Rob Stephenson

Soundview - The Bronx

This week, for my Every Neighborhood in New York project, I visited Soundview in the Bronx, once home to Phil Spector, Afrika Bambaataa, and photo legend Joel Meyerowitz, who was nice enough to share some of his vivid recollections of the neighborhood with me.

The neighborhood has transformed from fertile farmland to Quonset hut village, home to one of the city's highest concentrations of public housing, including the projects where Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor grew up. Today, while Bengali and Spanish have replaced Italian and Yiddish, traces of its varied history persist in unexpected corners.

This week, as part of my Every Neighborhood in New York project, I visit Manhattanville. 

In the early 19th century, Manhattanville was one of several small villages that dotted the landscape north of the city center at Manhattan’s tip. The village was situated in a deep valley at the mouth of Harlem Cove along either side of Bloomingdale Road, the well-worn Native American path that would eventually turn into Broadway. Manhattanville’s prime riverside location and proximity to another important and rapidly growing village, Harlem, made its development inevitable.

 The former village has its own unique, distinct history and was once a bustling center of industry full of breweries, slaughter houses,  dairies and car manufacturers.

Now Columbia’s $7 billion starchitect designed new campus is radically changing the face of the neighborhood

In the newsletter I take a look at the former breweries, do a deep dive on a pastry incident that had the neighborhood children licking whipped cream off of Broadway and answer once and for all the question “are Nerds vegetarian”?Spoiler, they are not.

This week, for my project visiting and documenting every neighborhood in NYC, I went to Pigtown in the heart of Brooklyn.

If you have never heard of Pigtown, that’s because it hasn’t been called that since the 60s when the name Wingate was reluctantly assigned to the neighborhood. Realtors preferred to list their apartments for rent in Wingate rather than Pigtown for obvious reasons. The name didn’t really catch on, so most people consider this neighborhood either Crown Heights, Prospect Lefferts or East Flatbush. Still, I’m calling it Pigtown.

It’s where Rudy Guliani grew up, where Patrick Scully instigated a fight with a pack of 100 pigs under the mistaken assumption that they were dogs, and where Thomas “The Terror of Pigtown” McCormick walked into a barbershop and ate two live canaries for no good reason.

Today, it’s home to the African Record Center and the hottest falafel in New York City.

If you want to see/read/hear more visit the link up above. The Neighborhoods is a free email newsletter that covers a different neighborhood in NYC each week.

Just emailed out my penultimate newsletter of the year, covering Westerleigh in Staten Island where they take the holidays very seriously.

Once called Prohibition Park, it was a hotbed of the temperance movement until people got tired of the whole non drinking thing.

Brooklyn Navy Yard

This week, I wrote about the Brooklyn Navy Yard where I've had a studio for the past 15 years.

The Navy Yard sits on the edge of Wallabout Bay, where 16 British Prison ships, "floating dungeons," were anchored during the Revolutionary War. 11,000 prisoners died on the ships, and their bones were interred in a crypt in Fort Greene Park.

Nowadays, it’s where Beyoncé rehearses for her next tour and a good place to test out driverless cars or pick up some chocolate babka.

This week I visited the neighborhood of Arrochar in Staten Island as part of my project photographing every neighborhood in NYC. Arrochar (arrow-car) was once home to not one but two Major-General Count Cherep-Spiridovichs, neither of whom you would want to spend much time with.

It was also the site of recent anti-immigrant protests that spurred Borough President Vito Fossella to renew calls for the borough to secede from NYC.

This week's edition of the neighborhood visited Chelsea, Manhattan.

Learn about the idiot asylum, the Woodstock hangover, how I broke someone’s $500 golf club, and much much more.

New edition of my newsletter the Neighborhoods is out today, this time looking at Port Morris in the Bronx. Once the piano factory capitol of the world, this neighborhood is the closest you can get to the  wreck of the HMS Hussar and her cargo of 1/2 a billion dollars worth of gold. As long as Joey Treasures doesn’t get to it first..

Read more and subscribe (its free) here:

This week’s newsletter covers Port Morris in the Bronx. Once the piano factory capitol of the world, this neighborhood is the closest you can get to the  wreck of the HMS Hussar and her cargo of 1/2 a billion dollars worth of gold. As long as Joey Treasures doesn’t get to it first..

Visit Hog Island with Dr. Doom , meet a hermit who inadvertently paid for his girlfriend’s wedding - to his own brother and more!!

This week's edition of the Neighborhoods, my weekly newsletter documenting every neighborhood in NYC, is a look at the stars n' stripes in their various incarnations throughout the city.

Long Island City