek Steakhouse. I've tried the latter. I don't know which was more tender: the steak or my belt.
Forgotten New York has a great thumbnail pictorial history of Bay Ridge but my next door neighbor, Betsy, has the best collection of old photos from the neighborhood, like this circa 1905 picture of the Crescent Club. I've gotta smile when I think that my house was probably under construction at the time this photo was shot.

While much of Bay Ridge is "old Bay Ridge" -- and by that I mean that there are lots of Bay Ridgers here who can trace their lineages back to a great grandparent who also lived here -- the area has come under assault from late-comers like me: wannabe homeowners who were priced out of Manhattan, Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope real estate. Even in the short few years that I've been here I've seen real estate values triple and more. In fact, a real estate agent told me last month that she could sell my house for four times what I paid for it in 1999. That means that I've earned as much paper wealth just from owning this house as I have actually working for a living! That's sick.

Ethnically, Bay Ridge has an unusual diversity. It's a small enclave of old-school republican conservatism in one of America's most liberal cities, which also means that it's conspicuously caucasian (for NYC). At the same time it's one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the city, most recently with a heavy influx of middle class Arabs, Russians and Asians. South Bay Ridge is traditionally "Italian Bay Ridge" while my neighborhood was known as "Irish Bay Ridge". In fact, my neighborhood's history is as much Norwegian and Newfie as anything else. Norwegian Day is a huge event in Owl's Head Park.

Owl's Head Park is at the bottom of my block and is one of the nicest city parks outside Manhattan. But only the newbies call it Owl's Head. Old timers still call it Bliss Park. This neighborhood was once a huge estate and farm belonging to Eliphalet Williams Bliss, a former machinist who built the EW Bliss company and who profited heavily in the munitions industry during the 19th century. Bliss is credited with inventing the torpedo. Here's what Owl's Head Park looked like in 1906. I think I can make out what is now the dog run where I bring Jack and Auggie every morning.

No neighborhood history is complete without dropping some famous names. Silent film star, Clara Bow, was born here. The actress, Lillian Russell, used to live here in a house bought for her by Diamond Jim Brady. It's now a Catholic girl's school, Fontbanne Academy. Both Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson had houses here, back when they were stationed at Fort Hamilton, which is still an active, albeit small, military base in Bay Ridge.

More currently, the actress, Marisa Tomei, is from here, or rather right next door in Dyker Heights. She didn't develop her accent in My Cousin Vinnie in a vacuum. It's classic south Brooklyn princess as was her in-your-face sarcasm. Two of the cast of The Sopranos are from around here too: Steven Schirippa (Bobby Bacala) and Tony Sirico (Paulie Walnuts). I've seen Sirico in the local delis. Another Sopranos cast member, Joseph R. Gannascoli ("Vito Spatafore") used to own a restaurant a few blocks from here, Soup As Art.

Film crews are all over the neighborhood this week shooting a new NBC series called The Black Donnellys about four kids who get sucked into the Irish mobs. Are you getting the idea that Bay Ridge might also have some attraction for the underworld? Well, it's true but that's not as bad as it sounds because Bay Ridge is also popular with senior law enforcement types. As a result it's one of the most crime-free areas of the city. Petty crooks know better than to work a neighborhood where their victim could easily be a cop, a fed, a judge or (worse) a Gambino.

Bay Ridge is the first neighborhood that the runners in the NYC Marathon see after the starting gun. It was also one of the hardest hit by 9/11 because of all the firefighters, cops and young financial wizzes who live here. You can't walk too far around here without encountering a family's memorial to its fallen loved one.

Now that I'm finally getting a handle on my SLR digital camera, stay tuned for the Christmas photos. If you think you've seen some outrageous Christmas displays, you ain't seen nothing until you've seen Dyker Heights during the holidays.



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