Walkin' In Brooklyn

Too cold to go far today. I'm out in the neighborhood, running errands. Update: Here's more footage from the library, along 86th Street and 18th Ave. Stops at Guiseppe Garibaldi Playground and Milestone Park. I had to put it on YouTube because the went over the 100 MB limit to upload it here. By a lot: Outtakes/Final Thoughts: I was walking on the avenue when I was going to shoot the first video, but there are people behind me. So I cut down a side street, which wasn't on the way to the bank or anything, just to film my introduction. I turn around and a couple people had followed me, and a couple more choose that moment to come out of their houses. Then one of the guys who'd turned the corner gets into a car and starts it -- and it's loud! And since it's cold, he has to leave it running! I came close to skipping the whole thing, but it was just too funny when I thought about it. Why be annoyed? Other than I was standi...

Marcus Garvey Blvd is a walk that has been a long time coming. It should've happened much sooner, and if there was a reason why I put off walking here, I might go back to the time that I walked Throop Ave, which was probably a couple years ago, which was the only time I was stopped by someone asking for money. I did offer her a couple dollars for Pampers. While I did this, she tried to nonchalantly grab more out of my hand. She relented when I told her that I needed the rest to get home. Walking with a wheeled backpack and looking like a professional of some kind, she might've thought I needed more than enough for a subway ride. If any case, after walking Nostrand, Marcy, Tompkins and Throop, I stopped walking south from Flushing to Fulton. However, in the past few months, I've walked eastward along most of the streets in Bed-Stuy that run parallel to Flushing and run into Fulton without any incident, and in fact, I greeted or smiled at a lot of people. (I even walked ...

Another day, another trip to Bushwick and another venture into Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights to get to Eastern Parkway. If the map is to be believed, I walked through Weeksville. Weeksville is an old name for a neighborhood settled in the early 19th century, named for James Weeks, an African-American stevedore from Virginia. Old names pop up from time to time as neighborhoods change and people want to differentiate from the recent past by reaching back into history. (I have no problem with this -- but it would explain why many lifelong Brooklynites have no idea where Weeksville is.) There were a lot of pictures on this one if only because of the number of streets I hit. Between the edge of the cemetery and Broadway there are a bunch of small streets, and I took a few of those at once. There was some iconograp...