As the forecast for Brooklyn includes blizzard-like conditions yet again, I’m sitting snug and warm after an exciting commute in the snow with my camera. Though some news sources are predicting a foot of snow and 50+mph winds tonight, is it wrong that I’m just a little bit excited? Anyone have plans to go shoot this afternoon or later this evening?
Check out some of my warm-up shots below from the South Slope, Gowanus, and DUMBO! And make sure to contribute your own to our Flickr pool!
One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2010 is to become a bolder photographer, especially when it comes to street portraiture. It’s not always easy to capture the unwitting (and sometimes unwilling!) on film, but fortunately there are zoom lenses until I get up enough nerve. Thanks to my fellow Love of Brooklynite Kruger for letting me borrow this crisp, vintage 135mm lens — it’s the perfect solution to shyness on the street!
On da Road (Brooklyn Style)
Brooklyn is an enigma. Situated on the westernmost location of Long Island, it forms the entrance to New York Harbor with Staten Island in the geological scheme. When it comes to human emotion, just the mere mention of the word Brooklyn is enough. We know you are not talking about Brooklyn, Ohio or Brooklyn Park, Minnesota but the Brooklyn located in Kings County, New York — the one made famous the world over through literature and media. The place whose greatest resource is the people who call it home.
Once one of six towns making up Kings County itself encompassed what is now the downtown area from Brooklyn Heights down to Red Hook and just into Sunset Park. The other towns were Flatlands, Flatbush, Bushwick, New Utrecht and Gravesend. Williamsburg was a growing village within the township of Bushwick that was granted its own charter and became a city. Within a decade before the Civil War, both Williamsburg and Bushwick were annexed by the city of Brooklyn. The other towns remained agricultural well into the 20th century, yet they were all incorporated to Brooklyn between 1894-1896.
In 1898, Brooklyn itself was annexed to the City of New York. All towns were Dutch except Gravesend, which was founded by a woman, Lady Deborah Moody, who left England in persecution of her beliefs, and came to Brooklyn via a radical Anabaptist sect from Massachusetts. The name Brooklyn itself means Broken Land in the Dutch language.
From the times of the Algonquins, whose place and tribe names still grace many community and place names here, to the European settlement and subsequent annexation into the greatest city in the world, we may live on Broken Land (Breuckelen) in what is arguably the finest collection of residential architecture in a single county in the United States. The past here may not have always been pleasant or fair, but yet in this small county we have not only created a world class image but the image of America itself or what it hopes to be some day. This is why I LOVE Brooklyn.
This past weekend, I cracked open a new book I got called Walking Brooklyn which is a compilation of 30 neighborhood tours throughout the far reaches of Brooklyn. The talented (and engaging) Adrienne Onofri really does a bang-up job taking you through 3 to 5-mile walks and dishing some great historical facts and super-local sites.
I rode my bike down to Bay Ridge, a neighborhood I loved living in and one which I thought I’d explored quite thoroughly, to try out my first tour from the book. It was fantastic. I learned so much.
The tour started at the 69th Street pier, where I found this quintessential Bay Ridge gentleman attacking his Saturday afternoon newspaper by the bay. His yachting cap was amazing.
