The numbered streets run downhill to the Narrows. The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge crosses the water at the south end of the neighborhood.
What Bay Ridge looks like
runs along the top of the ridge the neighborhood is named after. Below it there is a strip of park and the Belt Parkway, and then the Narrows. The Dutch called this Yellow Hook for the color of the clay. It was dropped after the yellow fever epidemics of 1848 and 1849.
Wealthy families put country houses along in the middle of the nineteenth century. Almost none of them survive. What stands now went up after the subway reached 86th Street in January 1916, mostly two and three storey rowhouses in brick and limestone on numbered streets that run downhill to the water.
Doctors' Row is the most continuous of those blocks. Fifty four houses sit on between and , built in the 1900s and 1910s.
One house on is nothing like the rest. J. Sarsfield Kennedy designed it in 1917 for a shipping executive named Howard E. Jones. It is uncut stone under an undulating shingle roof, and people call it the Gingerbread House.
and are the shopping streets. Most of the Arab shops and restaurants are on and between 67th and 75th Streets. One block has signs in Arabic and the next has Italian restaurants and bars.
South of there the streets keep going down to Fort Hamilton, where the crosses to Staten Island. It opened in 1964. Building the approach displaced 7,500 people and took down Fort Lafayette, which stood where the east tower is.
Films shot in Bay Ridge
Saturday Night Fever was shot on location in March 1977, most of it here and in Bensonhurst. Tony Manero's house is 221 79th Street and the hardware store he works in was 7305 . The house on Blue Bloods is 8070 Harbor View Terrace at the corner of 82nd Street, and a shot of it opens the Sunday dinner in every episode.
Saturday Night Fever, 1977
The gang stop the car in the middle of the and dance along the edge of it. Later in the film Bobby C falls from the same place into the water. They worked at night in early March, when the steel iced up, so John Badham blocked the scene with the actors crawling along the beam. John Travolta wanted Tony standing, which is why Double J is on his hands and knees and Tony is not.
Saturday Night Fever, 1977
Tony brings Stephanie to the promenade in Park after they argue in the car. They sit on a bench near the bridge while he recites statistics about it. The benches have been replaced since.
What Bay Ridge can double for
Bay Ridge can stand in for outer borough New York, a rowhouse block with water at the end of it and a shoreline with shipping traffic on it.
