Broad Street between Canal and Wright

This was never a block I went down much. There was really no reason too. There was an animal hospital but we had our own vet somewhere in Rosebank. Just no reason at all.

What I like about the pictures (ca. 1940), are how they show the block alive. My favorite is Lot 23 with both car and horse drawn wagon. Though already decades old, the automobile hasn't displaced every old fashioned transport.

Today, many of several of these buildings are gone. D is the parking lot for the old Virginia Funeral Home. J is an open lot. The old PS 14 is long gone. Where it once towered (keep you eye open when looking at the various Stapleton photos I post. Like the R&H clock tower, the school's tower once dominated the town's sky) remained a vacant lot for decades.

The Lost Iron Tower of Howard Avenue

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Like something out of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert E. Howard, this tall cylinder can been seen peeking out from behind the trees on Howard Avenue next to St. John's. Of course when I was younger my friends and I decided we had to make an effort to penetrate the dense woods and find out what it was.
Well, as you can sort of see, security's pretty lax and the woods aren't really that thick. We simply slipped through a gap in the fence and walked up to the metal column. I guess it's about eight or ninety feet high. There's not really much going on with it. There was an oval hole in the side that we were able to look into and see the great nothing inside and the sky through the open top above. And that was it. We went home and never bothered going back.





Apparently it's just a DEP Water Department water tower. The old photo's from 1937.