It's All Here

Hi Folks: The bird's eye view of many of the topics of interest in this blog is shown above.  It is a J. McDonald Vanderbilt photo from 2010.  The topic is the 38th Street BMT yard in Brooklyn.  The bottom of this picture shows the Ninth Avenue Station of the West End Line "D".  The tracks lie between 39th Street to the left and 37th Street to the right which is Greenwood Cemetery.  At the top of the picture is the waterfront.  You can see the Gowonas Expressway on Third Avenue with white multi-story buildings as shown in the streetcar rendering shown in a earlier post.  Notice that 37th Street makes a sharp 90 degree right and another one north.  This is 36th Street and if you follow it and go one block east at the waterfront you are at  the site of the Luckenbach Pier Explosion at 35th Street.  If you know where to look, can see that the "mystery ramp" leads no where.  39th Street was the route of the Church Avenue Trolley and from Eight Avenue to the waterfront the route of the Eight Avenue Trolley.  What a great photo.  It's source is www.nycsubway.org.  Since 1956, many things have changed in the area.  Many of leads leading to the Fifth Avenue El were abandonded an the configuration of the piers on the waterfront is not the same.

Miracle on 35th Street

About 33 days after streetcar service came to an end on October 31, 1956, on December 3, 1956, this tragedy occured at a pier at 35th Street, Brooklyn, four blocks from the trolley turnround shown on this blog's headpiece.  Many people were killed and injured and windows were shattered many miles away from the blast site near the former trolley loop.

http://marine1fdny.com/miracle_35th_new.php

The above photo comes from Dave's Rail Pix and shows a Church Avenue Car on 13th Avenue
 bound for the waterfront, just about to turn unto 39th Street, to the side of the retail market shown below.
Windows at 13th Avenue and 39th Street at the wall paper store shown on the right broke from the shock wave of the explosion, many miles away from the Luckenbach pier at 35th Street.  In the background, you can see the staircase to the 13th Avenue Station of the Culver Line and you can see the horizontal wooden trough for the overhead of the South Brooklyn Railway beneath the el.  Windows also broke on 39th Street at a laundry right off 13th Avenue and other places all over the city.

At the time of the blast, doors similar to these at the 39th Street side were blown open by the force of the  explosion.  I was inside the market  at the 39th Street side at the time of the explosion.  Within minutes, the sky darked from the west eventhough the sun was setting.