For the past decade, I’ve been photographing the city's split houses, buildings that appear to be single-family homes but are actually divided into two separate residences sharing a single wall. The project explores the subtle differences between each half and what those contrasts reveal about the people who inhabit them.
This week, as part of my Every Neighborhood in New York project, I visited Claremont in the Bronx.
The neighborhood was originally part of the Morris estate. One member of the family, Gouverneur Morris, wrote the “We the People” preamble to the Constitution and later died after attempting to clear a urinary blockage with a piece of whalebone.
In 1858, Martin Zabriskie, a real estate lawyer who had married into the Morris family, built a mansion on the northern part of the estate, praised for its “velvety lawns, giant trees, and magnificent view.” He named it Claremont (“clear mountain” in French).
Soon afterward, Martin, who had grown up on a New Jersey farm, became obsessed with becoming a Polish count. After spending months in Poland (and, according to one account, “a considerable sum of money”), he successfully lobbied for the title and adopted the aristocratic surname Zborowski. He returned to New York as Count Martin Zborowski.
His grandson, Louis Zborowski, built a series of enormous Zeppelin-engined racing cars that inspired Ian Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Louis Zborowski in the driving seat of Chitty Bang Bang 1 1921
The city purchased the grounds of the Zborowski estate in 1884 and the mansion was taken over by the Parks Department for use as their Bronx headquarters.
The neighborhood was also home to William Steig (Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, Doctor De Soto, Shrek), whose childhood experiences inspired his long-running New Yorker cartoon series Small Fry.
If you’d like to read, see, and hear more about Claremont (or any of NYC’s neighborhoods), here is a link to the project:
This week, as part of my Every Neighborhood in New York project, I wrote about Downtown Brooklyn, the city's fastest-growing neighborhood, accounting for roughly 5% of all new housing built citywide. In the first six months of 2025 alone, a record-breaking 3,700-plus units were added to the neighborhood, a growth spurt that prompted Justin Davidson, writing for New York Magazine, to call it "the Olive Garden of New York real estate."
In 1834, the village that had grown up around the Fulton Ferry Landing became a city, and a decade later City Hall was built. Walt Whitman lived on the edge of the neighborhood while working as an editor for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle until he got fired for his anti-slavery views.
Walt Whitman lived at 106 Myrtle Avenue
At the time, the whole area was a center of abolitionist activity. The Bridge Street Methodist Church, Brooklyn's first independent Black church, became a major stop on the Underground Railroad.
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Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman both spoke there, and the house at 227 Duffield, landmarked in 2021, was occupied by another active abolitionist family and possibly connected to the church through a network of tunnels.
When Brooklyn was consolidated into New York, City Hall became Borough Hall and for 26 years its most distinguished resident was Jerry Fox — a celebrity cat who wore custom spectacles made by a local optometrist, once helped avert a fire in Borough Hall started by a judge's cigarettes, and crossed paths with everyone from Henry Ward Beecher to John "The Boss" McKane.
When Jerry died, falling down a Borough Hall subway shaft, "there could not have been sorrow more profound than that which greeted the news of his death," according to his New York Times obituary.
Meanwhile, a developer named Andrew Wheeler built a French Second Empire palace on Fulton Street in the middle of nowhere, anticipating a bidding war for tenants. The only takers were a saloon, a dime museum featuring "the most talented dwarves in existence," and a roller-skating rink.
A decade later, a dry goods merchant named Abraham Abraham bought the building and turned it into what would become Abraham & Strauss — eventually one of the largest department stores in America, with 40,000 customers a day and its own private entrance to the subway.
The elevated train tangle that started at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge and ran down Fulton Street in front of Abraham & Straus was so notorious that locals called it the Black Spider.
Fulton street looking west. A & S on the front left.
LaGuardia finally killed it in the 1940s and, with Robert Moses's help, cleared several blocks in front of Borough Hall and replaced them with Cadman Plaza, which Thomas Campanella described as "a loose assembly of dull modernist buildings, each more forgettable than the next, all orbiting Cadman Plaza like space junk about a star." A few blocks away, MetroTech followed in the 1990s with similarly uninspired results.
The 2004 rezoning that MetroTech helped trigger has rewritten the borough's skyline in gleaming slabs of glass and steel, culminating in the 1,066-foot Brooklyn Tower (aka Sauron's fortress) with a $16.75M penthouse to match. Far below, the eight blocks of the Fulton Mall, the third most profitable shopping district in the city, remain defiantly un-gentrified: sneaker stores, discount retailers, cell phone dealers, wig shops, and street vendors hawking essential oils and mix CDs. For now.
Full piece with photos, audio field recordings, and more here.
This week, as part of my Every Neighborhood in New York project, I visited Broad Channel, Queens, sitting in the middle of the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, the only national park in the US accessible by subway.
Cross Bay Boulevard connecting Broad Channel to Mainland Queens.
Broad Channel started as one of several informal trestle settlements that grew up alongside the train tracks crossing the bay in the late 1800s.
During Prohibition it earned the nickname "Little Cuba" for its speakeasies and role as a landing point for Rum Row, the floating offshore liquor market that supplied the city.
Residents of the neighboring settlement of the Raunt, an even smaller collection of 100 structures built on pilings connected by boardwalks, were eventually evicted, the buildings were demolished and submerged by Robert Moses to create the freshwater ponds that now anchor the wildlife refuge. Broad Channel, more organized, fought off similar efforts and survived. Locals didn't actually own the land under their homes until 1982, after a 40+ year legal battle with the city.
Today it's one of the most flood-prone neighborhoods in the city (Sandy put it under six feet of water), but also has the highest resident-retention rate in NYC. Here, boats outnumber cars, flags are everywhere, and it feels more like Cape Cod than Queens.
My whole write up, including the 1998 Mardi Gras parade controversy, where a float featuring off-duty officers in blackface led Mayor Giuliani (of all people) to call for their firing, while Al Sharpton testified on their behalf, arguing it was hypocritical to punish them for racism while ignoring it within the NYPD and FDNY is here:
https://theneighborhoods.substack.com/p/broad-channel-queens.
I have a couple of sets of wired headphones (that are also microphones) that end in a lightning connector. Both have developed a crackling at that termination point. Can anyone recommend an electronics repair place to fix these? They don't make these anymore and are too expensive on eBay. Thanks!
This week, as part of my Every Neighborhood in New York project, I visited Grasmere on the northeastern shore of Staten Island location of the only freshwater pond in New York City considered “fit for swimming.”
Brady’s Pond was carved out of a boggy marsh called the Haunted Swamp by the Brady Brothers in the 1880s so they could use for their Ice harvesting operation. Soon after the pond was created, it started claiming lives, a A 1900 New York Herald article called it Staten Island’s “Death Pool.” And claimed "certainly no sheet of water in the borough is connected with sadder stories."
In 1911, a film crew watched an actor drown in front of sixty applauding spectators, who thought it was part of the film and then released the footage anyway.
The neighborhood also happens to be where Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, inventor of the comic foreground cutout, composer of a mosquito opera, and, most famously the painter behind the iconic Dogs Playing Poker series, spent the last six years of his life. His obituary read: “He painted many pictures of dogs.”
To read/see/hear more about Grasmere or other neighborhoods in NYC, you can subscribe to (or just read) my newsletter here: GRASMERE
This week, as part of my Every Neighborhood in New York project, I visited Kingsbridge, named after the first bridge ever to connect Manhattan to the mainland. The King's Bridge, built in 1693, was destroyed, rebuilt, and moved several times before finally being buried by fifteen feet of landfill in 1917.
In 1896, the neighborhood hosted the second automobile race in America, sponsored by Cosmopolitan magazine. One driver hit a cyclist on the way to the starting line and was arrested. Of the remaining drivers, only three finished.
A few months later, two bears were jailed at the local police headquarters, where they ate thirty porterhouse steaks, one policeman's shield, and a five-foot-long piece of rope before getting bailed out.
For much of the 20th century, Kingsbridge was the heart of the Bronx's Irish community, anchored by Gaelic Park, a stadium that hosted hurling matches, wedding receptions, and wakes.
In the early seventies, the stadium hosted acts like Cat Stevens, Carly Simon, Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, and Yes. On August 26, 1971, the Grateful Dead played to 15,000 people in the stadium, marking the last performance by the band’s original five members and the only time they played within view of the subway.
If you want to read the whole piece you can find it here
This week, as part of my Every Neighborhood in New York project, I visited Sheepshead Bay at the far end of Brooklyn's alphabetical grid of avenues. The neighborhood was named after the sheepshead fish, which was once abundant in local waters and looks ridiculous.
For a brief period in the late 19th century, New York City was the horse racing capital of the world. The craze gave rise to the city's nickname, "The Big Apple," which reportedly originated in a conversation between two New Orleans stable hands discussing a trip north to compete for racing's biggest prizes. For nearly thirty years, the Sheepshead Bay Racetrack hosted the sport's most prestigious events, attracted the city's largest crowds, and outgrossed every other track in New York. A 1908 law which outlawed sports brought that all to an end. The track was converted into an automobile speedway used for car races and aviation shows, sometimes both at the same time.
May 1916, Katherine Stinson vs, Dario Resta (LOC)
On September 17, 1911, just a week after earning his pilot's license, which consisted of a single ninety-minute training session with Orville Wright, Cal Rodgers took off from the Sheepshead Bay track in a bid to win William Randolph Hearst's $50,000 prize for the first coast-to-coast flight completed in under thirty days. The plane was sponsored by Armour & Company, who named it after their new grape soda, Vin Fiz, described by one critic as "a cross between river water and horse slop." The Vin Fiz made more than seventy-five stops and crashed sixteen times during the journey west. Rodgers finally reached California on December 10, several weeks after the contest deadline.
The neighborhood's most famous restaurant, Lundy's, opened in 1926 and, at its peak, seated nearly 2,000 diners and served more than a million guests a year. Its reclusive owner Irving Lundy, sometimes known as the "Howard Hughes of Brooklyn," spent his final years in an apartment above the restaurant, rarely receiving visitors. His closest companions were sixteen Irish setters and his chauffeur, who bathed and dressed him each morning. When Lundy died in 1977, the chauffeur was found to have defrauded him of eleven million dollars.
Lundy's shut down in 1979. A smaller portion of the dining room, "a mere eight hundred souls," reopened in 1995 but closed again in 2007. Today the former Lundy's is home to Cherry Hill, a gourmet grocery offering Russian delicacies, a Turkish restaurant, and, until last month, the hibachi steakhouse MOMO.
If you want to read the full piece, you can find it Here
This week, as part of my Every Neighborhood in New York project, I visited Bayswater, a quiet enclave on the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens. Once described as one of the “brightest gems in the crown of Rockaway’s supremacy as a watering place,” it attracted wealthy New Yorkers who built grand mansions along Jamaica Bay—most of which have long since disappeared.
The tip of the peninsula, once home to the largest estate of all, is now the seventeen-acre Bayswater Point State Park, typically empty, save for a few (brave)people fishing and an enthusiastic cohort of plane spotters armed with massive telephoto lenses.
Its most notorious resident was “Big Bill” Devery, the six-foot-tall, 260-pound NYPD chief who was one of the most corrupt figures in the department’s history. He famously advised his men to “hear nothing, see nothing, say nothing—eat, drink, and pay nothing.” Forced out during reform, he parlayed his graft into a stake in a Baltimore baseball team, moved it to New York, and eventually sold it to Jacob Ruppert, who renamed it the Yankees.
This week, as part of my Every Neighborhood in New York project, I visited Hamilton Heights in Northern Manhattan, a neighborhood that sits on an escarpment high above the Hudson and contains, among other things, Alexander Hamilton's former house, which has been moved twice.
Hamilton's Grange second location
In 2008, a team of German Baptist Brethren lifted the 300-ton Grange 35 feet into the air, clearing the adjacent church’s porch, slid it 50 feet forward, lowered it onto a bed of nine remote-controlled dollies, and rolled it down the street to its current site in St. Nicholas Park.
Overlooking the park is the Gothic campus of City College, built from Manhattan schist excavated during subway construction and decorated with over 1,000 gargoyles and grotesques.
A block away, from the school, Billy Strayhorn and Mary Lou Williams lived within steps of each other. Most nights, musicians like Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, and Charlie Parker gathered in Williams’ apartment around her Baldwin piano.
The neighborhood is also home to the house on "Archer Avenue" that Royal Tenenbaum bought in the winter of his 35th year
On its northern edge sits Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum, Manhattan’s only active cemetery, where four NYC mayors,Ralph Ellison, Jerry Orbach, and Richard Sands (aka the Human Fly) are buried.
I’ve been working through every neighborhood in NYC throughphotos, writing, and field recordings. Hamilton Heights is the 138th.
If you want to read the full piece, it's here: https://theneighborhoods.substack.com/p/hamilton-heights-manhattan
