Scenes from New York

[Kiwiwriter47 472]

Would folks be interested in me sharing some of the many odd photographs I have seen and admired of various odd sites and locales around New York City -- stuff that the tourists don't see but SimCity builders may find interesting?

Traffic lights, subway trains, stations, unusual buildings, memorials, markers, and fun stuff like that.

Let me know, and I'll add it to this thread. Here are some examples:

At least, I promise to add puns! 

[RobertLM78 1,597]

Awesome idea.   Looking forward to what you've got to dig up from  your collection. 

[Kiwiwriter47 472]

17 hours ago, RobertLM78 said:

Awesome idea.   Looking forward to what you've got to dig up from  your collection. 

I'll start by explaining the photos above.

One shows how you do NOT spell "Broadway" on a subway mosaic installed in 1933.

The second is a Heins LaFarge ceramic for Astor Place station, on the original 28 stops. John Jacob Astor made his money in beaver pelts, so the station is decorated with them.  A more recent artist made a giant reproduction of the square in the cross for the northbound platform of what is now the "6" train.

The Bushwick-Aberdeen mosaic is the work of Squire Vickers (I believe) in the 1920s. Detailed it is.

The elevated station is northbound Rivington Street on Allen Street, part of the Second Avenue Elevated, in the Lower East Side, in the early 1900s. The Swiss chalet headhouse with token booth, turnstiles, benches, and coal-fired stove, stands directly over the street. Note the safety fence on the station platform fence, an addition to prevent accidents. The entire station is wooden.

Also note the laundry hanging out and lack of air conditioning. SC designers might want to add hanging laundry to four-  and five-story old-law and new-law tenements. If they're smart enough, the laundry can go in and out. 

And the pun should be obvious! 

Now, who can tell me what THESE are?

[RobertLM78 1,597]

1 hour ago, Kiwiwriter47 said:

I'll start by explaining the photos above.

One shows how you do NOT spell "Broadway" on a subway mosaic installed in 1933.

The second is a Heins LaFarge ceramic for Astor Place station, on the original 28 stops. John Jacob Astor made his money in beaver pelts, so the station is decorated with them.  A more recent artist made a giant reproduction of the square in the cross for the northbound platform of what is now the "6" train.

The Bushwick-Aberdeen mosaic is the work of Squire Vickers (I believe) in the 1920s. Detailed it is.

Like the tilework - I used to do that for a living through most of the noughties.

 

1 hour ago, Kiwiwriter47 said:

The elevated station is northbound Rivington Street on Allen Street, part of the Second Avenue Elevated, in the Lower East Side, in the early 1900s. The Swiss chalet headhouse with token booth, turnstiles, benches, and coal-fired stove, stands directly over the street. Note the safety fence on the station platform fence, an addition to prevent accidents. The entire station is wooden.

Also note the laundry hanging out and lack of air conditioning. SC designers might want to add hanging laundry to four-  and five-story old-law and new-law tenements. If they're smart enough, the laundry can go in and out. 

This is probably my favorite image from the first set.   Interesting that they are only now opening its subway replacement.  I'm going to have to look into the history of that line. 

What's the difference between old-law and new-law tenements?  Is  that some sort of NYC statutory code, or does it have greater scope?

 

1 hour ago, Kiwiwriter47 said:

And the pun should be obvious! 

I'm probably overthinking -- or looking in the wrong spot.....

 

2 hours ago, Kiwiwriter47 said:

Now, who can tell me what THESE are?

Look like some more subway station mosaics (lower Manhattan as well probably (?)) - not sure what the "respect" banners/signs are about.

Next looks like the scoreboard for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

"Finally" (and I'm assuming "duckie" is a signature of sorts),  I don't know where, but I know I've seen the initials "HB" overlaid like that before... interesting because those are also the first two initials of my grandpa's name (HBL).

[Kiwiwriter47 472]

The pun is the Rubber Duck in Hong Kong...SimCity needs one.

The "Respect" signs refer to Aretha Franklin's defining song: "R-E-S-P-E-C-T...Find out what that it means to me!"

"BH" is the symbol for the 1908 "Borough Hall" station in Brooklyn, the first station on the first subway line to go from Manhattan to Brooklyn. A fairly ornate station it is.

The Grand Concourse Hotel is at Grand Concourse and 161st Street in The Bronx, two blocks from Yankee Stadium (old and new) and numerous Yankees lived there, from Babe Ruth (early days) to Mickey Mantle and Billy Martin (who would sneak onto fire escapes to watch each other bop their girlfriends) to Horace Clarke (who enjoyed its convenience).

The hotel was one of the best in The Bronx when it opened, and even had a rifle range for guests. It is now a seniors' home.

The Ebbets Field scoreboard is there to see if SC4 designers can reproduce it! 

 

[RobertLM78 1,597]

Top notch collection here.   Now, the 181st wall is a true mosaic..... and a nice one at that with the all decorative elements.

The Ansonia Apartment Hotel has a French chateau look to it.  Beautiful building - don't build 'em like that any more....

 

I never did make it to Brooklyn or Staten Island on my visit there back in '98.... fun trip though, hit up Rocky Sullivan's featuring some Seanchaí when it was still in Manhattan, saw a good play in the Bronx.... fun times.
 

[Naomi57 2,985]

This post is a great idea, @Kiwiwriter47.  I'm in!  

On 04/01/2021 at 9:08 AM, RobertLM78 said:

 

Yea, I really dig that song, always did ...

Aretha Franklin - Respect [1967] (Aretha's Original Version) (2½ minutes)

[Kiwiwriter47 472]

On 1/7/2021 at 10:17 PM, RobertLM78 said:

Top notch collection here.   Now, the 181st wall is a true mosaic..... and a nice one at that with the all decorative elements.

The Ansonia Apartment Hotel has a French chateau look to it.  Beautiful building - don't build 'em like that any more....

 

I never did make it to Brooklyn or Staten Island on my visit there back in '98.... fun trip though, hit up Rocky Sullivan's featuring some Seanchaí when it was still in Manhattan, saw a good play in the Bronx.... fun times.
 

Among the residents of the Ansonia were Babe Ruth, Florenz Ziegfeld, and my great-uncle Izzy's employer, Arnold Rothstein, the "Big Bankroll" himself.

Izzy was a bag-man and enforcer for Rothstein. Helped rig the 1919 World Series. He started skimming the take from Rothstein, and the "Big Bankroll" found out.

Izzy is now forever a cornerstone in the infrastructure of New York...he's holding up the Hell Gate Bridge. 

[RobertLM78 1,597]

8 minutes ago, Kiwiwriter47 said:

Izzy was a bag-man and enforcer for Rothstein. Helped rig the 1919 World Series. He started skimming the take from Rothstein, and the "Big Bankroll" found out.

Izzy is now forever a cornerstone in the infrastructure of New York...he's holding up the Hell Gate Bridge. 

Crazy.... "the kid liked to wet his beak  in everything"... gotta be careful not to bite the hand that feeds.

[Kiwiwriter47 472]

On 1/10/2021 at 4:45 PM, RobertLM78 said:

Crazy.... "the kid liked to wet his beak  in everything"... gotta be careful not to bite the hand that feeds.

I have a number of stories about Izzy, mostly in connection with how he got my grandfather (and therefore my father and me) into baseball.

The best one is that my family disliked him for being a criminal, except that when not working for Rothstein, he had a crew that robbed furniture warehouses.

Whatever swag he couldn't sell, he'd give to my family.

After he vanished, no more furniture. That annoyed them. 

[RobertLM78 1,597]

22 minutes ago, Kiwiwriter47 said:

I have a number of stories about Izzy, mostly in connection with how he got my grandfather (and therefore my father and me) into baseball.

It'd be interesting to hear some more about that.  Had a cousin by marriage  who played for a number of years - he's retired now, but he played for a number of teams once he made it to the big league: Bluejays, Dodgers, Indians, and White Sox.

26 minutes ago, Kiwiwriter47 said:

The best one is that my family disliked him for being a criminal, except that when not working for Rothstein, he had a crew that robbed furniture warehouses.

Whatever swag he couldn't sell, he'd give to my family.

I've got a friend from your neck of the woods who had a furniture business that went bust and he and some friends "repossessed" the repossession .
I don't remember all the details but the story ended with the guy whose warehouse he'd taken the furniture back from calling him up and my friend saying "without proof i'm afraid what we have here is civil matter."   I should hit him up and see how he is... been several years since I've talked with him.

[Kiwiwriter47 472]

I grew up in New York City in the 1970s, and I remember the "Charlotte Street" story very well. It's part of "The Bronx Is Burning" miniseries.

The incident that Howard Cosell referred to was a fire in an abandoned school right near Yankee Stadium during Game Two of the World Series. I remember seeing the telecast at the time and remember him saying that...and his utter ignorance of and hatred for baseball.

The NYFD Arson Squad found out who did it, but couldn't amass enough evidence to put him away.

A few decades later, I went through that street to get to Engine Company 82 to get one of their t-shirts, which I wore out to death. I will go and get another one. For those of you who don't know, the best book ever written about firefighters is "Report From Engine Co. 82," by one of its members, Dennis Smith, which hit the New York Times best-seller list in 1973. My copy is autographed. I was so pleased to see that these neat little ranch homes had replaced the blitzed ruins of the 1970s, which looked more like Hamburg after the Royal Air Force Bomber Command got through with it in 1943.

Here is the entry on Charlotte Street from "Forgotten New York," written today.

Charlotte Street, a three-block thoroughfare running from Crotona Park east across Boston Road to Jennings Street and Minford Place, was briefly the best-known, and most infamous, street in the Bronx in the late 1970s. The young Quaker lass named Charlotte Leggett would never know that by marrying into the prominent Fox landowning family in 1808, she would eventually have a short street in the immediate Crotona Park area named for her; apartment buildings housing middle-class workers would spring up; and that her street would decay and collapse into utter ruin before bouncing back to respectability.

The street became a microcosm of what was happening to the South Bronx in the 1960s and 1970s when the high cost of illegal drugs caused many to commit crimes to pay for their habit. Merchants, many of whom had been in business in the neighborhood for decades, and many residents moved out to escape the onslaught. Landlords found it was unprofitable to maintain their buildings when the junkies were trashing them. By 1970 half the families living on Charlotte were welfare families and monthly rents became hard to collect. After a while heat and hot water was not provided and some unscrupulous landlords turned to arson to force recalcitrant tenants out. That same year, over 4200 fires broke out on Charlotte, an average of eleven per day. It was a nightmarish scenario that saw most of the buildings on Charlotte burnt down or abandoned by the mid-1970s.

President Jimmy Carter was in New York to attend a United Nations session October 5, 1977, but his real mission had been cloaked in secrecy to all but his closest aides. Carter wanted to see for himself the devastation that had been wrought on Charlotte Street. His motorcade roared on streets that have almost never seen visits by mayors, much less Presidents: the Grand Concourse, East Tremont Avenue, and Third Avenue, whose El was so recently torn down; its burned-out buildings bore sheets of tin where the window glass used to be. The motorcade traveled down Claremont Parkway, at one time a genteel carriage road between the Bathgate and Zborowski estates; through Crotona Park, whose grand appointments were now rubble-strewn; and on Boston Road, conceived and built by Lewis Morris in the post-Revolutionary years as an alternative to the older Boston Post Road; and finally Charlotte Street. The massive Herman Ridder Junior High School loomed balefully over the rubble-strewn blocks, the school standing out now that mostly everything surrounding it had been lost.

A week after the President’s visit the Yankees opposed the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series at Yankee Stadium. The nation saw for itself the Bronx’ plight when between innings, ABC-TV cameras panned around on the numerous blazes visible in the night. “The Bronx is burning,” intoned Howard Cosell.

The south Bronx was slow to recover. The federal government promised only $55 million in the wake of Carter’s visit. In 1977, the crack and AIDS epidemics were yet to arrive. Drug overdoses and AIDS killed over 17,000 Bronxites between 1985 and 2000. But the seeds for Charlotte Street’s rebirth began to bear shoots in 1984 when Charlotte Gardens, a community of ranch houses, was constructed where all the old tenements had burned down. Applicants who could prove need were able to purchase new $52,000 three-bedroom houses. Soon, additional new housing sprouted on the battered streets to the south and east.

Today tree-lined Charlotte Street and its well kept ranch house stock bears no resemblance to the blasted vistas that President Carter, and successor Ronald Reagan, found when they visited it in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Here's the link: Charlotte Street - Forgotten New York (forgotten-ny.com)

[Kiwiwriter47 472]

On 1/12/2021 at 6:27 PM, RobertLM78 said:

It'd be interesting to hear some more about that.  Had a cousin by marriage  who played for a number of years - he's retired now, but he played for a number of teams once he made it to the big league: Bluejays, Dodgers, Indians, and White Sox.

I've got a friend from your neck of the woods who had a furniture business that went bust and he and some friends "repossessed" the repossession .
I don't remember all the details but the story ended with the guy whose warehouse he'd taken the furniture back from calling him up and my friend saying "without proof i'm afraid what we have here is civil matter."   I should hit him up and see how he is... been several years since I've talked with him.

Izzy and his crew would get "intel" on a warehouse getting a shipment, often from the night security guard.

They would show up in a truck, and either slip the guard a finsky, beat the hell out of him (if it was a different guy), or both, load up the furniture, and then fence it. After giving tribute to Rothstein (or whoever was his local underboss), they'd split the take.

The stuff Izzy couldn't fence went to my grandfather and his seven brothers and sisters. My family basically colonized the South Bronx. Dad grew up on the Third Avenue El.

 

Who's your cousin? I likely know the name...he may even have a biography in the Society for American Baseball Research project.

[Kiwiwriter47 472]

The role of coal and art in New York City 100 years ago.

Artistic coal plants!

The coal company helped the city survive winter | Ephemeral New York (wordpress.com)

 

A small building survives towers in New York...this can happen in SC4!

The former lives of a shabby Midtown brownstone | Ephemeral New York (wordpress.com)

 

New York City stoops to conquer.

How New York became a metropolis of stoops | Ephemeral New York (wordpress.com)
 

[Kiwiwriter47 472]

As fourth-generation New Yorkers like myself know, the best way to travel in New York has always been by subway.

When the original line was opened, with its 28 stations, most of them had distinctive Hungarian-style entrance and exit kiosks, which provided Straphangers with the ability to raise and lower their umbrellas when going in and out of the stations. Sometime in the 1950s, the New York Transit Authority ordered their removal, theorizing that their glass construction made them a traffic hindrance.

Some background on them:

SUBWAY KIOSKS, Manhattan - Forgotten New York (forgotten-ny.com)

From the page:

"They were always specifically referred to as “kiosks” because they were modeled after entrance and exit structures found on the oldest lines of the Budapest, Hungary’s subway (known as the Metro), constructed in 1896, which were in turn reminiscent of Hungarian summer houses, called ‘kushks’ that were modeled after similar ones found in Turkey and Persia. (New York City has not constructed an entire new subway line since the 1930s, while Budapest’s newest line opened in 2014. The NYC Second Avenue Line is supposed to open three stations in 2016).

Pretty early on, these entrance kiosks, placed on relatively narrow avenues and streets in Midtown, were interfering with sight lines of motorists and accidents were getting frequent, so they were replaced with much less elaborate staircases and railings. All had been torn down by 1968.

In 1986, a replica of one of the entrance kiosks was made from original IRT planning sheets and was installed on a traffic island at Astor Place and Cooper Square."

Here's where I come in. In 1986, I was walking by the half-finished kiosk in Cooper Square, and saw that the four hooks that held it down to the flatbed truck had been sawn off. Realizing the historic value of these hooks, I "liberated them in the name of the Crown" and hauled them home to Hoboken. A few weeks later, I donated some stuff to the New York Transit Museum, including all four hooks. The museum staff was puzzled. They knew what to do with my books and old signs and maps, but four hooks from a reproduction kiosk baffled them.

A few months later, I was on a New York Transit Museum fantrip and I met up with the man I'd provided the hooks to. I asked what became of them. He said one was a paperweight on his desk. He still had the other three. I suggested he could send them to the company that made the kiosk and the contractor that installed it, with a nice plaque, to thank them for doing so. He brightened up immediately.

Later, when the kiosk was opened, I took my father to see it and use it. He scrutinized it carefully, with the eye of a jeweler examining a fine diamond. He finally pronounced: "Yes, they've done a good job. This is what they looked like. They need to build more."

So do SimCity designers. Here are examples.

 

[RobertLM78 1,597]

Nice - I'm glad you posted - I needed a reminder.   I was just recalling earlier today that I  hadn't responded yet  to this  post and your question:

On 1/13/2021 at 5:54 PM, Kiwiwriter47 said:

Who's your cousin? I likely know the name...he may even have a biography in the Society for American Baseball Research project.

His name is  Michael Huff.   Haven't really been  in contact with any of them since granny passed away in 2004.

Those old kiosks were neat..... shame they  got in the way of  traffic  sights.  Cool anecdote about the hooks - good looking out for potential  historic artifacts.
Great pun today, too, btw....

 

[Kiwiwriter47 472]

On 1/21/2021 at 6:31 PM, RobertLM78 said:

Nice - I'm glad you posted - I needed a reminder.   I was just recalling earlier today that I  hadn't responded yet  to this  post and your question:

His name is  Michael Huff.   Haven't really been  in contact with any of them since granny passed away in 2004.

Those old kiosks were neat..... shame they  got in the way of  traffic  sights.  Cool anecdote about the hooks - good looking out for potential  historic artifacts.
Great pun today, too, btw....

 

Michael Huff. He played in a huff and was gone in a minute and a huff.  

Wikipedia says the following:

He was drafted in the sixteenth round (402nd overall) in the 1985 Major League Baseball Draft. Over his career in the majors, Huff played outfield with the Dodgers, Indians, White Sox, and Blue Jays from 1989 to 1996. Huff was a member of the 1993 Western Division Champion White Sox.

He occasionally serves as a television broadcast announcer for the Chicago White Sox, filling in for regular announcers Ken Harrelson and Steve Stone. Huff also has been known to make appearances at Coal City High School, at the request of Dean Vigna. He speaks to the Varsity Club about his experiences and life in the MLB.

Here's his line at Baseball Reference: Mike Huff Stats | Baseball-Reference.com (baseball-reference.com)

The toughest thing with the hooks was hauling them home to Hoboken. They were heavy.

My father and I always did that. When the Third Avenue Elevated shut down in The Bronx in 1973, we asked -- and got permission from -- the token booth clerk to prise off the "Pull" and "Push" signs off the station door at 180th Street, where Dad got off as a kid to visit his relatives. We did that as well with a "To the Trains" sign at 168th Street on their last day of service.

In 1955, he removed a lantern from the last 3rd Avenue El train at Gun Hill Road, and put a light bulb in it. I turn it on to give a nice red light when I'm working on something serious.

I liberated light fixtures from the decommissioned Culver Shuttle before the line was torn down in 1985. It stood in Brooklyn, haunting 36th Street and providing bocce ball players with cover from rain and junkies with a shooting gallery for 10 years after its 1975 closure before the City finally demolished it. I never could get the piece of wood with the graffiti that read "May 10, 1975. The end."

Here's the lantern.

The kiosks were replaced by some dull entrances in the 1920s and thereafter, along with a shot of the Astor Place kiosk.

And today's pun.

 

[RobertLM78 1,597]

44 minutes ago, Kiwiwriter47 said:

Michael Huff. He played in a huff and was gone in a minute and a huff.  

Another pun hiding in the admix.   Hehe - yeah, he wasn't a Hall  of Famer.. just an average player.  Still he was, if i recall correctly, the grandson of my step-grandpa's first wife's sister.  Both he and my grandma were widowed and, also if I recall correctly, my grandma and Jane (his first wife) were good friends.  James (my step-grandpa) was the one who introduced my parents - and i actually went to my grandma's and Jim's wedding when I was 5.
 

44 minutes ago, Kiwiwriter47 said:

The toughest thing with the hooks was hauling them home to Hoboken. They were heavy.

I bet they were.  Those kiosks aren't small  and aren't light.
 

44 minutes ago, Kiwiwriter47 said:

My father and I always did that. When the Third Avenue Elevated shut down in The Bronx in 1973, we asked -- and got permission from -- the token booth clerk to prise off the "Pull" and "Push" signs off the station door at 180th Street, where Dad got off as a kid to visit his relatives. We did that as well with a "To the Trains" sign at 168th Street on their last day of service.

In 1955, he removed a lantern from the last 3rd Avenue El train at Gun Hill Road, and put a light bulb in it. I turn it on to give a nice red light when I'm working on something serious.

Cool..!  I hope you still have them... or at least gave them a good home.    Hmmmm.....red light, serious work --- were you doing some b&w photography?

 

44 minutes ago, Kiwiwriter47 said:

I liberated light fixtures from the decommissioned Culver Shuttle before the line was torn down in 1985. It stood in Brooklyn, haunting 36th Street and providing bocce ball players with cover from rain and junkies with a shooting gallery for 10 years after its 1975 closure before the City finally demolished it. I never could get the piece of wood with the graffiti that read "May 10, 1975. The end."

For a few summers growing up i went to a summer camp in the mountains outside of Santa Fe.  2 of the 3 times i went i stayed in the first of the guys' cabins, cabin "D".  There was always a  bunch of graffiti on  the walls of the cabins.   Years later i was up there for a quick visit and was sad to see my favorite graffiti was gone and painted over:
"Mutants for Nukes" and underneath  it had  a cyclops smiley face...... xDDDDDDDDD

[Kiwiwriter47 472]

I don't know where the signs went...my father had a lot of small advertising signs and suchlike. My brother may have them. The lantern is over my desk and was n the photo series I shared.

The red light meant I was working on an article, my book, or work from home (which is now four days a week) for my day job. Lets people know I'm seriously immersed in whatever galacic crisis I'm in.

 

[RobertLM78 1,597]

4 hours ago, Kiwiwriter47 said:

The red light meant I was working on an article, my book, or work from home (which is now four days a week) for my day job. Lets people know I'm seriously immersed in whatever galacic crisis I'm in.

Cool - gotcha.....

 

Edit: gonna remember the branch manager ... that hit me hard...

[Kiwiwriter47 472]

Time for more New York ephemera:

 

Visit this apartment building in Manhattan...maybe you'll learn to play the violin!

https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2021/01/18/the-violin-over-the-door-of-a-turtle-bay-mansion/

Who lived here? Not "Surfside 6," but Efrem Zimbalist Sr.

Never heard of him? Heard of Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. of "The FBI" fame? He played Inspector Erskine.

Never heard of him? How about his daughter, Stephanie Zimbalist, who starred with Pierce Brosnan in "Remington Steele."

 

[RobertLM78 1,597]

3 hours ago, Kiwiwriter47 said:

Who lived here? Not "Surfside 6," but Efrem Zimbalist Sr.

Never heard of him? Heard of Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. of "The FBI" fame? He played Inspector Erskine.

Never heard of him? How about his daughter, Stephanie Zimbalist, who starred with Pierce Brosnan in "Remington Steele."

Never heard of any of  them to be honest ... but Stephanie is quite a fox.

[Kiwiwriter47 472]

14 hours ago, RobertLM78 said:

Never heard of any of  them to be honest ... but Stephanie is quite a fox.

Efrem Zimbalist Sr. is one of the 20th century's great violinists. Came here from Romania.

Efrem Zimbalist Jr. is a routine 20th century actor who starred in the 1960s police show "The FBI," which had J. Edgar Hoover's approval. He was a Chief Inspector with roving assignments in an office opposite Hoover's, and solved crimes based on real ones. J. Edgar opened every season by displaying the year's latest "Top 10 Wanted" list.

And Stephanie I discussed. She's in her 60s now.

 

[Kiwiwriter47 472]

The great borough of Brooklyn has ELEVEN sets of enumerated streets, which drive residents, visitors, and postal workers batty.

Numbered streets without a prefix

East numbered streets

West numbered streets

North numbered streets

South numbered streets

Beach numbered streets

Bay numbered streets

Paerdegat numbered streets

Brighton numbered streets

Flatbush numbered streets

and

Plumb numbered streets

The New York Times took a look at this weirdness today. 

Enjoy, and use this to name and number thoroughfares in your city!

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/27/nyregion/brooklyn-streets-numbers-renaming.html

 

[RobertLM78 1,597]

3 hours ago, Kiwiwriter47 said:

The great borough of Brooklyn has ELEVEN sets of enumerated streets, which drive residents, visitors, and postal workers batty.

Numbered streets without a prefix

East numbered streets

West numbered streets

North numbered streets

South numbered streets

Beach numbered streets

Bay numbered streets

Paerdegat numbered streets

Brighton numbered streets

Flatbush numbered streets

and

Plumb numbered streets

The New York Times took a look at this weirdness today. 

Enjoy, and use this to name and number thoroughfares in your city!

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/27/nyregion/brooklyn-streets-numbers-renaming.html

 

I'm not quite done reading the article yet ... fascinating stuff.......!!   Street naming can be a little mundane, but it's pretty important.  To start I usually do a quadrant system in my cities, but as far as names go numbers and letters are an obvious go-to: increasing from the city center always.  However it's not unheard of for me to use tree or herb names, too, also in alphabetical order and increasing from the city  center.

Considering how "just so" I am with names, I could see how annoying the system in Brooklyn would be.  I was always a little disappointed we never made it to Brooklyn (didn't feel like i was missing out on much with Staten Island, but Brooklyn would have been good to check out).

Thanks for sharing this gem of an article.  

[RobertLM78 1,597]

For grins and giggles I thought I'd try to geo-locate the corner shot in Williamsburg with little success.  Any clue where it  is taken?  (sadly  the writing above the door on the building to the left is hard to discern).

 

[Naomi57 2,985]

15 hours ago, RobertLM78 said:

Street naming can be a little mundane, but it's pretty important.  To start I usually do a quadrant system in my cities, but as far as names go numbers and letters are an obvious go-to: increasing from the city center always.  However it's not unheard of for me to use tree or herb names, too, also in alphabetical order and increasing from the city  center.

In SC4, sometimes I name streets, but even more I like to name Police Stations, Hospitals, and Education buildings ... sometimes even my Ferry Terminals.  I usually like to pull real-life locality names off the real-life areas that correlate to the New York region map I'm playing.

19 hours ago, Kiwiwriter47 said:

The great borough of Brooklyn has ELEVEN sets of enumerated streets, which drive residents, visitors, and postal workers batty.

All those numbered streets would definitely drive me batty!

[RobertLM78 1,597]

8 hours ago, Naomi57 said:

In SC4, sometimes I name streets, but even more I like to name Police Stations, Hospitals, and Education buildings ... sometimes even my Ferry Terminals.  I usually like to pull real-life locality names off the real-life areas that correlate to the New York region map I'm playing.

I like naming those sorts of things too, just some custom lots refuse to keep their new names, or will change all instances to that name .... so that sometimes gets neglected. 

A favorite  city-naming technique is to take a real life name and put a twist on it:  Chicago becomes Shakako, Deerfield becomes Horsefield, or... instead of  Yalta, how's about Yalton...?

[Kiwiwriter47 472]

On 1/28/2021 at 4:48 PM, RobertLM78 said:

For grins and giggles I thought I'd try to geo-locate the corner shot in Williamsburg with little success.  Any clue where it  is taken?  (sadly  the writing above the door on the building to the left is hard to discern).

 

Very tough one...maybe some research on the insurance company would answer it.

This is a VERY EARLY shot of Brooklyn, with a slow-exposure plate. Note the ghost at the bottom.

[Kiwiwriter47 472]

9 hours ago, Naomi57 said:

In SC4, sometimes I name streets, but even more I like to name Police Stations, Hospitals, and Education buildings ... sometimes even my Ferry Terminals.  I usually like to pull real-life locality names off the real-life areas that correlate to the New York region map I'm playing.

All those numbered streets would definitely drive me batty!

You can do a lot of names for police stations, hospitals, etc.

I just reach for my Hagstrom's Atlas for schools and hospitals and NYPD or FDNY lists for those facilities.

 

1 hour ago, RobertLM78 said:

I like naming those sorts of things too, just some custom lots refuse to keep their new names, or will change all instances to that name .... so that sometimes gets neglected. 

A favorite  city-naming technique is to take a real life name and put a twist on it:  Chicago becomes Shakako, Deerfield becomes Horsefield, or... instead of  Yalta, how's about Yalton...?

Well, Gotham City was based on New York City being "Gotham."

The last Batman movie turned Newark NJ into "Gotham City."