And I say to myself...

what a wonderful

world

As usual on Blogger, click any photo for a better view. 

This one's for Laura over at Coast of Illinois who got me going on one odd reason why I'm especially fond of these guys when she commented that her sad train commute needs buskers. 

Yes, a good busker is a blessing to a commute. Bad ones can be another story but I love these guys.

They play at my stop in Soho pretty regularly (sometimes together, sometimes trombone guy on his own). Funny thing is that they really won me over by their habit of sticking to their regular jazz standards right through the holiday season - NYC loves doing Christmas, and although I do love singing and hearing traditional carols, the incessant aural bombardment of pop Christmas songs in every store sometimes gets to me, especially if I'm feeling a little blue or stressed anyways which sometimes happens to me. I get nipped at by mild depression from time to time and when that happens at Christmas all the be-of-good-cheer stuff can get overwhelming and I get to  where I'd just like to crawl under the covers and stay there until December 26th if not January 2nd. Call it "Holidazed". Can't imagine what it's like for people with deeper depression - if anyone's reading this who goes through that, you have my respect and sympathy.

These guys are good and and if they wanted to, they could go with the holiday theme and do some wonderful brass arrangements of Christmas songs. I would like them and I would give them money, but there's something so refreshing about coming out of the office and walking past all the Soho shop windows pushing you to buy stuff with their holiday glitz, and then getting to the subway stairs and then hearing the strains of "Mac the Knife" drifting up to greet you and know you're getting a jazzy little hiatus from the season while you wait for the train. The first time I heard them was one of those times when my holiday spirits were wearing thin and I was just delighted to find them playing their tunes. Just the break I'd needed. I could just feel myself unwinding while I listened.

I was delighted to find them at 14th street yesterday, I'd gone to the main post office at 34th street (open all night) to put a couple of items in the mail (there some candy and there was some hair, I sure hope I got the mailing labels right!) and was switching from the C to the D here to get back to Brooklyn. I was down on the other end of the platform when I realized I was hearing "Hello Dolly". Went down to investigate 'cause the performing style sounded really familiar, and sure enough, there they were. Nice surprise, made the sort of long wait for a D train way better.

And as long as I'm posting about running errands in NYC - the Empire State Building (also on 34th St.) looked neat with its head in the clouds last night. I'm glad I had a camera along. 

Subway Series, Pittsburgh Edition

Usually my Subway Series posts are about art or music in the NYC subway. Today's is a little different. Lifted from my own FB post.

So, I'm moving into less-wild time at work right now, at least for a bit,  but on Thursday night I left work quite a bit later than I'd expected to - as frequently happens, I decided to do "just that one last thing" that ended up taking way longer than I thought.

B train service ends early this week so I grabbed a D, which means transferring to my local Q train at the Atlantic Avenue, which is a big station with a lot of lines running through it. D to Q transfer involves a long walk through passageways that run from one end of the station to the other.

 Atlantic Avenue is now officially known as Atlantic Avenue Barclays Center, after the gigantic arena there that opened in 2012. I've been pretty lucky about not needing to transfer there just as a big game let out, but that luck didn't hold tonight. A hockey game had just let out and the station was absolutely jammed with jersey-clad fans.

 Ordinarily this would've been aggravating - not the worst commute ever but good for a little internal grumbling about the powers that be who thought that the middle of downtown Brooklyn* was the perfect place to build a sports arena.

But that night, half of the jerseys were Pittsburgh, and although usually my only interest in sports teams is tied to how much joy my sports-fan friends take in a win for their team, I find I have a soft spot for the Penguins right now.

Thanks to Lois Alter Mark of Midlife at the Oasis for sharing on her FB page.

Click for more info.

*A Brooklyn FB friend questioned my description of the arena neighborhood as downtown Brooklyn. My response: "Hey, I'm from Aiea, what do I know?". Seriously, though, that was a bit of hyperbole, but it's not far from downtown Brooklyn, "downtown Brooklyn" gives non-Brooklynites something they can recognize, and it moves the story along better than "the convergence of a bunch of neighborhoods (Boerum Hill, Fort Greene, Downtown Brooklyn, Park Slope, Prospect Height)". Debating neighborhood boundaries is something of a NYC past-time, I found that quote in a Reddit discussion that's a a pretty good example. As for me, I know I live in Flatbush but I've never been 100% sure whether I live in Ditmas Park or Midwood. Anyways, Brooklyn friends, I hope you'll forgive my willful inaccuracy!

Music Also Helps - a rare Subway Series post

There is so much art and music and oddities on the NYC subway that I post about it just enough that at some point I gave it its own tag. 

My job is very calendar-driven, with a heavy concentration of deadlines in September and March. I will end up working strings of late nights just to get the big reports done, and it can be very stressful.

I think it was March of this year that the late nights coincided with subway track work, with the Q train running on two sections, one that ended at Atlantic Avenue and another from there on out to Coney Island.

Trains running strangely late at night can be aggravating, but when Ishmael Levi was there and singing for us late-night commuters, it wasn't as bad. Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" was the first song I heard him sing, I think it's a favorite of his because he was singing it more than once when I got to the platform to change to the train to continue into Brooklyn. I love music, but I'm not really a connoisseur and I don't know much about Leonard Cohen's work (although a lot of my friends were crushed at his passing so I know he must be great) - but this song is so beautiful, and when Ishmael sang it late at night as the tired night shift folks waited for the next train, I could just feel my nerves un-frazzling. 

Subway Series - "Blooming", 59th and Lex, mosaic by Elizabeth Murray

All work and no play may make Bonnie a boring blogger, as I said in my last post, but tonight it's also given me the idea to add to my poor neglected "Subway Series" with a post I've been meaning to do for a very long time. For those who aren't up on baseball lingo, in normal NYC parlance, a subway series is a set of games between our two hometown teams, the Yankees and the Mets, but here on Frogma, I had at some point thought it would be really neat to do a set of posts about the beautiful art installations you see in many of NYC's subway stations.

It was a fun idea. I haven't done as much with it as I'd hoped to, mostly because being a smartphone resistor means not having a camera perpetually on-hand, but in December 2015, my friend Mandy and I had gone for our annual holiday window viewing and finished that off with the carol service at the Brick Presbyterian Church on the Upper East Side, where I sang with the choir until a while after I moved to Brooklyn, it was a really good choir and I loved singing with them, but the commute got to be a bit much. I have been back for a couple of carol services, which are lovely, and it worked out really nicely for Mandy and me to attend that day.

This took us through the subway station at 59th and Lexington, which may very well have been where I came up with the "subway series" idea, and of course I had my camera for the windows, and Mandy's very patient when I need to make a random picturetaking stop. This particular station is a standout for me because I used to travel through it every day on my way to work, and the before-and-after contrast between how it was then and now is really something.

I was working at Carnegie Hall when I moved to the Upper East Side, and my morning commute involved transferring at this station from the 4, 5, or 6 that I would catch at 86th and Lexington to the N or the R that would get me to Carnegie Hall (yes, that is ALSO how you get to Carnegie Hall). The platforms are in different parts of the station and to get from one to the other, you would go through a big squarish mezzanine area. Now at that time, that station was one of the victims of circa 70's "decor", and UGH, the mezzanine was hideous. The walls were covered with rectangular tiles of what I would call operating room green, darkened with the grime of years and halfheartedly lit by half-broken fluorescent light fixtures.

Not a particularly heartening place to walk through, but hey, it was a commute, it doesn't have to be pretty.

Luckily for folks who have that commute today, though, at some point it got to be 59th and Lex's turn for an MTA Arts for Transit makeover - and what a job Elizabeth Murray, the artist who got the commission, did! I don't get to the Upper East Side much anymore, and I can't remember what sent me up there for the first time after the installation was done, but the first time I went through there after the installation, I think my jaw actually may have dropped when I walked into what had been the dreariest chamber and found the walls covered with shining swirling mosaic - it was like that moment in The Wizard of Oz when everything goes Technicolor! I did have one hint that things had changed in the form of a stray coffee cup like the one shown above, I saw that in the corridor as I approached the mezzanine and I did take it as a clue that things might have changed since my last trip through there, but I was still surprised at the beautiful colors that had replaced the old dirty bluish-grayish-greenish. Absolutely spectacular. I didn't have a camera that day, but I think that it was that day that I thought of sharing some of the subway art I enjoyed. This one took me a while, but here it is at last!

Click here to read more about the art and the artist. Click on the first photo for a slideshow view.  

Happy National Poetry Month (and one year out from chemo)

Still crazy at work but had to share this new Poetry in Motion subway card featuring art by Sebago sailing co-chair Holly Sears. In addition to patiently teaching many, many newbies (including yours truly) how to sail dinghies, she is an AMAZING artist. This piece is from Hudson River Explorers, her glorious public art installation in the overpasses at the Metro-North Tarrytown station. I always like the Poetry in Motion series and I'll be looking for this one especially! Click here for the two posts that I did after going to see the installation and the gallery exhibit that she had at the Hudson River Museum at the time that the piece was first unveiled.

Also have to have a little "whoop whoop" moment today as Facebook kindly reminded me that one year ago today, I rang the bell after my last chemo infusion. I wasn't going to go to my Irish music session tonight but I think that's an anniversary that deserves a pint and a few tunes. Seeing the doctors is getting to be a less regular thing now, they extend the intervals between appointments as you go along without any trouble, but I had doctor week a couple of weeks ago and so far all's well. 

A little more subway art -

Big doin's at the club this weekend, the club succeeded in rolling the biggest boat we've ever rolled - on dry land! Plus I got to go paddling - never dreamed I would be back on the water just a month after my surgery but I was and although it was a short one, it was great. Will post about both of those soon, haven't had a chance to go through my pictures from the rollover yet, hope I can squeeze that in soon although I have a busy week ahead.

However, my last post (er, I mean the last Frogma post, by guest blogger Flat Stanley) talked a lot about the Arts for Transit program, and I thought it was rather serendipitous that one of the SD cards I used yesterday turned out to still have the photos from the fishless fishing trip I mentioned in one of my Hawaii posts but never actually posted about on it, so those got uploaded again, including a set of a subway art feature that pretty much stopped me in my tracks as I was heading for the boat. I rode the Franklin Avenue Shuttle from Prospect Park to get to Broad Channel; I'd never done that before and the stained glass installation there is absolutely spectacular. It's called Life and Continued Growth, it's by artist Eric Prior, here's the artist's explanation of the work, and here are my pictures. Click on the first one for better view, this is it for words today. Enjoy!

 

Flat Stanley Visits NYC Part 2 - and now the more usual New Yorky stuff (plus kind of a lot about trains)

Note from Bonnie - once again today, I'm turning my blog over to Flat Stanley, who's visiting me from Ms. Rozell's class in Texas. Hi, Ms. Rozell's class! For more about who Flat Stanley is and why we're playing tourist, check yesterday's post. Take it away, Stanley!

********************

Thanks, Bonnie! So at the end of the last post, we were just about to go down into the subway to head on into Manhattan. Brooklyn is a great borough and you could just visit there for a week and not get bored at all, but there are a couple of really famous NYC landmarks that we can get to really easily from Grand Army Plaza, and Bonnie decided that we should go see a couple of those too, so we're on our way! 

We're still in Brooklyn, but I just wanted to show you this neat subway art. This looks kind of old-fashioned but it's actually part of a program where the MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority, the group that runs the public transportation) brings in artists to do station-wide art projects that make being in the subway a lot more interesting and fun. A lot of the older subway stations actually have beautiful mosaics and other decorations because they were built right around the beginning of the 20th century, when there was a thing called the City Beautiful movement, when city planners tried to make things that even everyday people used into something beautiful. 

Later in the 20th century, NYC fell on some hard times - have you ever seen pictures of subway cars all covered in graffiti? That was in the 70's when the city almost went bankrupt! The subways actually got to be scary places to go, and the stations that were built or re-done then were not beautiful at all, and the old ones that had been beautiful got all sad and dirty, but then the city started to recover and things got better. The nice old stuff that had was still there was cleaned up, and then somebody thought of doing this artist program to make the stations that were too dreary to do anything about look nice, and it's worked out great! Bonnie actually thought this plaque might have been from the old days but when she looked it up on Google she found out that an artist named Jane Greengold was invited to decorate this station in 1995. The little band of mosaic tile at the top is probably from the old days but the plaque is part of Ms. Greengold's station-wide nod to the Soldiers and Sailors Arch, just upstairs in Grand Army Plaza. You can read a little bit more about it here if you want to. 

Ms. Greengold called her theme "Wings for the IRT: The Irresistible Romance of Travel", but to a New Yorker, "IRT" also stands for "Interborough Rapid Transit", which was the name of the first company to run a subway line in New York City. The first subway line started in 1904 and it was only in Manhattan, but then it spread out, and the Grand Army Plaza station was part of that company way back when. New York's a big city with lots of people who want to get around, so another company came along to see if they could make some money doing that too; that one started as Brooklyn Rapid Transit and then when they started going to Manhattan they changed to Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit, "BMT". Then the city decided that they should actually run their own subway line too, and that was called the Independent Subway, which got shortened to "IND". The two other ones ended up not making their owners enough money after a while, and the city ended up taking them both over in 1940 and gradually blending the 3 systems (which had been built as totally separate!) into 1. You can tell somebody's a real old-school "Noo Yawker" if they talk about taking the IRT or the BMT instead of calling their line by a letter or a number (like Bonnie rides the B or the Q to work and she didn't really know all this stuff by heart, she sort of knew about it but we had to go to this site to get all the details).

Anyways, sorry, wow, that was a lot about the subway, wasn't it? But it's kind of neat how it got to be the way it is today. I'll try not to talk quite so much after this! 

Now we're in Manhattan looking down Wall Street. This is more what you think of when you think of New York City, isn't it? This is way way way downtown, but it's called Wall Street because a long time ago this is where the wall that marked the north end of the city was. Back then the city was still called New Amsterdam, it was Dutch too. This is where the New York Stock Exchange is, and although more people are starting to live down here (the real estate people love making up cute names for neighborhoods and they call this FiDi, short for Financial District), it used to just be banks, banks and more banks! If we had a little more time we could walk down and see the stock exchange but the day was actually going a little faster than Bonnie had expected it to!  

And what she really wanted to do was take me for a ride on the Staten Island Ferry. This is a fantastic thing to do if you ever come to New York City - it doesn't take very long, the views are incredible (I'll show you some of those in a minute!) and it's actually free! 

Here we are inside the ferry terminal. Bonnie had actually had a day off from work the day we did all of this, but it was a work day and it was getting pretty close to rush hour - that's why there are so many people here, they're all waiting to get on the boat and go home to Staten Island (which is also full of houses and trees and is a much quieter place to live that Manhattan, which is really busy). 

The ferry boats are nice and big, though, so there's plenty of room for everybody. We're riding the Spirit of America today, getting ready to cross upper New York Harbor - there's somebody we HAVE to say hi to out there! 

And here we go! We're looking back at downtown; there's another ferry waiting to load up, at the height of rush hour a ferry leaves that terminal every 15 minutes! It takes about 25 minutes to cross the harbor so at rush hour you always pass another ferry going the other way. We're also looking up the East River - that's the river that runs along the east side of Manhattan, but it's also called the East River because that's the river a boat would take to go east out into Long Island Sound.

Further out in NY Harbor - I wish it was a prettier day because when the sky is blue and the sun is shining on the glass buildings, this is a spectacular view! Here you can also see the Hudson, which runs along the west side of Manhattan. The Hudson is also sometimes called the North River, because that's the river a boat would take to go north to Albany and beyond. The Lenape, whose territory this was at one time, called the Hudson "Muhheakantuck", meaning "river that flows both ways", because the Hudson (along with all of the major waterways that surround NYC) is tidal, coming in and going out with the moon - so for a little over six hours it flows north, and then it slows down, and stops, and then starts up again going south, and does that for a little over six hours, and then slows down and stops and starts up going north again and does that again and again pretty much forever. This is great for people in boats (especially little ones like Bonnie likes) because if you time your trip right you can go from Manhattan to, oh, say, the Statue of Liberty and back and have the current helping you out the whole time. If you time it wrong, it can be a huge pain, so most boaters around here know how to read their current tables! 

And speaking of the Statue of Liberty - 

There she is! The Lady in the Harbor. You guys probably all know a lot about her already, and of course everybody knows what she looks like, but how can you come to NYC without at least seeing her? Off to the right is a little bit of Ellis Island, where a whole lot of peoples' grandparents and great grandparents first came to the United States. We didn't go there today, that would be a whole extra blog post, but Bonnie's been there and when people ask her what they should do if they are visiting NYC, she usually recommends that. She's never actually been to visit the Statue of Liberty, but she's sailed and paddled past a zillion times and just never gets tired of seeing the Statue. 

We're playing tourist out here on the water today, and a lot of people do like to play here, but there's a lot of work that still goes on in NY Harbor, the city grew up where it did because of this beautiful sheltered harbor. Here's a tugboat not too far from Staten Island, probably waiting to go collect a barge they're going to take somewhere. Every Labor Day Weekend there's a big tugboat race up by Manhattan, Bonnie says it's fantastic! 

And this is the only shot we actually took ON Staten Island - there are some great places to visit on Staten Island but again, we just didn't have time - hint: if you ever mail yourself to NYC, make sure the person you mail yourself to has more than one day to take you around! We're getting back on the same ferry we just got off of - they make everybody get off of the ferry when it lands even if you're going straight back, so the crew can do a quick clean-up without falling over people. 

Looking up the Kill van Kull, which goes on behind Staten Island. You see the word "Kill" in a lot of place names around here, the Kill Van Kull runs into the Arthur Kill, which goes by the Fresh Kills landfill, and there's Peekskill and Fishkill and Catskill and Peterskill, but it's not because New Yorkers are really angry all the time (they can be sometimes, but mostly they aren't, just like most people), it's another one of those Dutch words, and it just means a creek or other narrow body of water. The Kill van Kull is still a very busy area for commercial shipping - you can see a few of the big ships that have to go in there to get to where they need to ti load or unload - Bonnie's been back there in a kayak and she says it's fun to see the big ships going by, but little boats have to be really careful because the big guys don't have much room to move in there! 

There's another Staten Island Ferry - now we're going back to Manhattan and they're on their way where we just were. 

When we'd started out this afternoon we thought we would finish with a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, but we're running out of daylight, so instead we'll just walk up and take a picture of it. We passed the tall ship Peking on the way - this is a HUGE old ship and is part of the South Street Museum fleet - unfortunately they're looking for someone to buy the Peking as it's really expensive to take care of a ship like this, and the museum has another slightly smaller one, the Wavertree, that they've decided to concentrate on. She's off in drydock being fixed up now, should be beautiful when she comes back!

And you can just see the bridge in the distance. So we'll just walk a little further north - 

And there she is, the Brooklyn Bridge, standing here across the East River since 1883. It's really too bad we didn't have time to walk across, that would've been a perfect end to my day here!

Off in the background you can see the slightly newer Manhattan Bridge, which opened in 1909. You can walk across that one too but the Brooklyn Bridge is more designed with walkers in mind. Further north from there - can't see it from here - is the Williamsburg Bridge, which opened in 1903. A good way to remember the order is just to think of a fancy car - BMW! One more thing about the Brooklyn Bridge - remember how yesterday I was talking about how Brooklyn wasn't always part of NYC? This bridge being built may have been one of the things that helped make that happen; before that, you could only get to Manhattan by ferry and this bridge connected the two cities in a way they'd never been before.

And that was all we had time for in my day in NYC! I'll be heading back to Texas soon, I had fun during my short visit to NY and I hope you enjoyed my stories about the place!

Subway Series #2-and-a-half

A very New Yorky wishing well.

Three coins in the trackbed,
through the ripples, how they shine

(with apologies to Jules Styne, of course)

Can't quite count it as a Subway Series post 'cause those were supposed to involve me actually carving out a little time to go take pictures, but this just fits in!

Subway Series #2 - Subway Zoetrope

Well, technically maybe it should be #1 -- I first posted this almost exactly 2 years ago, so if you think it looks familiar, that's why! However, that post was wrecked for some time, as I explained in Subway Series #1: "With my animation obsession, I naturally always get a kick out of watching it and one day I got a whim to share it here, so took my little Optio to work with me one day, worked past rush hour & then simply rode back & forth across the Manhattan Bridge, filming the zoetrope each time, until I got a decent shot. Just discovered that I'll have to redo that, I'd put that on Yahoo Video which I've JUST discovered is now entirely devoted to pet-food-manufacturer-subsidized cute animal videos - no more you-tube-esque user uploads & sharing, my video is gone & the 2008 Masstransiscope post just shows a black square. BOO! Can't find the original clip anywhere so I'll just have to redo it."

Well, I went to redo it tonight, but I didn't wait until late enough and I was tired (had to work on Saturday & be in early today), and I was running out of steam by the time I got a clear shot (need a window with no people sitting in front of it), and then the train stopped dead for a good half a minute right when we got to the zoetrope & then just crawled out. ARGH. Plus I'd set the camera to super-high quality which is an utter waste when filming on the subway - all you get is highly defined graininess. Bleah. I was too zonked to try again, though, so I figured I'd just go home & see if I could do anything with the one shot. I downloaded it and sure enough, it sucked, but somehow while I was working on trying to see if I could cut out at least some of the sitting-still part, I stumbled across the original video clips.

YAY.

So once again, for your viewing pleasure, here is Masstransiscope, by Bill Brand.

Original 2008 post text:

Graffiti artwork animated by the movement of the subway train. Can be seen just before the Manhattan Bridge on Manhattan-bound N, Q & B trains. Not my art, I just pointed a camera at it while I rode past on the train. I like it 'cause it puts some fun into my morning commute!

I'd put this up on Yahoo Video earlier this week & since I seem to be indulging in a lot of New Yorky posts this week, this one fits right in.

It's funny, this giant zoetrope was actually originally installed in 1980. By the time I started riding this particular line, the animation panels had been completely covered in graffiti. I'd noticed the slits - it had occured to me that they resembled a zoetrope, but I didn't realize, until the sequential frames were restored & all the sudden one day I was looking out the subway car window & seeing bouncing balls & rocketships flying by, that it actually IS one!

For more information check out bbotics.com!

There's also a blog with a short circa-80's news piece about it from the - shows how he designed it (check it out, no computers, he actually built a big working model) & then he & the reporter actually go into the installation in the Myrtle Avenue subway station (abandoned but still down there, you sometimes hear those called "ghost stations"). You can see that here.

Subway Series #1 - The Station Formerly Known as the Real Estate Office of T.B. Ackerson

Welcome to the Frogma Subway Series!

Nothing to do with baseball, of course. My main interest in baseball tends to be limited to wishing the Mets would maintain momentum one of these seasons because that would make my honey very happy.

Nope - the Subway Series I've been thinking about doing for a while? Just a series of posts featuring photos of the stations that make me want to slow down. As a carless New Yorker, I rely on our public transportation system to get around, and usually, when I'm on the train, I'm in a hurry to get somewhere - but every now and then I'll find myself walking through a station with which an artist has gotten to have his or her gleeful way during a renovation and slowing down because the public art is particularly beautiful or entertaining. Ever since TQ gave me a camera that can handle indoor shots better than my Optio WP, I've been thinking it would be fun to share some of my particular favorite installations.

I've already done a couple proto-Subway-Series posts, both of which ended up being pretty popular. One was a video of a giant-scale zoetrope that an artist created in the "ghost station" at Myrtle Avenue, the former last stop on my line. You see it from the Manhattan-bound B and Q trains after leaving the present-day last stop in Brooklyn, DeKalb Avenue. With my animation obsession, I naturally always get a kick out of watching it and one day I got a whim to share it here, so took my little Optio to work with me one day, worked past rush hour & then simply rode back & forth across the Manhattan Bridge, filming the zoetrope each time, until I got a decent shot. Just discovered that I'll have to redo that, I'd put that on Yahoo Video which I've JUST discovered is now entirely devoted to pet-food-manufacturer-subsidized cute animal videos - no more you-tube-esque user uploads & sharing, my video is gone & the 2008 Masstransiscope post just shows a black square. BOO! Can't find the original clip anywhere so I'll just have to redo it. The other one, of course, was last February's Duke Riley Cracks Me Up.

I'm kicking this off today, with a station that hasn't even been artified yet (although there are artistic plans in place that actually sound sort of neat), because I really enjoy it when I find out that something I've walked past time & time again without really noticing it actually has a pretty interesting history.

This time, it's the station house at the Avenue H stop of the B and Q lines. I almost never stop there, it's 1 stop past my stop & unlike the next couple of stops, there's nothing specific that I would usually stay on the train for. I would go on to Avenue J for DiFara's Pizza, and before a sushi place opened on Cortelyou Road I used to go to a place on King's Highway when I got a craving for raw fish - but after I'd gotten the pizza or the sushi, I'd usually walk home and that would take me right past the station house.

I never particularly noticed it because most of the stations around here have some sort of little houselike affair as the entryway - like this one at Cortelyou Road:



In addition, it hasn't always looked this quaint - here's a pre-renovation photo of the headhouse that I found last night on Wikimedia Commons . Would you look twice? I didn't.



However, it turns out that this station house actually must have been one of the first structures in my very nice neighborhood - as I found out earlier last week in a quick post about the nearly-complete renovation on the Ditmas Park Blog, it started out as the office of T.B. Ackerson.



No, no, no, not the wine merchant. THAT T.B. Ackerson's is a modern Cortelyou Road tip-of-the-hat to the original T.B. Ackerson, the real estate agent who first developed much of my neighborhood in turn-of-the-century Brooklyn.

It's an unusual neighborhood for NYC - there are a few nice old apartment buildings like the one I live in, but you wouldn't really notice those so much as the lovely, big, freestanding single-family homes, each with its own green lawn, all on shady tree-lined streets.
-

Suburban vision, early variety.

Some of the area homes border on "mansion" - not quite the massive structures the ultra-rich of the time lived in, but still quite grand and unique (especially by today's standards) -



But there was also a nice variety of interesting and comfortable pre-planned home designs for those with a little less money. I'm not sure I ever would've noticed this without going on a tour of local architectural styles run by the Levys, longtime local residents who have a family tour business, Levy's Unique New York, but they were talking about the prefabricated nature of the less expensive homes in the area and sure enough, for all all the homes look so individualistic at first glance, as we were walking down the street, sharp-eyed patrons started noticing repetitions!

Like this -



or this!



It's actually easier to spot these in the wintertime, when the trees are all bare, and the tour was in the wintertime, but they're around to see if you're looking for them.

I ran over to check out the renovation myself yesterday, with this post in mind (as I mentioned with yesterday's fall foliage shot), and they did a very nice job on it -



Oh, and the art?


At some point, bronze rocking chairs will be installed on the porch.

For a photo of the station in its original incarnation as T.B. Ackerson's real estate office, plus a very good article about how local support for the old station (even with the old battered paint-job and 70's-industrial-blah interior that made me miss ever seeing anything special here until it was specifically pointed out to me) saved this station from the MTA's original wrecking-ball plans, visit The Third Rail Online's article. I found it a very interesting read.

Want to see a few more of the colorful homes in my neighborhood? Check out my Full Spectrum in Victorian Flatbush post - I went out one day with my camera in hand, determined not to come home until I'd found a house for every color in the rainbow!