This is a tumblelog, kinda like a blog but with short-form, mixed-media posts with stuff I like. Scroll down a bit to start reading, or a bit more to read more about me.
Fire limits in Manhattan moved north pretty steadily (and early), but in Brooklyn it appears to have been in spurts. I wonder if any of the limits discussed here were even enacted in 1892, as there so many early 20th-century frame houses in north Brooklyn.
Brownstoner’s Building of the Day looks at the Claver Institute in Bed Stuy. An amazing building, from what was a golden era in Catholic church architecture in Brooklyn. Henry V. Murphy was one of a handful of diocesan go-to architects, and one of the most innovative of the group.
“unfashionably Modern midcentury structures”
Orchard Street, just north of Rivington in 1909. Most of the buildings along the west side of Orchard remain, though the pinnacles and the like along the cornices are long gone.
N.Y. Times: Pilar Montero, Bar Owner and Link to a Seafaring Past, Dies at 90
Mrs. Montero, who died on Jan. 14 at 90, presided as grande dame of the establishment and came to embody a sort of Brooklyn bridge between the old and new versions of the borough’s salty character. “She is a human time machine,” The New York Times wrote in 2006.
Montero’s was one of a dozen similar bars along Atlantic Avenue when Mrs. Montero and her husband, Joseph, opened for business in 1945 near the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. Like the others, Montero’s was open from 8 a.m., when longshoremen’s midnight shift ended, until 4 a.m., when the law required bars to close.
Unlike the others, which shuttered or upgraded to suit a more genteel clientele when dock traffic declined in the 1970s, Montero’s kept its character as a seafarers’ place after the seafarers had left, later attracting artists, writers and Hollywood location scouts.
The bungalows of Far Rockaway are gentrifying! (Actually, this has been going on for a while now.)
Kevin Shea finds an old theater above his bodega on Second AvenueAvenue A. You can tell by the fire stair that there WAS a theater there, but who knew that there IS a theater in there.
Folly Theater, Graham Avenue.
@urbanoyster tells us that on this day in 1934 Graham Avenue’s Folly Theater reopened - here is a color postcard (which appears to be a colorized version of the black-and-white card posted here).
