Sunset Park Brooklyn
Sunset Park, Brooklyn …nestled between Bay Ridge and Greenwood, was my destination this week (6/21/16). A hard trip at 52 miles round. ...…Long Beach, The Rockaway Peninsula, Marine Pkwy Bridge, to Sheepshead Bay, Brighton Beach, Coney Island, to the Verrazzano Bridge, Brooklyn Esplanade and eventually down 5th ave from Bay Ridge Ave.
Sunset Park is both a Brooklyn area neighborhood and an actual Park. The actual park is a postage stamp that is a bit of an anomaly as it is a “knob hill” with relevant elevation rising from flatlands overlooking, and providing stunning vistas, of the surrounding area that includes the Upper Bay, Staten Island, Jersey City, and the downtown and midtown Manhattan skylines. Photographing the vistas was my reason for making Sunset Park my destination ….and Sunset Park did not disappoint.
The neighborhood is a teeming melting pot that did not show much evidence of gentrification, however on every street off of 4th, 5th and 7th avenues there were meticulously kept “turn of the century” Brownstones and row houses that I love so much.
Today Spanish seem to be the indigenous population, with an older Caucasian population coming in second. However the Chinese are clearly making their presence felt. They were everywhere but don’t seem to be dominating yet as they are in many areas of Queens .....there were few restaurants and food markets of their own. My goal was to get off the streets and back on the esplanade by 3pm as I did not want to compete with school buses along with the normal traffic of the day. Not quite making my deadline what I witnessed were mostly Chinese children being released to their parents from those school buses. This is clearly an area in transition that does not seem to be going in the same direction as the other Brooklyn neighborhoods.
