SHEEPSHEAD BAY'S ONLY INDEPENDENT NEWS BLOG

Luke Stangarone cleaning the Feltman window // Source: Tricia Vita, AmuzingTheZillion.com

Sheepshead Bay resident Luke Stangarone is on a mission to uncover the history of a magnificently preserved stained glass window. He’s enlisted the help of Amusing the Zillion blogger Tricia Vita, who then turned to us. And since we’re pretty useless, we decided to turn to you…

So here’s the deal: Stangarone’s wife’s relatives were old-school Coney carnies, and they managed to rescue two stained glass windows from the tremendous Feltman’s complex before it was torn down. The windows sat in a muddy Park Slope basement for decades until Stangarone decided to clean them up, and is donating one to the Coney Island Museum. But the problem is, they’re not sure where in Feltman’s the windows come from, and it was quite an expansive complex:

Charles Feltman is famous as the inventor of the hot dog, but his entertainment complex on Surf Avenue was multi-faceted and covered a full city block. According to the Coney Island History Project, which has a 120-year-old chair from Feltman’s Maple Garden on display, the Feltman empire included nine restaurants, two bars, a ballroom, an outdoor movie theater, a hotel, a beer garden, a bathhouse, a pavilion, a Tyrolean village, a carousel, a roller coaster called the ZIZ and the maple garden! Since Feltman’s closed in 1954 and was demolished to make way for Astroland Park in 1962, you’d have be over 60 to remember going there.

Well, any of you history buffs, or old coots (or both), know where these lovely windows come from?

View more photos at Amusing the Zillion.

A c.1896 lantern slide, courtesy of Joseph Ditta. It's the earliest known photo of the plot.

There’s a certain lexical contortion that must be performed when writing a headline to celebrate the anniversary of a historic cemetery. I began the headline with “Happy Birthday,” then figured “happy” was not appropriate. So I went with “morbid.” But then “birthday” sounded way off, so I changed it to “deathday,” but nothing seemed right about that. So I went with “anniversary.”

Although language may bar my ability to create a proper phrase to capture the day, it doesn’t stop facts from being facts. Yesterday marked the 360th anniversary of the first recorded burial in the town of Gravesend – and possibly within the current confines of the Gravesend Cemetery, according to Gravesend historian Joseph Ditta.

(Read our August 2009 Q&A with Ditta about Gravesend’s history and preservation.)

The burial of the unnamed infant son of William Wilkins took place on August 18, 1650. This first interment occurred seven years after Gravesend was settled by former English subjects under Lady Deborah Moody on land granted to them by the Dutch governor of New Amsterdam. It took eight more years for the graveyard to take on more officious boundaries, when a resident offered 20 guilders – Dutch gold coins – to fence in the southwest corner of the village, which constituted the cemetery.

But if you go today, don’t expect to see the Wilkins baby’s tombstone. The earliest surviving stone marker is marked 1724, and the oldest legible stone dates to 1768. Still, that’s mighty old.

And speaking of going today, your opportunity is coming. Locals are lucky to have the knowledgeable (and eminently friendly) Joe Ditta presenting a pre-Halloween tour of the area on Sunday, October 24 at 11:00 a.m.

The tour will cover more than 250 years of the cemetery’s history, and is filled with all the intrigue reflective of the city’s twisted growth. Hear about murder-suicides, possible poisonings, and the warped burials of Coney Island sideshow freaks.

The tour is being given in conjunction with the Salt Marsh Alliance (based in Marine Park) and its resident History Club. (For information, see http://www.saltmarshalliance.org/ or call 718-421-2021.) Also, check out the Facebook fan page for Ditta’s book, Gravesend, Brooklyn, and the tour’s event invitation.

The original version of this article said the settlers were Quakers. This is incorrect. Lady Moody was an Anabaptist.

I know, I know – I did a postcard yesterday. They don’t really come in that often, but when they do I try to get them up right away before they disappear into Internet limbo.

No date is given on the card by the eBay seller. However, there is this entirely useless description that I find amusing: “We specialize in BETTER cards from all five boroughs of NYC consisting of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island, The Bronx and those Long Island communities that constitute Queens County.” (emphasis added)

Yeah, screw Queens.

A similar angle of the beach is given in this 1903 photograph, which we first showed you in the article about Manhattan Beach’s history with fireworks (and is original from a Daily News profile). You can see just how nitty-gritty that purty building in the background of the postcard actually looked.

Another beautiful postcard being auctioned on eBay, this time depicting a Flatbush stretch of Kings Highway, looking south towards Gravesend. It was mailed and postmarked in 1930, meaning the illustration itself is probably from the late 20s.

A stack o’ stickers and a beer on me if anyone can identify the intersection and get a present-day photo of approximately the same angle.

Brooklyn Jockey Club at Gravesend Racetrack (1893)

I get a lot of e-mails and phone calls asking about Sheepshead Bay’s horse racing history. People want to know what tracks were around, where the tracks were, how long ago they existed, and – of course – photos, photos, photos!

Sheepshead Bites has had a couple of historical nuggets on the tracks – which featured both horse and automobile racing – but I usually send people off to a slew of Googled links I keep on hand.

Well, over at Stevapalooza!, the blog of cartoonist Steve Bialik, a great list of all the neighborhood tracks and a summary of their history is assembled. The information includes track locations and dates of operations – as well as photos and illustrations of each one.

The best part? He’s got a bunch of tracks that I didn’t even know existed. Like the tiny Deerfoot Trotting Track, which saw a slew of murders including that of its owner (after a friendly wrestling match went too far); the poorly-named Prospect Park Fair Grounds on Avenue T and Ocean Parkway; and the Parkway Driving Club.

In the future, when people ask me about the racetracks, this is where I’ll be sending them. Kudos to Bialik for putting this great piece together!

This entry into our Postcard series comes by way of an Amazon listing. The caption reads:

Great match race (a dead heat) between Dobbins and Domino, for $10,000 a side: over the Coney Island Futurity Course, Sheepshead Bay, Long Island, August 31, 1893

That puts this race as the fifth anniversary of the Futurity Stakes, which, when it launched on Labor Day 1888, was the richest race ever run in the United States. The Futurity still runs today over on the Belmont track.

On this date 32 years ago, six firefighters perished in what, at the time, was the largest loss of firefighters in a single fire in Brooklyn history. At approximately 9:02 a.m., the roof of Waldbaum’s at Avenue Y and Ocean Avenue (where Staples is today) collapsed, sending at least 12 firefighters into the inferno. In battling the blaze to save the lives of their fellow laddermen, 34 firefighters were injured.

The heroic firefighters who died in the blaze on August 2, 1978, are FF George Rice, 38, Ladder 153; FF James McManus, 48; Cov. Lt. James Cutillo, 39, 33rd Battalion; FF Harold Hastings, 39, 42nd Battalion; FF Charles Bouton, 38, Ladder 156; and William O’Connor, 29 of Ladder 156.

On the anniversary of their supreme sacrifice, John Dwyer of JGDwyerPhotography put together the above slideshow. Dwyer has been photographing the FDNY in action since the 1970s.

In 1999, the city renamed the corner “Firemen’s Corner,” in what is said to be the last public dedication to honor the fallen heroes.

A Facebook page frequently visited by family and friends also keeps the memory of those who passed alive, as does an annual mass held this morning at St. Brendans Church. You can also read the account of Steve Spak, another FDNY photographer on the scene that morning.

This was originally to be a “Postcard” piece, as the image above comes from an eBay auction. But further research revealed a fascinating part of Manhattan Beach history, dating back too far to fit even in the “Remember When” series.

From the Harper’s Weekly archive, the wood engraving above is not some illustration of a far off land beset by flame and destruction. Instead it’s a fireworks display, put on in 1885 in Manhattan Beach.

Keep reading about Manhattan Beach’s awesome fireworks displays around the turn of the century, and to see photos of the beach from that era.

While not really a postcard, I’m sticking this in with our new “Postcard” series, which saves images of the Sheepshead Bay-area that briefly appear on sites like eBay, never to be seen again.

The above is a 130-year-old wood engraving that’s been bevel-matted. It comes from an 1881 issue of Frank Leslie’s Weekly, an illustrated magazine that published from 1852 to 1922.

According to the eBay seller, who matted the antique engraving, text underneath the illustration says, “The June meeting of the Coney Island Jockey Club, at Sheepshead Bay — Taking the water-jump in the steep-chase, June 15th.”

The Sheepshead Bay Race Track, home of the Coney Island Jockey Club, was one of the premiere horse-racing facilities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its entrance was on Ocean Avenue between Avenue X and Avenue Y.

View the full illustration, before cropping.

Old postcards with photos of our neighborhood turn up on eBay fairly often, and subsequently show up in my Google Alerts. There’s usually very little information about the postcards – the one above, for example, is undated with no mention of the publisher or photographer (notice, please, how few houses there are on Shore Boulevard). But after I see them on eBay, those photos are never to be seen again as they usually can’t be found online. From now on, I’ll be posting them here for posterity. Enjoy.