The week-long citywide OpSail event kicks off at 8:11 a.m. Wednesday May 23, with the Majestic Parade of Ships—17 tall ships and 10 U.S. Navy and foreign military ships—sailing beneath the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

Ships will arrive from Spain, Mexico, France, Japan, Canada, Finland, the U.K. and U.S. ports. More info is below:

Where: Red Hook Marine Terminal, Columbia Street entry at Congress Street
Public transportation is strongly suggested: B61 and B63 to Atlantic Avenue and Columbia St.

When: Saturday, May 26, Sunday, May 27 and Monday, May 28, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Ships
Tall Ships
Juan Sebastian de Elcano, schooner, Spain
Cuauhtemoc, barque, Mexico
Etoile, schooner, France
La Belle Poule, schooner, France

Navy Ships
HMCS Iroquois, destroyer, Canada
JS Shirane, destroyer, Japan
FNS Pohjanmaa, mine layer, Finland
RFA Argus, hospital/cargo, United Kingdom

US Coast Guard Cutters
USCG Seneca
USCG Willow

The website offers access to maps and hand-written info about every known address in all 48 states in the Union, allowing you to find census maps and descriptions to locate an enumeration district, browse census images to locate any household interviewed in the 1940 Census and then save and/or download images. The Search page is here.

Warning: The site is slow, if not clunky, as hundreds of thousands are discovering this fascinating window to the past all at once. It’s also a bit unnerving to navigate. The best tutorial I found is at Gawker.com here.

Happy hunting! Be sure to share anything revealing with all your friends here on the Cobble Hill Blog. We’ll also be scouring for tidbits over the next several weeks.

(Image: Gawker.com)

The piece, headlined “Gentrification Has Made This Old Brooklyn Neighborhood Unrecognizable,” discusses how these nabes have evolved, with a good deal of history on Cobble Hill’s Smith Street.

Here’s one breakaway quote:

By the 1960s, the area just south of Brooklyn Heights (known as South Brooklyn to that point) began to fill up with spillover from Brooklyn Heights, and new names were given to revitalized areas. “Cobble Hill” was one, “Boerum Hill” another, and “Red Hook” included the slab of land that is now “Carroll Gardens” (Red Hook can still be found on the other side of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway). Each neighborhood began to take on its own identity, while they remained close enough to one another to foster a larger sense of togetherness.

The Business Insider article is smart, detailed and an exceptional read about the neighborhoods. Highly recommended reading. (Photo: Business Insider)

Residents were also urged to begin contributing to the Cobble Hill wiki site to add their own facts about the area.

Brooklyn Eagle: Morrone spoke Monday night at the annual meeting of the Cobble Hill Association at Long Island College Hospital. He is a teacher at New York University and the author of five books, including An Architectural Guide to Brooklyn.

One of the best physical (as opposed to online) resources, he says, is the library of the Brooklyn Historical Society in Brooklyn Heights. Among other things, it contains several Brooklyn atlases, dating from about 1855 through 1930. These were published by private companies, mainly for fire insurance purposes, and show detailed maps of each street — block by block, lot by lot.

The library also contains “land conveyance [or property] records” from the 19th century. Particularly for older neighborhoods such as Cobble Hill, said Morrone, these are important because the former City of Brooklyn’s Department of Buildings only began keeping records in the 1870s or afterwards.

Join us for a discussion with Francis Morrone about how to research the history of a house or other building in Brooklyn. Morrone will discuss some of the nuts and bolts of basic building research, as well as the myriad avenues opened up in recent years by the internet. The web has changed the whole game. For the serious researcher it has not replaced the necessity of consulting physical archives, but it has made stay-at-home research rewarding as never before.

Learn the secrets of the trade from a professional historian.

Time: 7:30 P.M.
Date: Monday, October 17, 2011
Place: Long Island College Hospital, Conference Room A
Enter at main entrance 339 Hicks (at Atlantic)

All members of the public are invited. No admission charge.

WSJ:  But the mood outside clerk’s offices was largely celebratory. Julie Irwin and her husband, Steve Landis, brought their twin 4-year-old daughters from Cobble Hill to the Brooklyn Municipal Building. They offered them as flower girls for marrying couples.

Ms. Irwin said she wanted her daughters to see what she called “the civil rights event of our generation,” and the girls decided it would be fun to pitch in.

“The first thing they said this morning was, ‘Is it time to go to the weddings yet?’” she said.

Under an instructor’s eye, a student kayaker does a roll behind One Brooklyn Bridge Park.

The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Dependable is berthed at Pier 7.

New York Times: The mighty Queen Mary 2 will no longer be belching diesel fumes over Red Hook when it docks at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal next year. Instead, the cruise ship will shut its engines and plug into a giant electrical outlet built especially for the port.
…

Plugging in to an alternative hydroelectric source at the Red Hook port would eliminate nearly 1,500 tons of carbon dioxide, 95 tons of nitrous oxide and 6.5 tons of diesel particulate matter annually.

State Senator Daniel Squadron released the following statement:

With this agreement to bring shore power to the cruise terminal, Brooklyn can finally breathe a little easier. The noxious diesel fumes that cruise ships in port have been spewing are bad for Brooklynites and bad for the environment. I have worked with Council Member Brad Lander, Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, our colleagues in government and the entire community to advocate for an expedited agreement to implement shore power. I commend Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Cuomo, the Port Authority, the New York Power Authority, the Economic Development Corporation, the Environmental Protection Agency, and Carnival Cruise Lines for working together to find this important solution.

Update: Mayor Bloomberg’s press release, which came out after this was first posted, includes more information on timing:

The project includes over $15 million in onshore infrastructure, funded with about $12 million from the Port Authority and a nearly $3 million grant from the US EPA. Carnival Cruise Lines will spend up to $4 million to retrofit the two Carnival Cruise Lines ships that dock at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal. Under an agreement reached by the New York City Economic Development Corporation, the City and New York Power Authority (NYPA) will provide NYPA electricity to Carnival at a fixed and discounted rate for a period of five years, which is valued at roughly $2 million per year. Approximately 40 ship calls per year will use shore power. Construction of the on-shore infrastructure will begin mid-2011 and is expected to be complete in 2012. Additionally, beginning in 2012, Carnival Cruise Lines will be required to use progressively lower-sulfur fuel for its ships, further reducing the relative cost of shore power.

So, given the time needed to install shore and ship-based infrastructure, it appears that the changeover to shore power is at least a year off. However, the reduction in the sulfur content of fuel used by the shipboard auxiliary generators in the interim should be of some benefit.

Photo of Queen Mary 2 docked at Red Hook by C. Scales.

Rooftop Films recently created an underground film screening in the tunnel, with a tour hosted by “tunnel aficionado” Bob Diamond. When Rooftop Films discovered just before their event that it would be shut down, they released this statement:

“This came as a complete surprise to us, as we had every reason to believe the events were entirely legal and sanctioned. While we believe that the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel is a valuable and historic New York City landmark, we also have a strong commitment to safety, and hope that arrangements can be made to reopen the Tunnel safely and legally so that it can again be enjoyed by all New Yorkers and visitors.”

Will we ever see below Atlantic Avenue again?

Join Francis Morrone, director of the CHA Cobble Hill History Project, on a walking tour of Cobble Hill history and architecture, ranging from Jennie Jerome to the impact of the BQE to Cobble Hill’s unparalleled collection of ornamental ironwork–and much, much more. The roughly two-hour walk begins at Court and Congress streets in front of St. Paul’s Church. The tour will also be a chance to learn more about the History Project and opportunities to volunteer and share information.

You can download an informational PDF here.

$10 for CHA Members and $20 for Non-Members.

The tour is limited to 40 participants.

RSVP to cobblehillhistoryproject@yahoo.com.

Cool. So sharks were all over the harbor. But what about the Gowanus Canal?:

“Without doubt the most noteworthy biological event within the canal’s industrial history was the appearance of a large shark in 1950. Ali showed me a scrapbook about the canal that included a photograph of the shark from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Fittingly, it is a dismal scene – policemens bullets spray the water near the creature as hundreds of people watch along the bulkheads.”

This is great for so many reasons. Could you imagine the hysteria that abounded in the 1950s at sharks? So misunderstood, as they continue to be to this day, that the police thought it would be a public hazard to keep the fish alive?

The Brooklyn Paper: The controversial designation sets into motion a half-billion-dollar, decade-long federally overseen clean-up of the polluted waterway, which cuts a sclerotic artery through the gentrifying heart of Brownstone Brooklyn. But it also raises questions about whether developers, who currently yearn to build residential housing in the canal zone, will ever exhibit quite the same ardor now that the area has been deemed one of the most polluted places in the country.

“This site has a very long legacy of toxic pollution that plagues this urban waterway,” said Judith Enck, the EPA’s regional director. “And because of that, the EPA is saying it is adding the Gowanus Canal to the federal Superfund list. We believe it will get us the most efficient and comprehensive cleanup of this waterway.”

Enck started her statement by declaring that taxpayers should rest easy that the feds went with a Superfund designation, which sets into motion a process of getting restitution from responsible polluters.

“The goal of Superfund is to ensure that polluters pay for cleanup, not the taxpayer,” she said.

Photo by Max Flatow.

Take an inside look at Caputo’s Bakery at Carroll Gardens Diary, where they speak to John and James Caputo (father and son owners, pictured above), and discuss the 106-year history of the Italian bakery on Court Street.

Established in 1904 by John’s father and grandfather, the bakery was originally opened for business on the southeast corner of Union and Hicks before it and adjacent buildings were demolished to make room for the construction of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. John’s father was the baker and he did everything by hand in an old-fashioned slow mixer. They sold three breads: plain, seeded, and scalita (a dry Sicilian bread that goes best with soups, I learned). Home deliveries were big then and so frequent trips were made by horse and wagon around the neighborhood, running up stoops with bread baskets. “Families ate a lot of bread – five to ten loaves a day!” John says.

The clientele was noticeably different as it was a working-class Italian-American neighborhood. “If you wanted to work behind the counter and be a salesgirl, you had to speak fluent Italian,” John recalls. “Our backhands? All Italian.” Those scalita loaves went fast. “Today we only sell a couple of scalitas, but we used to make hundreds of them. Meat was expensive and so the staple was bread. You filled up on bread. My father used to say ‘You can’t have a piece of meat without a piece of bread’,” John reminisces. James laughs and adds, “Our family still can’t eat without the bread.”

It’s hard to quantify just how much the neighborhood and the world around D’Amico Foods have changed in the 61 years since, but some things haven’t. Coffee beans are still roasted daily, and Emanuele’s son Frank still straps on an apron, 59 years after he started working in his father’s shop.

The younger D’Amico, 82, started his professional life as a draftsman. Born and raised in Carroll Gardens (long before realtors coined that name), he’d enlisted at 17 and spent the last two years of World War II on a Navy ship in the Pacific.

Photo, Lost City.

Lost City reports that Smith Street’s recently shuttered Armanda Tailor will become a tanning salon. Does anyone know how long, exactly, the shop was there for?

Armando Tailor and Dry Cleaner, a fixture on Smith Street near President, has closed. The neighboring shoe repair shop told me the old Italian tailor who ran it has retired. The man, silver-haired and with glasses and very little English, was an old-school craftsman. He could do all the things that nobody bothers with anymore: fix buttonholes, replace zippers, etc. I’ve had most of my suits tailored and cuffed there over the years. He knew his work and did it expertly, and, consequently, charged a little more. But he was honest. Last year, when I took a worn, but beloved old winter coat in to get a new lining, he looked it over with a skeptical eye, then asked me, “Do you really like this coat?” He was telling me it wasn’t worth what it would cost me to get a new lining. I did it anyway. I’m glad I did. It’s the last piece of work he did for me.

Photo, New York Times.

The New York Times Magazine features a piece today on the Gowanus Canal, and the environmental debate surrounding it as of late. How great is the photo? It’s the canal like I’ve never seen it.

“It’s this area of transition,” a real estate broker named William Duke told me recently. It was a warm weekday evening in September, and we were standing at the trash-strewn terminus of a street that dead-ends into the waterway. “Between the old and the new, the natural world and the man-made world,” Duke went on. “It’s poetic.”

Join us for a fun night of  interesting tid-bits about Boerum Hill, as you pass by famous addresses, historical sites and stop in for a drink at three cool local pubs. It’s not a pub crawl, but a chance to see and hear history come alive as we pass through the heart of Boerum Hill (with, of course, a civilized drink or three along the way). 

Tomorrow, June 13, is the first-ever fundraiser held by PortSide NewYork, a young, innovative non-profit organization with diverse programs are about water and the waterfront. PortSide NewYork plans to create waterfront access, arts and recreational boating events, jobs, historical products and policy-programs for diverse economic groups and individuals. The fundraiser is taking place tomorrow evening from 6-9 pm at the Brooklyn Lyceum (227 Fourth Avenue @ President Street in Park Slope). Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, a major supporter of all things waterfront, will speak at the event, which will include food and wine. A large format multimedia installation of images and sounds from PortSide and the harbor will bring the waterfront inside. Proceeds from the fundraiser will support planning and interim programming in Atlantic Basin and shipping of the last two engine cylinders for the Whalen from Seattle. Tickets are $50 and may be purchased here. If you’re free tomorrow, go and show your support!

Lost City reports that Mario Migliaccio, the Italian-born pizzaiolo who’s been making pies at Sam’s Restaurant on Court Street for over 60 years, is moving back to his hometown in Ischia following the recent death of his wife. Mr. Migliaccio’s son, Louis, will be taking over the restaurant, and little is expected to change. I’ve never tried a pizza from Sam’s- anyone out there a fan?

81-year-old Mario Magliaccio was one of Brooklyn’s master pizza makers, but few knew it. He kept to himself and didn’t court publicity the way some other old pizzerias did. For that, you have to admire his integrity and modesty. At Sam’s, making good, simple food didn’t qualify the owners for any special genuflection; it was a matter of course.