A Brooklyn Summer

The neighborhood as seen from the apex of Sunset Park.

Uphill Architecture

A few specimens of representative architecture in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

Stuck up in Soho

Beneath the BQE

 

The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway cuts a huge, noisy, antiquated, and congested swath through the boroughs the bare its name.  Seeing as I don’t drive it regularly, or even own a car for that matter, I have very little use for the aging infrastructure.  Well, with one exception, the photos I take of it.  These photos were taken on Park Avenue, under the BQE, in the Clinton Hill area of Brooklyn, and near the Navy Yard.

 

 

 

 

Local Scale

Demonstrating the somewhat more human scale perspective that is the Brooklyn neighborhood. Taken in Cobble Hill.

Brrrrrrrrrrrooklyn

Well ok, its in the mid to upper 50's today, but when this photo was taken a few days ago, it was much colder. Taken at the corner of Boerum and Dean, where the neighborhoods of Boerum/Cobble Hill neighborhoods border each other.

Winter-Deli

A very cold day on Bedford Avenue in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn...

Flats Fixed

Who can resist quirky storefronts?  I know I can’t!  Obviously, at the corner of Park and Franklin; this is an area in which three neighborhood of Brooklyn meet.  Those neighborhoods are Clinton Hill, Williamsburg, and Bedford Stuyvesant.

My ‘Pretty’ Street

I tend to be a rather private person so I avoid posting online those things that are of a personal nature. With that being said, I definitely do not post content indicating my place of residence, in case one of my ‘raving stalker fans’ may be lurking in the darkness ;) I post photograph of locations all over the city, but available time has been scarce as of late so in an attempt to deliver new content, I have taken to the Hannibal Lecter strategy of coveting what I see everyday…In this case, my own street.

Without disclosing exactly where, I will describe the vicinity. I reside in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant. The section of the neighborhood that I live is in the far northwest corner where it borders Williamsburg (to the north) and Clinton Hill (the the west). I have seen realtors market property in this area as being in either neighborhoods to avoid the whole Bed Stuy [do or die] image. Regardless of the spin, I live in Bed Stuy. The neighborhood is in transition and my street is no different. My block consists of brownstone and tenement stock that have been rehabbed, the photo directly below was taken from my stoop.

Such is typical of a dense neighborhood, one block is completely different from the next. The next block contains old industrial properties that have been converted into lofts with a few areas that still contain light industry. The buildings are well utilized by graffiti artists.

The next block is mainly retail, this shot was taken on garbage collection day-eve; case closed on the ‘rats the size of cats’ mystery that are frequently seen at night. Its quite a surreal sight to be walking home at night to see rapid, mobile, masses inside closed garbage bags, or garbage cans that wobble as if they are in some kind of eccentric orbit with about five tails sticking out of the top.

Welcome to NYC retail after dark, opaque, graffitied, gates rule the landscape. From what I hear, there is an initiative to ban these things [citing safety and law enforcement concerns], but I’m not for sure.

Forget Ikea or some other urban home store, a real man needs only a few dozen of these to furnish his place…

You Would…Would You?

This wide angle shot was taken near the Hudson River in the Lower Manhattan neighborhood of Tribeca.

Click this image to view it large, much better that way…

Spring Teaser

Spring has partially arrived in the form of 1 to 2 days a week, but its total embrace still eludes us all.  This shot was taken in the West Village area of Manhattan.

Ghostly

Looking a silhouette of the Chrysler Building from a residential street, near Jackson Boulevard in Long Island City, Queens.

Crossed Wires

Just hanging around in Astoria photographing wires and fire escapes.  Taken near the corner of 30th and Newtown, exact area is geotagged in Flickr.

A Cold Day in Brooklyn

Taken at the corner of Metropolitan and Union in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg.

Slope Canyon

Architecture that is iconic of many street scenes in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slop.  The arterial streets are lined with buildings of this nature, which are a commercial/residential mix and the minor cross streets, which are cladded with historic brownstone homes.

The Homefront

I've been dedicating much of my photographic time to projects as of late and haven't been able to capture assorted urban scenes. This effort will contribute to great, less succinct, blog posts at a later date, but I am faced with the dilemma of providing immediate content; my solution, photograph close to home, as in, right in front of it. This is an autumn shot of the street, in which I live, in Brooklyn.

The Deli @ Myrtle & Adelphi

This shot demonstates the current and rapidly changing state of the northern section of Clinton Hill; that is, the section between Myrtle and Flushing, near the Navy Yards. A largely industrial area is rapidly becoming residential.

↑↓

Just wanted to see how retro I could get with the composition of this shot. This is the corner of Fulton and Vanderbilt in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.

Auto Culture

Brooklyn begins to take on a less urbanized feel when you get to its outer areas and neighborhoods (ie. garages, driveways, small yards, and large offsets from streets). This shot was taken on Bay Pky in Bensonhurst, near the Belt Parkway, a far south west neighborhood that is close to Coney Island.

The 'Newer' Lower East Side

New, modern condos and offices now mingle with the old tenements of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The neighborhood was once a working class area of the city, is rapidly becoming one of Manhattan's trendiest areas to be. Taken on Essex Street in the heart of the LES.