Which Historic Charm? Pt. 6

More Brooklyn bikes and cobblestones for you, this time from June, 1895. As with the last photo I found, there’s no statue atop the arch yet, and one gets the sense that walking from where this photo was taken to the monument would be easy, not at all like doing it today.

If he were alive today, aside from being freakishly old, the boy in the foreground would be shocked to see what has happened Grand Army Plaza. But turning it back into this, while romantic for some, is no more the answer than turning PPW back into the speedway it was before last June. Progress requires forward movement and new ways of looking at modern living. How people use streets evolves over time and we would no more want to be stuck in the 1890s than in the 1990s.