Have a fantastic week and stay cool!

In between, it was all party.  

Throngs of people all dressed in orange and in high spirits filled the back three cars.  There were people playing bongos, people giving stump speeches, shouting, singing, and even a vuvuzela concerto, with the musical pieces including, “V will Rock You” and “V didn’t Start the Fire,” among others.  The NYPD must have been alerted to the party beforehand because there were about 20 officers chaperoning the trip, but they were in great spirits as well and were smiling and enjoying themselves when their high-up boss (who was also on the train) wasn’t looking.  So with all of this, there was no way that For the Love of Brooklyn could have missed this!

Waiting for the final train to arrive on the Lower East Side; the final empty train about to be filled with revelers!

The Motorman for the Last (V) Train Ever reflects and poses for the camera.

Vuvuzuelas? On a train?! Loud!!

It’s not a party unless you’re hanging from the ceiling! Getting crazy as we approach the final countdown…

MTA SAFARI. Mission: Find the last known (V) train in existence.

How cool is that MTA costume?

Smiles abound as the train approaches the end of its journey.

We’ve arrived at Forest Hills!!!

“Are you a photographer?” he asked urgently, hands full of grocery bags. Uh, do you see my tripod, man? “You gotta go over there! There’s been an accident!” He pointed to the north side of the Prospect Expressway, where I could see lights flashing from the highway down below. I finished up the shot, collapsed the tripod, and ran to the fence where he’d pointed.

I watched as the first of many fire trucks arrived on the scene. I could see straight down into the car that had ricocheted off the median in the west-bound lane; there was a young woman in the driver’s seat, moving slightly. No firefighter approached the car until they shut down traffic, and cars continued to speed by the smoking fender.

Finally, the rescue workers approached the car, spoke brief words of reassurance, and prepared her a gurney for the ambulance. She was speaking and the firefighters were smiling as they safely loaded her up for the hospital.

I, on the other hand, was running out of film, but managed to snag a shot of the traffic backup before hiking home. Let’s hear it for the MTA. I love the subway.

Check out the interview below and more of his work on his Flickr stream!

For the Love of Brooklyn: What is the story you try to tell with your photography?
Peter Puleo: The original story I was trying to tell behind my photography began as a documentary project of my forgotten community living in the shadow of the greatest city in the world. That genre of shooting, I believe, has remained evident in my work as I always try to capture the lost moments and emotions of the city — particularly the “outer” borough communities – usually at night, and particularly in inclement weather. Another story one may pick up on is more historical as I try to blend the past into the present day through similarities in lifestyles and social habits/customs. Eventually joining the internet community, I became exposed to many new and fascinating styles and concepts of photography. It always blows my mind how many people show such original talent to what for so long was ignorantly considered the easiest of all arts. There are many amazing and talented individuals displaying their work not only on Flickr but also on so many blogs and internet forums too. It is truly a learning experience of which I have become a perpetual student.

LoB: As a native Brooklynite/New Yorker, how does your view behind the lens change as you move between boroughs?
PP: My view behind the camera lens does not change anywhere I go. As much as I love Brooklyn, if I find something, I believe worth showing to the world outside of Brooklyn, I will photograph it. I believe Brooklyn has definitely had a huge effect on my approach to photography and especially people because I try not to be judgmental of anyone I photograph and always try in some way to create a dignity in all my shots, whether it is a sad lost pride or a stoic individual. I have had conversations with virtually all the folks I have shot and for a few, I know their life stories, which I try to bring out as much as possible in only one or two shots.

LoB: If each borough of New York City was a different kind of camera format, what would Brooklyn be and why?
PP: This is a question that requires a lot of thought. Here at this time I am going to say Large Format because these cameras are still the very much used by the photo industry in the professional areas of Fashion and Landscape photography. Brooklyn as a landscape is a cornucopia of the world transplanted to a small corner of Long Island and part of the greatest city in the world. In this landscape you can see a microcosm of America and also very much in evident is the best and worst of what our society has to offer; it makes it a truly unique place. From a fashion standpoint, Brooklyn is a voyeur’s paradise and probably one of the best people-watching places in the world. Fashion cannot happen without people and if there is one thing that has always been Brooklyn’s greatest export, it has been our people. We definitely march to our own tune.

LoB: You primarily have been shooting film, but have been known to use digital on occasion.  How does your photography change when you’re using one or the other?
PP: Film was the format I was introduced to from a young age when I was given a Polaroid Spirit600 on my 5th birthday — probably my favorite camera at that young age.  By the time I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time with a Ricoh point-and-shoot and then got my first digital camera at age 19 – the Canon SD500 Elph. I spent a lot of time with that camera until I started taking film photography courses in college and started using my dad’s Minolta SRT201 and Pentax K1000 – a camera I still use quite frequently.

Using film keeps me grounded to the basic fundamentals of photography being a fine art; I find that if you do not get to see the finished product of what you are shooting immediately, it will make you more critical and picky of your art and quite possibly create a unique style of what you shoot. I find that when I shoot film, my pictures speak more on their own because I invested more passion and thought into taking that one shot, knowing there cannot always be a do-over. On a more opinionated point of view, I love the technicolor quality of many films, particularly low-speed slide film. Many of my more recent film pictures posted on Flickr were shot with 100 speed Fuji Velvia and I try to expose the differences in my photostream between that and the digital and cell phone pictures I occasionally post.

LoB: You probably know Brooklyn better than anyone in the world (at least anyone under 30).  How did you gain the knowledge and would you ever consider giving walking tours?
PP: WOW! That is quite a compliment. I would not say I know Brooklyn better than anyone, even in my mid-20s age group. There is relatively small but very dedicated group of all-ages Newyorkophiles, one might call us. Brooklyn was basically introduced to me as a very young kid by a couple of factors. First and foremost, my paternal grandmother, a Bushwick native, bestowed quite a bit of borough pride on me. Her dignity in not fleeing the neighborhood like so many of her neighbors was very admirable to me as a kid. My father came of age amidst quite a bit of different worlds in what was a very tumultuous 1960s Brooklyn and the characters who were his friends and their stories left an undeniable impact on my life.

Another major factor would be the Canarsie neighborhood in which I grew up during the 1990s and 2000s. Without a doubt, it is a sociologist’s dream – the community was an amazing mix of old bourgeois Brooklyn families, established German and Italian Americans, a large displaced Jewish community fleeing neighboring Brownsville beginning in the 60s, and rapidly growing Caribbean and Asian immigration populations beginning in the late 1980s. This environment lent the neighborhood quite an old-fashioned working class cosmopolitan flair not really found in the city in such recent history. The history behind that world started emerging with all the amazing artifacts I started finding by strolling through my own neighborhood as a young teen. And many fascinating stories from a very large number of old-timers living around me who came from all over Brooklyn, America and the World only made me hungry for information. It has become a very serious affair since then.

Many times I have mulled over the possibility of conducting walking tours here in Brooklyn and actually on occasion I have had the pleasure of assisting my friend Adam Schwartz, a very well-known and respected historian and school teacher right here in Brooklyn! His page on Flickr is http://www.flickr.com/photos/11290907@N03/

Will I conduct tours in the future is a question I honestly have not answered myself. I do not think I can go at it alone because I wouldn’t know where to begin as there is so much out there. But if anyone out there is ever interested in pursuit of this endeavor, feel free to contact me. [Ed. note: Hints might be dropping all over. Tell us here where you want the next tour and walk to happen!]

LoB: An extra one for fun: What is the best subway line, and best model train?
PP: This is a tough one for me, haha. Growing up, my father used to have off on Wednesdays and Sundays and around the age of 5-7, every Wednesday after school we would take a random trip on a different subway route here in Brooklyn (LIRR too). One of my favorite trips was taking the (D) train to Coney Island (It used to be called the Brighton local). However, being from Canarsie, the (L) would be my train. If I had to pick a subway line as the best in the whole city, then it would be between the (A) and (J). The (A) traverses the city from the top of Manhattan to the seaside peninsula – a fabulous ride indeed but it only passes through Brooklyn and underground at that. The (J) and (L), on the other hand, only make 5 stops in Manhattan and spend the bulk of their run on the old BMT lines. The (J) is all elevated in Brooklyn and is a wonderful throwback to the days of the massive elevated transit empires of the New York of yore.

The subway train models that were my favorites were recently retired last year and they were the ambitious Slant R40 and the classic R38.

Thanks so much to Peter for the fantastic interview and have a great weekend!

After a long holiday break and many travels both domestic and abroad, all of us at for the LOVE of BROOKLYN are now back in our fair borough. Happy New Year and best wishes to you and yours! Stay tuned for more coverage, more photos, and follow us on Twitter for up-to-the-minute updates!

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 weekend marked the seventh annual Open House New York celebration, which grants public access to many architecturally-significant and culturally interesting landmarks in the NYC area not otherwise open often (or ever, in some cases). The program this year featured loads of really exciting tours, many of which sold out in advance.

I opted to try and grab tickets for the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel tour, and to my good fortune, I was able to reserve two spots before it sold out. The tour takes you down below the street level into the world’s oldest subway tunnel, which was lost for decades until a man named Bob Diamond rediscovered its location in 1980. After excavating the tunnel and trying (without success) to petition the city government to put it to good re-use, Diamond founded an organization to lead tours, preserve its history, and promote the tunnel as a fascinating historical landmark in New York city history. Check out his organization’s website (and full history of the tunnel) here.

I can heartily recommend the tour, which they give monthly, and with plenty of excitement, I brought my tripod and a flashlight. Check out my Open House photos and captions below!

Two volunteers from the Open House New York staff and BHRA set up traffic barriers and remove the manhole in the intersection of Atlantic Avenue and Court Street in Brooklyn.

The tour guide led groups of us down into the tunnel via the manhole in the middle of the street. That felt pretty awesome, as the cars were zooming by. Strangely, you couldn't really hear much street noise at all.

After coming down through the manhole, we entered the antechamber. This is where Bob Diamond crawled through and made his discovery.

This shot is from near the end of the tunnel, not 200 yards from the Hudson River and New York Bay. There is a giant stone wall at the end of the tunnel, in which they believe that an old steam engine is buried. Let's hope that the city and powers that be grant them money to excavate and find out!!