Where is Bushwick and Why? Part 1: Lines on a map.
Let’s start with a simple question: where exactly is Bushwick? And where is it not? It’s a question that comes up a lot, and the answer depends on who you ask — especially if you are asking a real estate agent!
Bushwick lies between Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy, and Ridgewood on the Queens border, all without a natural geographic border, save for the green hills of the Cemetery Belt. So it can a bit tricky to figure out what is what, and where is where. Let’s get that out of the way.
This sucks — this oven timer was completely intact, if a bit dirty, under the ground still attached to the rusted remains of an old stove. I pried it off, admired the fact that the face was ceramic and had interesting 60s-y numbers, and set it aside. Over the weeks of shifting piles of dirt and trash back and forth, it got covered by some dirt…and trash. One day I sent my pickaxe sailing into the ground to turn up some more earth (and dig out knotweed roots), and the pick stuck right into the timer. Would have made a cool thing to hang on a wall.
What? Yeah that’s right, an entire stove completely under the top level of dirt.
See that long bar sticking out of the ground at a severely acute angle? That’s a driveshaft, the thing that transfers the energy from the engine to the wheels of a car. It was a good 3 feet longer, but we sawed a piece off, thinking it was just an old gas pipe. When we realized it was solid steel, we decided to leave it in there until we can dig the entire thing out. I see a lot of crazy junk in my yard, but this one really makes me wonder what the hell could have been going on…
Someone who lived in this house in the 70s and 80s had a bit of a shower curtain fetish. This is just one pattern of tens of crazy colorful styles of plastic shower curtains we have found in the yard over the past year. It’s possible some of them are table cloths and other plastic sheet-like products, but I’m sure most of them are from the shower. When they tired of a style — off to the back yard garbage dump it went.
Bushwick is the new home to many of our readers, but its history stretches back to the founding of Brooklyn. So join local historian Adam Schwartz (and guests) for Bushwick Geographic, a series of historical excursions across time and the space of Bushwick, in what was once the city of Brooklyn.
But this is no mere trip down memory lane. With the use of our handy locator maps, you can walk the same streets of Bushwick with a whole new view on the past of our community.
Bushwick’s southern end marks the beginning of the cemetery belt, a vast grouping of 29 cemeteries where over 5 million New Yorkers are buried. The Belt developed in the mid to late 19th century, as a product of the Rural Cemeteries Act, as bodies were taken out of backyards and churchyards in Manhattan to move to the "Green Hills" of Brooklyn, as they were once known.
The most interesting of these cemeteries is certainly Bushwick’s own Most Holy Trinity, at the end of Central Avenue, just south of the intersection of Central and Chauncey Street (map). Many of us see it everyday as we pull past it on the L train at Wilson Avenue Station.
My pick axe routinely pulls entire outfits up out of the ground, but today I thought I’d share my yard’s footwear harvest, including a Puma — maybe from the last time the brand was cool? A pair of knee-high tube socks tied in a knot complete this decomposing ensemble.
Technically this is vinyl tile, but I call all such coverings “linoleum.” There are so many sizes and patterns of this stuff in the yard, I could probably cover a whole apartment floor with them in a full rainbow. This particular pattern is not the most offensive of the stuff I have pulled up, but it’s still pretty nasty.
Under a good portion of my yard, just a few inches down, are several large expanses of roofing. Plants seem to have no problems thriving around them, but they have to be removed to get to the knotweed roots lurking underneath. When you bend them in half, you get a strong whiff of tar as fresh as the day it was slathered on. Because the trash men don’t take bags that weigh more than 60lbs (especially on days when the trash men are trash women, *grumble*), we have to break these up into 2-foot sections and place each one in its own bag. It’s basically a mini environmental disaster in every way. The only debate is whether the roofing is an older roof from the current house, or from the house that burned down which occupied most of what is now the yard. That will take more research.
As we have once again begun tackling the back yard, with much help from our fantastic new housemates, we’ve been uncovering a whole new stash of trash. Some of it is interesting enough to share, as a sort of dorky “urban archaeology” study. Won’t you join us as we uncover Bushwick’s depressing past as told by a single patch of dirt?
This find dates itself pretty well — Pepsi that still has the “-Cola” on the can, and sugar as the sweetener — something that went away in the early 80s as massively subsidized corn farming plus sugar tariffs brought us nearly free high-fructose corn syrup as compared to beet and cane sugar. As people are beginning to demand a return to sugar, more products are reintroducing it — especially since the ethanol debacle is making the price of corn skyrocket of late. Say, can we stop paying corn farmers to not farm now?
