A Slice Of Brooklyn Neighborhood Tour - Part 2

Today's post is Part Two of Tony Muia's The Slice Of Brooklyn Neighborhood Tour.
Click here if you missed Part One of the tour.

After we left Juniors Restaurant, we got back on the bus and drove down Flatbush Avenue toward Grand Army Plaza. Grand Army Plaza is an 11-acre oval plaza that forms the main entrance to Prospect Park. It was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1867. The Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument received landmark designation in 1973; in 1975, all of Grand Army Plaza became a New York City historic landmark.

The Soldiers' and Sailors' Memorial Arch, is Brooklyn’s version of the Arc de Triomphe. Conceived as a memorial to the defenders of the Union in the Civil War, the elaborately carved Arch designed by John H. Duncan, was completed by 1892 and then adorned with its striking Quadriga and other statuary by sculptor Frederick MacMonnies.

Spirit of the Army Sculptures

The Quadriga - Columbia in her chariot

Spirit of the Navy sculptures

Bailey Fountain, Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, New York, by sculptor Eugene Francis Savage, 1932

Named after Brooklyn-based financier and philanthropist Frank Bailey (1865-1953), he funded it as a memorial to his wife Mary Louise. It features an elaborate grouping of allegorical and mythical figures that includes the god of water Neptune and a pair of nudes, one male, one female, representing Wisdom and Felicity.

The Brooklyn Public Library's Central Library is located on the southeast corner of the plaza. Opened on February 1, 1941, the Central Library is the major reference center for BPL's 60-location system. The library's notable architecture was created to resemble an open book, with the spine on Grand Army Plaza and the building's two wings opening like pages onto Eastern Parkway and Flatbush Avenue. Containing more than 1.5 million books, magazines, and multimedia materials, it provides services to all ages, free Internet access throughout the building, and, since September of 1997, a Multilingual Center for non-English speakers and those interested in linguistics.

We then drove around the perimeter of Prospect Park ,a 585-acre urban oasis located in the heart of Brooklyn, New York City’s most populous borough. The masterpiece of famed landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who also designed Central Park, Prospect Park features the 90-acre Long Meadow, the 60-acre Lake and Brooklyn’s only forest. The nation’s first urban Audubon Center, and the Prospect Park Zoo. It attracts over eight million visitors a year.

We also passed The Brooklyn Botanical Garden, a 52-acre garden which includes a number of specialty gardens, diverse plant collections, and the Steinhardt Conservatory, which houses the C.V. Starr Bonsai Museum, three climate-themed plant pavilions, a white cast-iron and glass aquatic house, and an art gallery. Founded in 1910, the Garden holds over 10,000 species of plants and each year welcomes over 700,000 visitors from around the world.

Next, we drove down Eastern Parkway, and at Washington Avenue we passed The Brooklyn Museum, housed in a 560,000-square-foot, Beaux-Arts building, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the country. Its world-renowned permanent collections range from ancient Egyptian masterpieces to contemporary art, and represent a wide range of cultures. I realized it has been too long since I paid a visit to the museum, and I hope to return soon.

The Brooklyn Museum is well-known for its expansive collections of Egyptian and African art, in addition to 17th, 18th, and 19th century paintings, throughout a wide range of schools, and it's ongoing special exhibits.

At this point in the tour, Tony spoke about the legendary Brooklyn baseball team The Brooklyn Dodgers. Brooklyn helped make baseball commercial, as it was the locale of the first paid admission games, a series of three all star contests matching New York and Brooklyn in 1858. A new era begins for Brooklyn baseball on April 9th, 1913 as Ebbets Field opens with a game of the newly named Dodgers against the Philadelphia Phillies. As a team they had their ups and downs but were always followed by ardent Brooklyn fans until 1957, when the President of the club, Walter O'Malley, decided to move the team to the city of Los Angeles because the city planner of New York, Robert Moses, refused to build him a new ballpark in Brooklyn. It was a heartbreak that Brooklynites have yet to get over.

Ebbets Field was the ballpark the Brooklyn Dodgers played in from 1913 to 1957, and after the Dodgers left Brooklyn for Los Angeles, the field was torn down and replaced with the Ebbets Field apartments, as seen in the photo above.

As we circled Prospect Park we passed The Lefferts Historic House Museum. The Lefferts family was among the earliest European settlers in Brooklyn. They trace their roots to Dutch colonist Pieter Janse Hagewout (1621-1661), a farmer and cobbler who emigrated from Holland with his family in 1660, and settled in the farming village of Vlacke Bos (meaning "wooded plain"), or Flatbush as it came to be known. In 1687, Hagewout’s son Leffert Pietersen bought 58 acres of land in the area now known as Prospect Lefferts Gardens. He built the original Lefferts Homestead. It is a fine example of the Dutch roots of much of Brooklyn's early history.

We then drove up and down some of the beautiful streets of the neighborhood know as Park Slope. Park Slope got its name from the huge 526-acre Prospect Park which it borders. Many of its fine mansions, brownstone and limestone homes were built during the 1880s and 1890s.

Today many of these structures are within the Park Slope Historic District, one of New York's largest landmarked neighborhoods.

Here are close up photographs of the unique architectural details of some of the residences.

(right click on the photos to enlarge)

These photos were taken of homes on 3rd Street, between 7th and 8th Avenue.

During the 1850s, the neighborhood of Park Slope was situated on land that was virtually completely owned by Edwin C. Litchfield.

Litchfield Villa was originally built as a residence for the Litchfield family in 1857. Edwin Litchfield, a railroad magnate and real estate developer, purchased nearly a square mile of meadow and swampland for his estate in 1852 which extended down to the Gowanus Canal. He hired Alexander Jackson Davis, a prominent architect of the time, to design his hilltop home. The mansion was named Grace Hill for his wife, Grace Hill Hubbard.

However Olmsted and Vaux’s design for the new Prospect Park included Grace Hill and its surrounding property, and in 1868 Litchfield was forced to sell his land to the Brooklyn Parks Commission.

After Litchfield’s death in 1885 the Villa was occupied by park administrative offices and park police. It currently houses the Brooklyn headquarters of the NYC Department of Parks and offices of the Prospect Park Alliance.

At this point we traveled along Prospect Park West and passed Farrell's Bar & Grill at 16th Street. A favorite neighborhood bar since 1933. Among its many famous patrons in the 1970s was Oscar-winner Shirley MacLaine, who broke the tradition of being chaperoned by a male and became a well-known customer. Famous newsmen Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill were also frequent patrons. Tony also pointed out that it was used as a location shot for the 1997 movie "As Good As It Gets" starring Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt, as he played those scenes on the video screen.

In my next blog post I'll bring you part three of The Slice Of Brooklyn Neighborhood Tour, where we entered Green-Wood Cemetery to see some of the famous and infamous people buried there, plus seeing some of its outstanding scenery. We will then continue to the conclusion of the tour in the very elegant Victorian Flatbush neighborhood of Ditmas Park.

Hope you'll drop by and come along for the ride!

A Slice Of Brooklyn Neighborhood Tour - Part 1

If you've been reading my blog for awhile you might remember when I went on Tony Muia's very enjoyable "A Slice of Brooklyn Pizza Tour" last April. Last week I was fortunate enough to be invited to accompany him on his " A Slice Of Brooklyn Neighborhood Tour."

This 3 1/2 hour comfotable coach bus tour through Brooklyn includes an audio-visual historical tour of Brooklyn's famous movie locations, landmarks and points of interests, and includes a stop at the famous Junior' s Restaurant...a Brooklyn landmark since 1950, where we were promised a sample of the BEST cheesecake and a classic egg cream! Although I am a life long Brooklynite, I knew I'd learn many new things about my hometown, since Tony is a fact filled and engaging tour host.

Our first stop was at Brooklyn Bridge Park , located under the Manhattan Bridge. While still under construction in many places, the future 85-acre Brooklyn Bridge Park will stretch 1.3 miles along the East River from north of the Manhattan Bridge to Atlantic Avenue.

(click on all photos to enlarge)

We were able to walk under The Manhattan Bridge which crosses the East River in New York City, connecting Brooklyn at Flatbush Avenue Extension to lower Manhattan at Canal Street. The bridge was opened in 1909 and carries both vehicular traffic and subway trains. It is quite an experience to be underneath and hear the roar of the subway pass over head!

The neighborhood near the bridge on the Brooklyn side is becoming gentrified from it's former factories and warehouses into condominiums and stores, and is called DUMBO, an acronym for "Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass." We road along some of it's narrow cobble stoned streets during the tour.

From the Brooklyn Bridge Park we had spectacular views of The Brooklyn Bridge and Lower Manhattan. This is a view I never tire of!

The Brooklyn Bridge one of the oldest suspension bridges in the United States, and stretches 5,989 feet over the East River, connecting the New York City boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn, and carries motor vehicles, pedestrians and bicycles. It opened in 1883 and took 14 years to build. At that time the bridge's giant towers stood taller than anything in the New York skyline, even taller than any structure in North America! It was designed by John A. Robling, an immigrant from Germany. His son, Washington Robling, was it's builder. Washington Robling's wife, Emily Warren Robling, served as his unofficial assistant engineer when he was incapacitated late in the construction by collapsing bridge timbers which crushed his legs. Due to her efforts to complete the construction of the bridge she ranks among the most remarkable women of her time!

The tour then drove us to the Fulton Ferry Landing pier where we had more breathtaking views of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Lower Manhattan skyline.

This is one of the most popular sites for photography in New York City. It is at this location that Robert Fulton, who invented the first steamboat ferry in 1814 , had his ferry called "The Nassau," which carried passengers across the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan. A bronze plaque in the pier states that by 1868 there were one thousand ferry crossings daily, and 50 million passengers were carried annually until the ferries closed in 1924.

The plaque on this rock commemorates that fact that under the cover of darkness on August 29th, 1776, Washington's army crossed the East River from Fulton Ferry, below where the Brooklyn Bridge rises today, leaving Brooklyn to the British during The Battle Of Brooklyn, the first battle of the Revolutionary War. (right click the photo to enlarge to read the inscription)

The tour again boarded the bus and drove over to the nearby charming Brooklyn Heights neighborhood. This neighborhood dates back to 1824, and is largely composed of block after block of picturesque Greek Revival and Gothic Revival houses, and Italianate brownstones and mansions. More than 500 buildings were built before the Civil War. Brooklyn Heights was the first neighborhood protected by the 1965 Landmarks Preservation Law of New York City.

We proceeded down to The Brooklyn Promenade, which is a third-of-a-mile stretch park on an esplanade above the the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. This exclusively pedestrian walkway offers more majestic views of downtown Manhattan and is lined with flowerbeds, playgrounds, and two rows of benches, the park is a favorite destination for walkers and joggers.

The Promenade, actually an esplanade, cantilevered over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is a favorite spot among locals, offering magnificent vistas of the Statue of Liberty, the Manhattan skyline across the East River, as well as views of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge. It is a popular tourist destination for the Macy's July 4th fireworks, and for the unobstructed views of the skyline.

The quiet, neat, tree lined streets of Brooklyn Heights were so enjoyable to walk through, and allowed us to stop to admire the beautiful architecture up close.

Tony stopped at a few residences along the way to inform us of who lived there at one time.

This is 142 Columbia Heights. The iconic New York writer Norman Mailer, who was a 2 time Pulitzer Prize winning author, and who started The Village Voice newspaper in Greenwich Village, lived here until his death in 2007.

Next, we passed 70 Willow Street, which is an enchanting Greek Revival style home dating from the 1830s. Truman Capote lived in the basement here during the late 50's and early 60's, where he wrote the novels "In Cold Blood" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's."

We also passed this 1829 red brick corner house at 19 Cranberry Street, which was used as the location for the 1987 Cher/Nicholas Cage film "Moonstruck." You can see the Manhattan skyline in the distance.

Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims at 75 Hicks Street, built in 1849, where Henry Ward Beecher was once considered "The Most Famous Man in America." The preacher and abolitionist’s church was also “the Grand Central depot” of the Underground Railroad. Henry Ward Beecher was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin."



Now we were all ready to drive down Flatbush Ave to DeKalb Avenue to visit Junior's to have some refreshment! Founded in 1950 by Harry Rosen, this landmark restaurant is known to have the best cheesecake in New York City!

As part of the tour we went inside and were served a slice of their rich, creamy and delicious cheesecake.

It was so good quite a few of the tour participants bought a whole cheesecake to take home with them!

We were also treated to our choice of a chocolate or vanilla egg cream, which is a traditional Brooklyn refreshment invented in the 1920's when the city was full of soda fountain establishments.

Tony explained that an egg cream contains no egg or cream, but is composed of a splash of milk, seltzer soda and Fox's U Bet chocolate syrup.

It was almost as good as the ones I remembered drinking as a child!

I know I've shown many of these sights in past blog posts, but I hope you enjoyed seeing them again as part of The Slice of Brooklyn Neighborhood Tour.

In my next blog post of part two of the tour I'll show you many more new and interesting and historical places we visited on the tour such as Grand Army Plaza, the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Dodgers Ebbets Field location, and many many more fabulous Brooklyn sights!