Adventures in Brooklyn 6/24/14. It felt like playing hooky today, but it was a scheduled free day (interrupted by business calls, emails and text messages) but I did manage to get to the extremities of Brooklyn today, and even crossed over the Gil Hodges Bridge on my bike, crossing over the Jamaica Bay inlet and finally to the Rockaway Peninsula where I landed at Ft. Tilden, formerly a fishing bridge and part of the Gateway National Shoreline and a former WWll army base complete with huge bunkers built into the dunes that housed huge guns for taking out German submarines. Yes, this town is full of history. But before getting to the shore I passed along my regular biking route which avoids the busy and congested Flatbush Avenue for a zig-zag route that brings me through real neighborhoods, many of which I would never want to live in. Racism, homophobia, hyper patriotism and strict religions dont make for a welcome hood for this faerie. But the neighborhood of Marine Park has one of the few remaining 18th Century Dutch homesteads and it is being restored. The Brits have succeeded in wiping away the history previous to their take over of this former Dutch colony, but happily much scholarship is busy bringing the Dutch history in New York to the surface. One great source of this information is in The Island at the Center of the World: the Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America by Russell Shorto. On a large plot of land between 35th and 36th Street between Avenues S and T, I think, sits one of the oldest homes in the New York area, and its history is still being discovered. nytimes/2001/06/24/magazine/to-be-a-slave-in-brooklyn.html. Evidence points to its place in the history of slavery and freedom. If you thought brownstone townhouses were the oldest homes in New York, guess again. Typical brownstones are a Dutch design, by the way. The stoop (an old Dutch word) brings you up to the formal living quarters. The ground floor of a townhouse, below the stoop, is where the help lived and worked, and that is also the part of the house most prone to flooding, a big concern of the Dutch who basically lived below sea level with dikes to protect them. Their legacy is left behind in our most prominent architectural home design. But their farm houses were different, and the pictures below show the restoration work in progress. Going to the beach by bicycle can provide some architectural history lessons as well as getting the heart pumping. And by the way, the Pakistani food out on Coney Island Avenue is simply amazing if you take it to the ocean. Just keep the sand away from it.
Posted on: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 04:18:43 +0000
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