The map of Brooklyn is kind of hard to wrap your head around. It's the second largest of New York City's five boroughs, making it three times bigger than Manhattan. Brooklyn is huge. Brooklyn is huge thanks to the grid pattern covering most of it. Manhattan is pretty easy to make sense of, but Brooklyn does not have that same luxury. The streets here are not regular. Brooklyn is basically what Manhattan would have been had there been no 1811 Commissioners Plan. As I started looking at Old maps of Brooklyn, I realized that there's actually a bigger story here and it's about the growth of New York City so I want to look at several features on this map that tell that story.

As one of the oldest sandwich shops in New York City, Defonte’s has been a top destination for Italian American sandwiches for more than 100 years. Originally purchased in 1922 by Nick Defonte for only $100, the shop sits in Red Hook, a Brooklyn neighborhood that has evolved over time: Once labeled one of the "worst" neighborhoods in America by LIFE Magazine in the 1990s, it sustained heavy damage during Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and is now home to a growing number of high rises. And yet, Defonte’s has stayed very much the same through it all, a cash-only spot buzzing with energy and a requisite picture wall of famous and notable Italians.

Follow the owner Larry Demonte and Anthony, one of his sons, and meet the “Chenzo 13” sandwich. Named after Larry’s eldest son Vicent, who passed away in 2021, the “Chenzo 13” quickly became a new favorite on the Defonte’s sandwich roster.

Can you imagine riding down Broadway on a special sidewalk cart? In 1872, a proposal by Alfred Speer would have had the street lined with tracks and carts for the first moving sidewalk.

Back in the late 1860s/early 1870s, inventor and businessman Alfred Speer was fed up with street congestion in front of his wine store on Broadway near City Hall. Though elevated trains were popping up around the time, they were mostly above 14th Street, so Speer designed an aerial, steam-powered sidewalk (much cleaner than the locomotive trains) that would make a loop up and down Broadway to alleviate traffic. It would be constantly in motion at 10 miles per hour, carrying passengers by foot or in its movable chairs for five cents a ride. Speer even went so far as to patent the idea, officially called the “Endless Traveling” or “Railway Sidewalk.”

Read through the full article for more on Alfred Speer's 1872 moving sidewalk proposal.