Alyssa Hernandez
English
Did you ever take a walk around City Tech to see what was actually around the area? Well I was able to get that chance but you would think me being from Brooklyn that I would be quite familiar with the area, well I thought wrong, and if it wasnât for Brooklyn Historical Society I would have probably never got the chance.
During our first couple of classes we went on a tour with BHSâs own Julie Golia who is one of their public historians and she showed us another side of Brooklyn that many of us donât see because we are so used to our neighborhoods. I am so thankful that I was given this experience because I learned that not that far from City Tech there was a theatre that burnt down many many years ago. Not only did we go to BHSâs for a walking tour but we also got the chance to go inside of BHS and look at the archives. This part I really enjoyed because being able to look at old documents from the 18 and 1900âs was an amazing experience since I was able to work with archives in my high school. To be able to see how the people wrote, to see maps some which were even hand written. It shocks me to see how great they still looked. The most shocking map that stood out to me was the subway map from I believe they told us the 1970âs and this map looked liked it was all over the place. Comparing our maps of today to back then the maps of today our more detailed and clearer. Before I didnât really pay attention to maps but after being able to see those old maps they became interesting to me to see how they looked and how some of them were hand drawn.
Our time with BHS made me realize that their is way more to just the parts of Brooklyn I know. I never knew that a lot of the homes around City Tech are land marked. And a funny thing we learned and seemed to steal the spotlight of the day were the boot scrapers on these land marked homes. Julie Golia explained to us how they were put there because back then horses were used to get around and as you may know they have a tendency to poop any where they please so the people back then before they would go into their homes they would use the boot scrapers to clean their shoes. I thought this was really interesting because you donât see them on any new houses since my guess is we have cars and not horses on the street anymore. But its strange how the boot scrapers fascinated many of us.
After this semester I realized that now I look around more at houses while walking home and noticing their structure also I look at buildings more closer because they sometimes have on the corner the year they were built and it interest me to see these buildings are still around from all the way back then.
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Land Marked: “an object (as a stone or tree) that marks the boundary of land”
www.merriamwebster.com
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/land%20mark
Archives: ” a place in which public records or historical documents are preserved; also: the material preserved-often used in plural”
www.merriamwebster.com
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/archives
