There is no there there

[4523 3rd Avenue, Sunset Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

“When Commissioner Moses finds the surface of the earth too congested for one of his parkways, he lifts the road into the air and continues it on its way”: thus gushed The New York Times in 1941 on the creation of the Gowanus Parkway (later Expressway), a six-lane highway that wreaked havoc in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood. Robert Caro tells the story in The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, pages 520–525.

This building, at the southeast corner of 46th Street and 3rd Avenue, was one of many that were destroyed to make room for the parkway. The first rowhouse that followed this corner building was also destroyed: the block now begins with the rowhouse with the bow window. Look at this corner in Google Maps and you can see that it’s as if buildings have been sheared away.

I think of the kid in knickers as a silent witness to a neighborhood’s destruction.

*

A reader tracked down the pharmacist: Dr. Max Korowitz, who had been at this address since 1916. In 1936, he was the subject of an article in The Brooklyn Eagle.

Related reading
All OCA More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives posts (Raindrop.io)