Bob’s New York

I’ve lived in New York City—Brooklyn—for 39 of my 47 years. Like most people, I’ve built up a mental map of the place where I live, in which my internal landmarks assume disproportionate size and importance over the actual landscape. I’m not sure if the annotated photomap below the cutline will fascinate anyone but me and fellow New Yorkers (and maybe not even them). For the next ten days, however, I’ll add reader’s personal landmarks (and brief annotations), as long as they fall within the boundaries of the photomap (Unfortunately, most of Staten Island and The Bronx are not on the map, and Queens is cut by about a third). Either post your landmark as a comment or e-mail it to me. The request can be for anything, from the bar where you met your spouse to a public landmark like the Empire State Building. I won’t post home addresses, for obvious reasons.

There are actually two maps: a guide map that lets you see the whole area at a glance, and the detailed photomap. The detailed map is a big image (1000 x 1000 pixels), so it may take some time to load, and you’ll have to scroll around to view all of it.


Notes

Geography: New York City is composed of five boroughs, four of which are islands or parts of an island: Brooklyn (Kings County) and Queens (Queens County) are on the western tip of Long Island (Nassau County bounds Queens to the east); Manhattan (New York County) and Staten Island (Richmond County) are islands themselves; only The Bronx (Bronx County) is on the U.S. mainland. Though the suburbs theoretically begin at the city’s boundaries, in practice there are parts of Staten Island and Queens especially that are still more suburban than parts of Nassau County, Westchester (north of the city), or large portions of northern New Jersey. Of course the whole region is becoming more and more urbanized, and in another fifty years the whole eastern seaboard will probably be one giant supercity.

Nomenclature: The small red dots on the detail map are places where I’ve lived. The alphanumeric tags are by borough (i.e.: “Q10” is Queens 10), and are not entirely sequential. The designations R1 through R10 are river or inlet crossings (note that not every river crossing is identified; there are simply too many of them in Manhattan and tagging them would clutter the map unnecessarily).

Photo Credit: The guide and photomap are adapted from a NASA photograph (sts113-347-034) taken from the Space Shuttle Endeavor in December 2002. The 14-day mission to the International Space Station (STS-113) was commanded by Jim Wetherbee.

Guide Map

Guide Map of NYC 

Detailed Photomap

Detailed Photomap of NYC 

B1. Marine Park: an 800-acre park with pedestrian and bicycle paths, and playing fields for baseball, soccer, football, and cricket. The oval path inside the park is planted with a ring of beautiful old shade trees. “Marine Park” is also the name of the area surrounding the park proper—a residential neighborhood of one- and two-family homes.
B2. Gerritsen Inlet and Salt Marsh: part of the Gateway National Recreation Area, the marsh is home to rabbits, ducks, geese, horseshoe crabs, cormorants, sandpipers, fiddler crabs, snails, butterflies, herons, egrets, red-winged blackbirds, marsh hawks, and a huge variety of fish, insects and flora.
B3. Floyd Bennett Field: a former U.S. Coast Guard Air Station, now inactive except for a NYPD aviation unit. It was dedicated by Mayor James J. Walker in 1931 and named for Floyd Bennett, the aviator who piloted Admiral Byrd across the North Pole in 1926.
B4. Sheepshead Bay: the home of Brooklyn’s small sport fishing and party boat fleet. Though the fleet is much reduced, boats still leave every morning and evening for fishing trips in local waters. Emmons Avenue, the street that parallels the north side of the bay, used to be lined with clam bars and seafood restaurants, but most have been replaced by retail stores. Randazzo’s Clam Bar, my favorite, still survives, unlike Davey Jones Locker, a waterfront dive that saw much between-class drinking in my early college days.
B5. Kingsborough Community College: I attended KCC, part of the City University of New York, for two years. The college is located in Manhattan Beach, which is both a neighborhood of huge, expensive homes (on tiny lots—hey, it’s New York), and an actual beach, seen as the light-colored crescent to the left of the alphanumeric tag. I first attended Kingsborough in 1975, when much of the campus still consisted of temporary buildings left behind by the U.S. Coast Guard, which had a World War II-era base there. Boardwalks connected most of the buildings so that students wouldn’t have to negotiate the ankle-deep sea of mud that covered the campus in wet weather.
B6 & B7. Brighton Beach and Coney Island: The beaches and neighborhoods of Brighton Beach and Coney Island form one continuous strip across the southern edge of Brooklyn. Coney Island has an amusement park, Astroland, with the oldest wooden roller coaster in the United States, the Cyclone. Coney Island also has the original Nathan’s Restaurant and the New York Aquarium, an ice-skating rink, and recently, an A-league baseball stadium for the Brooklyn Cyclones, a New York Mets farm team. (I’ve never been to a Cyclones game, and it’s not high on my list of things to do.) Brighton Beach is mostly just boardwalk and sand, though there are a half-dozen Russian restaurants on the boardwalk. The neighborhoods of Brighton Beach and Coney Island are mostly residential and commercial.
B12. Brooklyn College: part of the City University of New York and my alma mater. It’s where I met , and where I worked for several years after graduation.
B13. Prospect Park: a 526-acre park designed by Olmstead and Vaux (who also designed Manhattan’s Central Park), features a lake and stream that issue from a city water main. It’s one of the places in New York where you can forget that you’re in the middle of a huge city.
B14. Green Wood Cemetery: the final resting place of Leonard Bernstein, Samuel Morse, Peter Cooper, Horace Greeley, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Henry Ward Beecher, Elias Howe, “Boss” Tweed, and Bill “The Butcher” Poole, the real-life inspiration for the character played by Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of New York.
B15. Xaverian High School: a Catholic high school on Shore Road, overlooking the Verrazano Narrows and New York Harbor, in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. I made a lot of friends in that neighborhood, and spent most of my late teens and twenties dating Bay Ridge girls and drinking in Bay Ridge bars.
B16. John Paul Jones Park: known locally as Cannon Park, for its 19th Century cannon monument, the park overlooks the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and lower New York Harbor. Its grassy bluff overlooking the Narrows was the site of much teenaged necking with my high school sweetheart. It’s a hugely popular site for wedding pictures and teenage drinking, too.
B17. Pratt Institute: an art and design college in Brooklyn. I worked there for six years after moving back to New York from Oregon. The school is a few blocks from my childhood home on Skillman Street, and when I worked there, my uncle Robbie lived right across the street in the house that he and my father and their siblings were born in.
B18. Fort Hamilton: the only active U.S. Army post remaining in New York City. It is also the site of a huge Veterans Administration hospital. Artillery from Fort Hamilton and Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island protected the entrance of New York Harbor until after World War II.
B19. Brooklyn Army Terminal: this 950-acre ocean terminal was the embarkation point for hundreds of thousands of troops and millions of tons of supplies and munitions bound for Europe in World War II. The site, which has 11 huge buildings and is served by heavy rail lines, has been mostly vacant since 1949.
B20. Brooklyn Navy Yard: closed in 1966, this huge shipyard built hundreds of vessels, including the World War II battleships North Carolina (BB55), Iowa (BB61), and Missouri (BB63). I proctored a civil service exam there in the early 1980s. On my lunch break I went exploring, and I found several workshops that looked as if the workers had set their tools down in 1945 and just closed the door behind them. The site is now being developed as an industrial complex.

BX1. Rikers Island: The island is a jail complex run by the New York City Department of Corrections. Though it is part of the Bronx, the only access to the island is via a bridge from Queens. The 415-acre island has 10 jails, schools, medical clinics, ball fields, chapels and mosques, gyms, drug rehab programs, grocery stores, barbershops, a bakery, a laundry, a power plant, a track, a tailor shop, a print shop, a bus depot and even a car wash. Criminal suspects denied bail by a New York court, or who can’t post bail, or who are simply waiting for an empty bed in an upstate prison, are held on Rikers. Daytime population—including guards, employees and visitors—can be as large as 20,000. By most measures, Rikers Island is the largest jail facility in the United States.

M1. Governor’s Island: this was the former headquarters of the Third District of the U.S. Coast Guard, and the homeport of the Coast Guard Cutter Gallatin (WHEC 721), my shipboard home for two years. The Gallatin, a 378-foot high-endurance cutter, tied up at Yankee Pier, the Y-shaped structure on the island’s southern edge (the piers to its left, Tango and Lima respectively, are also named for the letters of the alphabet they resemble). The island’s name originated when New York was a British colony and the island was the home of New York’s royal governors. One of the oldest structures on the island, Castle Williams, dates from the Civil War, and the U.S. Army controlled Governors Island until 1966, when it became a U.S. Coast Guard base—the largest in the world. My father also served briefly on the island during World War II, when he was jailed in the Army Stockade for fighting and being AWOL. The base was deactivated in 1997, and in 2001, the two historic fortifications and their surroundings became a national monument. On January 31, 2003, the Governors Island National Monument was transferred to the U.S. Department of the Interior and is now managed by the National Park Service.
M2. 14th Street and Union Square: at the northern edge of Greenwich Village, the Union Square area has several movie theaters, dozens of restaurants (including the elusive Chat ‘n Chew), a huge Barnes & Noble bookstore, a Virgin Records store, and hundreds of other retail stores. Union Square is the site of numerous and seemingly continuous political protests, a weekend farmer’s market, and a holiday fleamarket. The park has sculptures of Presidents Lincoln and Washington, the Marquis of Lafayette and Gandhi, benches, grass trees, dog runs, and a cafe, outside of which skate punks do their best to support orthopedic surgeons. A lot of my socializing gets done in that neighborhood.
M3. Madison Square Garden & Penn Station: Madison Square Garden is home to the New York Knicks basketball team, and was the site of the 2004 Republican National Convention: two reasons to never go there. Penn Station is a rail hub for the New York City subway system, Amtrak, and New Jersey Transit. One block east of Penn Station, at Broadway and Sixth Avenue, is Herald Square, named for the New York Herald newspaper, and the site of Macy’s flagship store. If you’ve watched the Thanksgiving Day Parade on television, you’ve seen Herald Square.
M4. Times Square: where 42nd Street, Broadway and Seventh Avenue intersect, Times Square was once synonymous with crime, drugs, and porn. Known to its demimonde habitues and cops as “The Deuce,” the area was Disneyfied (literally) by former Mayor Rudy “no sex” Guiliani in the 1990s. It’s much safer now (as is most of the city), and cleaner, but it isn’t Times Square anymore. The square is named for the New York Times.
M5. The Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum: A decommissioned aircraft carrier, the USS Intrepid saw action from World War II through Vietnam. The museum’s collection has dozens of aircraft (including an SR-71 Blackbird and an Air France Concorde), spacecraft, an armored vehicle, a submarine and a destroyer. Intrepid was decommissioned in 1974, and the museum opened its doors in 1982; in 1986 the Essex-class carrier was designated a National Historic Landmark.
M6. The American Museum of Natural History & Hayden Planetarium: As far as I’m concerned, this is the museum—the one against which all other museums are measured. The museum opened in 1869, and covers four huge city blocks on Central Park West. Its science departments employ more than 200 personnel, including more than 40 tenure-track curators, and has the largest natural history library in the Western Hemisphere. The museum has over 30 million specimens in its collections. None of that tells you what it’s like to go there, though: it’s like stepping into another world. Visiting the American Museum of Natural History is as close as you’ll get to living inside Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World. I spent a lot of my childhood in the halls of this museum with nose pressed against the glass diorama cases and my imagination running loose inside the landscape.
M7. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Defines what an art museum is. The Metropolitan Museum is another place where I can spend the whole day in a kind of waking dream. The European paintings collection alone has more than 2,000 works. Then there’s the Egyptian Collection, including the Temple of Dendur; Greek and Roman Art; American Paintings; European Sculpture and Decorative Arts; Islamic Art—that’s not even half of it. As with the American Museum of Natural History, the little kid inside me is always thrilled and a little surprised that they just let you walk around loose in the place.

 M8. Central Park: In 1857 New York City held the country’s first landscape design contest and selected the “Greensward Plan” of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux for the 843-acre park. The park has rolling hills, meadows, lakes, footpaths and a zoo. Like Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, it’s one of those places where you can temporarily forget you’re in the middle of a city of eight million people.
M9. The Battery and South Ferry: This is the southern tip of Manhattan. From here you can take ferries to Staten Island, Governors Island, Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. Castle Clinton was built on South Ferry between 1808 and 1811, and is named after New York City Mayor DeWitt Clinton—the fort is now a National Historic Monument. There is also the East Coast War Memorial, a tribute to soldiers and sailors lost in the Atlantic during World War II.
M10. Ground Zero: The site of the former World Trade Center (inside the yellow box), Ground Zero is now a construction site for a new office tower and memorial to the victims of the September 11 attacks. The area is currently surrounded by a steel mesh fence, outside of which (unauthorized) vendors hawk garish 9/11 mementos. At the moment of the attacks I was at Pratt Institute (B17), about three miles from the site. We heard a rumbling—not an especially loud one—and the windows rattled from the impact of American Airlines Flight 11 into the north tower of the World Trade Center. North Hall, where my office was, is two blocks from the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (the dark traffic artery that bends just above the alphanumeric tag), and loud rumblings that rattle the windows are pretty common. I was having a conversation with my boss, Horace, at the time, and we just glanced at the windows then went back to what we were discussing. It wasn’t until a minute or two later that someone who was listening to the news told us the World Trade Center had been hit by a jet.

NJ1. The Statue of Liberty: Twelve-acre Liberty Island (formerly Bedloe’s Island) is located in New York Harbor. The Statue of Liberty, a gift from the people of France, was dedicated in 1886 and was designated a National Monument in 1924. Liberty Island is federal property located within the territorial jurisdiction of the State of New York, despite the fact that it appears on the New Jersey side of the state boundary in the photomap.
NJ2. Ellis Island: The island was incorporated as part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument in 1965. Between 1892 and 1954, approximately 12 million steerage and third class steamship passengers who entered the United States through the port of New York were legally and medically inspected at Ellis Island. It was reopened in 1990 after a massive restoration. Ellis Island is Federal property within the shared territorial jurisdiction of the States of New York and New Jersey.
NJ3 & NJ4. Bayonne, New Jersey: I was a civilian crew member for the Military Sealift Command in 1982 and 1983, and the administrative and training facilities were at the Military Ocean Terminal, Bayonne (MOTBY). The huge terminal has twenty deep water berths: once cargo arrives at Bayonne, it can be placed directly into vast covered warehouses or uncovered—and fully secure—staging areas. All types of cargo, from heavy, outsized weapons like the Abrams tank and the Patriot antimissile system, to the full range of munitions available to U.S. fighting forces can be loaded by Bayonne’s stevedores onto every type of roll-on/roll-off vessel in the Military Sealift Command fleet. Bayonne also has the best steaming times to Europe, a full day’s advantage over any other US port, military or civilian. (Since most civilian ports are containerized, there are no commercial ports which can lift the 70-ton M1A2 Abrams.) Aside from a class in firefighting, and one or two visits to pick up plane tickets and travel documents, I spent very little time there, but I have fond memories of riding my motorcycle over the Bayonne Bridge.
NJ5. Jersey City, New Jersey: What can one say about glamorous Jersey City? It’s got a population of 240,000 and it’s about 15 square miles in area. Like many small industrial cities, Jersey City’s manufacturing, transportation, docks, basins, railyards, and warehouses went into decline beginning in the 1970s. It’s in the middle of a civic comeback because of its proximity to New York City (and its views of the skyline). Still plenty of crime and pollution, though.
NJ6. Port Newark, New Jersey: Newark is like Jersey City without the glamor: high crime and a decaying infrastructure; industrial pollution higher than anyplace outside the former Soviet Union; and one of the most depressing airports in North America. If Newark had a tee-shirt it would say, “Are you fuckin kidding me?! Get outta here!”

Q8. Fort Tilden: A decommissioned U.S. Army post, Fort Tilden was home to a 16-inch artillery battery (Battery Harris), the concrete emplacements and ammunition bunkers for which are still visible. Now part of the Gateway National Recreation Area, the area has Atlantic beachfront and a scattering of old Army buildings going to seed among the wooded dunes. It’s a beautiful place, and I try to get out there as often as I can to walk on the beach and ride my bike on the trails through the dunes.
Q9. Breezy Point & the Surf Club: Breezy Point is a gated co-op community at the western tip of the Rockaway Peninsula (actually, there are three co-ops: Breezy Point, Rockaway Point, and Roxbury), populated mostly by Irish-American and Italian-American civil servants—cops and firefighters predominating. A number of my friends lived there when I was in my twenties, and I did a lot of boating and scuba diving off Breezy. I also worked at the Surf Club, a beach club unrelated to the co-op communities, for two summers.
Q10. John F. Kennedy International Airport: formerly Idlewild Airport, it covers 5,000 acres and handles more than 30 million passengers a year. The airport opened in 1949, and was renamed for slain President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
Q11. LaGuardia Airport: the airport was built in 1929 (on the site of a former amusement park) as a private flying field. In 1937 it was taken over by the City of New York and renamed New York City Municipal Airport; in 1939 it was renamed New York Municipal Airport-LaGuardia Field, after New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. In 1947 it was taken over by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (which also operates Kennedy and Newark Airports) and renamed LaGuardia Airport. More than 22 million passengers pass through LaGuardia every year. Pilots are supposed to loathe the airport, referring to it as “LaGarbage,” because of its relatively short runways and proximity to tall buildings.

R1. The Brooklyn Bridge: Connects Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. A suspension bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge opened to traffic on May 24, 1883. The main span is 1,595 feet long, and the total length of the bridge and approaches is 6,016 feet. It’s 85 feet wide, and the towers are 276 feet high (above mean high water). It carries cars and pedestrians.
R2. The Manhattan Bridge: Connects Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. A suspension bridge, the Manhattan Bridge opened to traffic on December 31, 1909. The main span is 1,470 feet long, and the total length of the bridge and approaches is 6,855 feet. Its towers are 322 feet high (above mean high water). It carries cars and subway trains.
R3. The Williamsburg Bridge: Connects the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. A suspension bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge opened to traffic on December 19, 1903. The main span is 1,600 feet long, and the total length of the bridge and approaches is 7,308 feet. Its towers are 310 feet high (above mean high water). It carries cars, subway trains and pedestrians.
R4. The Verrazano Narrows Bridge: Connects the boroughs of Brooklyn and Staten Island. A suspension bridge, the Verrazano opened to traffic on November 21, 1964. The main span is 4,260 feet long, and the total length of the bridge and approaches is 13,700 feet. Its towers are 693 feet high (above mean high water). It carries cars only, except once a year during the running of the New York City Marathon, when pedestrians can use the span.
R5. The Rikers Island Bridge: Connects the borough of Queens to Rikers Island, a jail complex operated by the New York City Department of Corrections. The Bridge, built in 1966, is 4,200 feet long, and carries only vehicle traffic.
R6. The Queensborough (59th Street) Bridge: Connects the boroughs of Queens and Manhattan. It was made famous, sort of, by Simon & Garfunkel’s 1972 hit “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).” A cantilever multispan bridge, the Queensborough opened to traffic on March 30 , 1909. The western main span is 1,182 feet long, the eastern main span is 984 feet long, and the total length of the bridge and approaches is 7,449 feet. Its towers are 350 feet high (above mean high water). It carries cars and pedestrians. There is no access from the bridge to Roosevelt Island, the long, narrow island that lies beneath the bridge in the East River. Access to the island is by tram and footbridge from Manhattan.
R7. The Triborough Bridge: Connects the boroughs of Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx. The Triborough Bridge is not a single span, but rather is a complex comprised of three long-span bridges, a number of smaller bridges and viaducts, fourteen miles of approach highways and parkways, parks and recreational facilities, and administrative offices for the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. It opened to traffic on July 11, 1936. The total length of the bridge and approaches is 13,820 feet. Its tallest towers are 315 feet high (above mean high water). It carries cars and pedestrians.
R10. The Marine Parkway-Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge: Connects Brooklyn and the Rockaway Peninsula, part of Queens. A vertical lift-span bridge, the Marine Parkway Bridge opened to traffic on July 3, 1937. The main span is 540 feet long, and the total length of the bridge and approaches is 4,022 feet. It carries cars and pedestrians. I ride over this bridge frequently on my way to the beaches in Rockaway and Fort Tilden. The pedestrian walkway on the west side of the span gives you an excellent view of the Rockaway Inlet, Breezy Point and Coney Island.

Reader Landmarks

A. The Second Avenue Deli: : Second Avenue and 10th Street, Manhattan. “…one can find sublime sandwiches at the 2nd Avenue Deli. I have been known to go there straight from the airport, suitcase in hand, because I just can’t wait another minute for a good corned beef on rye.”

Copyright © Robert J. Howe