Bay Ridge - 67th and 66th Streets, Wakeman Place, Lief Ericson Park, Owl's Head Park

This unusual route came about because I had to drop my car off for servicing. I figured that this would be a good time to make up some of those missing Bay Ridge streets. Being that there are so many irregular streets and tiny lanes, it's going to be a pain to complete all of it without repeating a lot of steps and a fair amount of backtracking.

I can say that I actually planned to do more than this because it never occured to me that this route would be nearly four miles long! (Naturally, I didn't account for the extra walk to the subway to get home, but still!)

So here is Bay Ridge on one fine Tuesday morning. (Actually, it might've rained on me a little.)

Also, let me add right now that the title of the map is incorrect. It is not 68th and 67th Streets, but rather 67th and 66th streets which border Leif Ericson Park.

Note that I "oopsed" loading the photos, so they're larger than usual. I could add a "width=" tag to each of them to shrink them at some point. Or do you prefer larger photos? Feel free to respond. My posts get almost double-digit readers, and you can't all be bots, can you?

Our journey begins at the eastern end of Leif Ericson Park, near the Gowanus Expressway. (At least, I think it's still called that over here. It's I-278, heading for the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge.)

RIP Officer Chris Hoban. Hoban attended the same high school that I did. He was a couple years ahead of me. He was gunned in a narcotics operation in 1988 at the age of 26. Police work is inherently dangerous, and that was a dark day for another reason: it was the first time in years that two NYC police officers were killed in the line of duty in separate incidents in many years.

Hoban is remembered every year by our school with a run in his honor along Shore Road.

When I see houses like this one, I take pictures just to record "old" Brooklyn. It'd be nice if these places get fixed up, but I wouldn't be surprised if they aren't torn down for some new monstrosity. (And, no, I don't mind new construction if it doesn't look out of place, or if all these new units could bring rents, and home prices, down. Unfortunately, people have already shown a willingness to put so much money into rent that new units will more likely bring more people into the market from other places than lower the prices for those already here.)

These next three pictures were something new to me. If you look at Google Maps (as of this writing), this building isn't decorated like this yet. However, Google does list is as the Prajna Zen Monastery. A little online research says that the Salem Lutheran Church was sold for $4.65 million to the Eastern Buddhist Association in 2019. So the building got repurposed and is still in use, rather than being torn down for high-priced housing units. (I won't repeat my complaints, but this is a high-value, in-demand area.)

The High School for Telecommunications has been there for as long as I remember, which makes sense because the building is over a hundred years old, even if the school it houses has only existed for a few decades.

Just down the block is St. Nektarios Greek Orthodox Church. The building is close to a century old, from what I can tell online.

Side trip to Wakeman Place down Begen Place.

And then I looped back on Sedgwick Place.

I finally made it down to a piece of Colonial Road that I hadn't walked yet and to Owl's Head Park. I didn't walk through it, but I did walk around it.

Next side trip: Bliss Terrace. I walked a little up and down Bay Ridge Avenue looking for the second street to come back, but it turned out to be an alley of garages and the gate was shut, so I had to double back the way I came.

A piece of Narrows Road, followed by the Court of Owls ...,er, I mean Owl's Head Court.

The west side of the park borders the Belt Parkway, in particular, the exit from the Belt that heads up to Fourth Ave with another exit at a Colonial Road. I'd have to check, but I believe that this was the original end of the parkway before the ramp to the Gowanus was built. For that matter, I don't know when the Gowanus was built -- there used to be elevated railway tracks over Third Ave, and, obviously, there was no reason for a highway to the Verrazzano Bridge before there was a bridge in 1964.

I did climb a hill at one point to take some pictures of the harbor and of Staten Island and New Jersey. The funny thing was that at Colonial Road, the park was below my level. I went down and it went up.

I found an abandoned scooter and took a picture but in the end, I didn't report it. I'm sure it was found. There were plenty of people going back and forth.

I don't always go down these alleys, but since I'd already walked the streets on either side, I figured why not. Of course, has I planned better, I would've gone down those steps instead of up>. I always seem to be going up flights of steps!

Back to Wakeman Place, which extends to Third Avenue. However, since 66th Street doesn't start until Fourth Avenue, I had to walk a block through the park.