This week's Cornerspotter was too easy for Brooklyn history buffs. The first commenter correctly identified the photo as Talman Street, a long-gone road that ran between Jay and Bridge Streets near the border of Downtown Brooklyn and (what we now know as) Dumbo. That same reader also named the photographer, Berenice Abbott, and kindly informed us "that her pics are so easy to spot." The street followed an old cow path, through a slum of rickety clapboard houses populated by poor Irish immigrants in the 19th century. By the 1930s, African Americans began to settle in the area, but the houses still lacked cellars, running water, toilets, and central heat. The city deemed them uninhabitable, and during the urban renewal that followed World War II, the street was wiped off the map to make way for the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and Farragut Houses. Abbott documented the area for the Federal Art Project's Changing New York series.
· Hint: Urban Growth Wiped This Street Off The Map [Curbed]
· Photo: Talman Street, 1936 [MCNY]