Union Church of Bay Ridge, June 23, 1963. The Union Church of Bay Ridge was established in 1918, following the merger of two Ridge Boulevard Churches, the Bay Ridge Reformed Church (which occupied the Union Church’s current site) and Bay Ridge United Presbyterian. The current church was completed in 1931.

Reichert’s Tea Room, ca. 1940. The Reichert’s Tea Room likely opened around 1931 and was a well-known hangout in the neighborhood. A 1931 ad for the shop stated: "Meet Me at Reichert’s’ has become such a familiar phrase among young people in Bay Ridge. It is hardly worth mentioning here. The point we like to make is this: If Reichert’s didn’t make the best ice cream sodas in town would they meet at Reichert’s?” The storefront became Hinsch's in 1949 and continued to serve ice cream and diner-esque foods through 2011. In recent years it has been converted into a Stewart’s (a fast-food restaurant franchise first established in 1924!)

Over the years, as I’ve photographed the city, I’ve amassed a collection of loose typologies—those omnipresent features like storefront churches, split houses, and dead ends that create a throughline across the different neighborhoods and boroughs of New York. One of the first subjects I began to document somewhat systematically was handball walls. These large concrete monoliths, pockmarked, peeling, and painted-over slabs, preside over playgrounds like oversized Rorschach tests. A standard wall is 16’ by 20’, mirroring the proportions of the 8x10 camera I was working with. They are everywhere.