Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on a zip line

The Brooklyn Bridge turns 130 years old on May 24. That’s the date the bridge opened to massive crowds and fanfare in 1883.

The story of its amazing construction has been told many times. Yet one small moment during those 13 years deserves a shout-out: the day the bridge was crossed for the first time.

It wasn’t on foot but by rope. The man who took the plunge was E.F. Farrington, the bridge’s “master mechanic.”

In summer 1876, in preparation for building the steel-wire cables, a wire traveler rope was carefully looped around the anchorages built on each side of the river.

On August 25, after the rope had been secured in place, Farrington gave his workers a demo of how they would be getting from one side to the other, reports The Complete History of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, published in 1883.

“A boatswain’s chair—a board slung at the four corners by ropes uniting in a ring overhead—was attached to the traveler at the Brooklyn anchorage, and Mr. Farrington took his place in it at 1 o’clock p.m. on that day, and was drawn across to New York, his chair being lifted over the towers; the time from anchorage to anchorage, 22 minutes.”

A New York Times article from May 24, 1883 notes that thousands watched Farrington zip-line his way across from Brooklyn to New York:

“The firing of cannon, the blowing of whistles by the river craft, and the shouts of the spectators went up in a vast greeting to the man who sat in the boatswain’s buggy, waving his hat in one hand and clinging to the ropes with the other.”

Girl, roses, and butterfly in a Brooklyn garden

There’s an enormous amount of beauty in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, opened in 1910.

But the bronze statue of a girl holding roses in her right hand and a butterfly sundial in her left is an especially captivating sight.

Called “Roses of Yesterday” and created in 1923 by Harriet W. Frishmuth, the five-foot statue fittingly welcomes visitors into the rose garden pavilion.

Frishmuth was a Philadelphia native who came to New York to create art. She had a studio on Sniffen Court, the loveliest alley in Murray Hill.

A Colonial-era relic outside an uptown mansion

The Morris-Jumel Mansion (right), on 160th Street east of St. Nicholas Avenue, is a lovely time capsule of the 18th century city.

Built in the 1760s by British colonel Roger Morris as a breezy hilltop retreat called Mount Morris, it was used as a headquarters by George Washington during the Revolution. (Yep, Washington really did sleep here!)

In 1810, wealthy couple Stephen and Eliza Jumel turned it into a French-inspired country home, where they entertained prominent residents of the young city.

After her husband died, social-climbing Eliza’s new spouse, Aaron Burr, moved in—a fascinating story for another post.

Anyway, two hundred years later, the Georgian-Federal style mansion is a museum. But perhaps the most interesting relic is a slab of stone on the grounds outside the house.

It’s a mile marker. Before GPS, maps, and even a city street grid, mile markers were set in the ground on roads outside the city. They let travelers know how far they were from today’s downtown.

This mile marker says we’re 11 miles north, not a short distance back in the day.

An accompanying plaque explains that the mile marker was originally placed in 1769 on Kingsbridge Road, which ran along Broadway, according to Myinwood.net.

Mile markers have been disappearing for generations. Apparently a nine-mile marker remained in Upper Manhattan until as recently as 1991.

As far as I know, there’s only one other mile marker left in the ground: this beauty on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. I hope it’s still there.

An infamous murder on Brooklyn’s Lincoln Place

Ever notice that Brooklyn’s Degraw Street suddenly becomes Lincoln Place after crossing Fifth Avenue?

The name change has to do with a gruesome murder near this intersection in 1873, then the media attention that gripped the block for the next few years.

In March, Charles Goodrich, a 41-year-old widower, was found with three gunshot wounds to the head in his brownstone at what was then 731 Degraw Street.

At first, police thought it might be suicide or a robbery. But strangely, his body had been laid out neatly and cleaned of blood.

So when neighbors reported that a young woman had been living in the house and that they often saw Goodrich with her on the stoop, police took the investigation in a new direction.

They believed the woman’s name was Kate Stoddard (right); she was a Massachusetts native in her 20s who worked in a hat factory in Manhattan. But for months, she proved to be elusive.

Finally, after a sighting by Stoddard’s ex-roommate on the Fulton Ferry, cops tracked her down.

During questioning, she denied everything—until detectives found Charles Goodrich’s personal items in her room in a boarding house on High Street.

Reportedly she confessed. Turns out her real name was Lizzie Lloyd King. She’d met Goodrich through a personal ad, and they soon married.

Then Goodrich told her the marriage was a sham and he wanted her to leave him alone, as he was now engaged to another woman.

During an argument in the house on Degraw Street, a spurned King drew a gun and shot Goodrich dead.

In 1874, she was committed to an upstate insane asylum for life—but not before residents of Degraw Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues  (left) petitioned the city to have the street’s name changed, fearing the “unpleasant associations” with the murder.

New York playgrounds named after celebrities

Beastie Boy Adam Yauch, who died last year at age 47, isn’t the only musician to have a New York playground named in his honor.

Not far from his namesake park on Atlantic Avenue is Harry Chapin Playground, at Columbia Heights and Middagh Street.

Like Yauch, Chapin grew up in Brooklyn Heights. And just as Yauch spent his childhood playing at the park eventually named for him, so did Chapin.

Harry Chapin Playground was dedicated to the singer in 1987, six years after his life was cut short when the car he was driving on the Long Island Expressway collided with a truck.

How the west side of Central Park, at 81st Street, ended up with a Diana Ross Playground is an entirely different story.

According to this 1984 People article, Ross “had a dream” to create a playground for kids in the park. She planned to build it with cash raised from her July 1983 free concert on the Great Lawn. But after the show, she told the city she didn’t make any money.

Eventually, Ross put in $275,000 to fund the playground, which opened in the late 1980s.

Cool old-school store signs found all over the city

You don’t see too many delis with a Te-Amo Imported Cigars sign anymore. This one was spotted above a bodega on Graham Avenue in East Williamsburg.

Did neighborhood delis used to offer shoeshines, as the other end of the sign implies?

I don’t know what was covering up this Manhattan Flower Shop sign, on Manhattan Avenue in Morningside Heights. But I’m glad it’s visible again. The hand-drawn lettering is so charming.

Is this Joe Junior diner, on Third Avenue in the teens, owned by the same people who ran the late, great Joe Junior on Sixth Avenue and 11th Street? I love a restaurant that spells seafood with two words.

“Factory Methods Used” may have been great advertising in the 1970s. But in today’s artisanal, DIY world, John’s Shoe Repair, on Irving Place, would have to instead boast that they rebuilt shoes by hand.

Salerno Surgical Supplies is also on Graham Avenue in East Williamsburg. Its presence here might shed some light on the average age of neighborhood residents.

Taking in the view from East River Park in 1902

William Glackens contrasts the calm quiet of a lower Manhattan park with the smoke-choked industrial Brooklyn waterfront across the river in his 1902 painting “East River Park.”

Is this the same East River Park that exists today south of East 12th Street? According to the NYC Parks Department, the current park was conceived by Robert Moses in the 1930s.

The painting is part of the collection at the Brooklyn Museum. “William Glackens found ample subject matter in the parks of New York and the city dwellers who frequented them,” the museum website explains.

“Here he depicted the natural features of the East River Park, and the pastimes of its inhabitants, in sharp contrast to the bustling industrial setting of Brooklyn’s waterfront visible across the water. For the many immigrants living in small, cramped quarters, the urban parks of Brooklyn and Manhattan served as a refuge from the poor conditions and overcrowding of tenement life.”

Mark Rothko’s solitary 1930s subway platforms

Waiting for the subway to pull into the station can be a collective experience.

But not for the people in Mark Rothko’s Subway Series paintings. These figurative scenes, completed in the 1930s, depict isolated, Giacometti-esque New Yorkers who appear to be trapped in their own individual worlds.

These subway paintings “enabled him to focus on the horizontals and verticals, treating the figures as tall, spindly, stick-like forms,” according to the caption accompanying one of the paintings on the website for the virtual Musée Historique Environment Urbain.

“They are flat, stiff and inexpressive and yet suggestive of an inaccessible inner drama.”

A 2012 biography of Rothko by James E.B. Breslin had this to say: “As in all his subway paintings, Rothko’s interest is not in the trains but the platforms: modern, public, urban spaces where strangers come and go—or wait.”

“His stations are not grimy, dark, hellish underground spaces; nor are they filled with quick-moving, shoving, noisy rush-hour crowds. Rather, they are bare, compressed areas which contain a slow, quiet, and solitary mobility.”

Rothko, born in Russia and raised on the West Coast, moved to New York in the 1920s and soon began his career as a painter. Classified as an abstract expressionist, he spurned the label his entire life.

An earlier post on the most famous painting in the Subway Series.

A sleepy, beachy view across Gravesend Bay

Gravesend, Brooklyn has changed a lot in its almost 400-year history.

Founded in the 1640s by a group of religious dissenters, it went from colonial-era English town to farm community to the site of late 19th century beach resorts and a racetrack—then a suburban-like neighborhood by 1930, states The Encyclopedia of New York City.

In View Across Gravesend Bay to Seagate, a 1905 painting by Thomas Satterwhite Noble, the shabby wooden pier and debris-strewn beach give this stretch of Gravesend the appearance of a sleepy fishing village.

Today, this beach might be part of Calvert Vaux Park, named for the designer of Central Park who mysteriously died off these waters.

What took the place of Ebbets Field after 1957

Everyone knows the story: At the end of the 1957 baseball season, the Dodgers moved out of their Crown Heights ballpark and decamped to Los Angeles.

But the 45-year-old stadium on Bedford Avenue didn’t sit empty.

It was used by semipro leagues and college teams before the wrecking ball, painted to resemble a baseball, finally arrived in February 1960.

Following two years of construction, the Ebbets Field Apartments—beige, monolith buildings rising 20 stories—opened to the public as rentals.

The apartments are still there, looking worn. And somewhere on the property this plaque also exists, a small commemoration of the fabled ballpark that opened 100 years ago this month.

Ebbets Field wasn’t the only city stadium to get the ugly apartment building makeover. The Polo Grounds, former home of the New York Giants, is now the Polo Grounds Towers, a public housing complex.

One small, faded plaque marks the former site of home base.