GRAHAM AND METROPOLITAN AVENUES
Williamsburg
JUNE 1, 1937. ABBOTT FILE 248

The large corner store at this commercial intersection was built in 1888, when Williamsburg was a small village on the edge of the town of Bushwick. Although Williamsburg became Brooklyn's most congested residential neighborhood after the 1903 opening of the Williamsburg Bridge, this northern corner of the neighborhood remained stable. The electric trolley wires and the subway station are the primary signs of twentieth-century change.

The intersection remains remarkably unchanged today, although the pictorially interesting aspects of Abbott's photograph--the buildings' decorative cornice and clapboard siding and the tangle of overhead wires--are gone.

Return to Brooklyn