"Shore Road, east side, north of 86th Street, showing No. 8391 at the right, 1928" The address numbers on Shore Road were reorganized at some point in the 20th century , as this house seen in this photograph is now listed as no. 8525.

The Gingerbread House, ca. 1939 The house that would become widely became known as "The Gingerbread House" was built in the early 1900s and designed by architect J. Sarsfield Kennedy. The home's distinctive Arts and Crafts style set it apart from many of the surrounding estates. Kennedy had designed the nearby boathouse of the prestigious Crescent Club. Perhaps it was the architect's design of that building that convinced Howard E. Jones, the wealthy president of the shipping firm James Ewell and Co, to commission him for a private home. Work on the Gingerbread House began in 1917. The house that sprung forth on the ample grounds purchased by Jones was made of natural material, its uncut stone and thatched roof evoking a fairy tale home in a European forest rather than a Bay Ridge estate. However, this rambling style wasn't the silly whim of the architect; the organic design is nuanced, adding order and subtle charm throughout the building. The Gingerbread House remains the most architecturally distinctive building in Bay Ridge.

"Shore Road, west side, opposite 83rd Street, showing the Crescent Athletic Club's boat-house, which was destroyed by fire in April 1933. This organization has its origin in a football club, organized in 1884 by William H. Ford, and was on leased grounds located at the corner of 9th Ave and 9th Street, Brooklyn. The club which was incorporated in Feb. 1888, took over in the spring of 1889 the land and boat-house of the Nereid Boat Club. In the same year they purchased from the Van Brunt and Bergen estates of Bay Ridge a tract of land extending from 83rd to 85th Streets, and from Shore Road to Colonial Road. On Decoration Day 1892, the club house which cost $80,000 was opened to the members, 1922."

7535 and 7539 Shore Road are a pair of connected homes set back from the street, behind a short stone wall and a cluster of large old trees. The homes have a beautiful unobstructed view of the bay. The Brooklyn Eagle and the New York Times reported in some early/mid-20th-century articles that the houses date to either the turn of the 19th century or earlier (the NYT note a build date of 1764). Construction dates are notoriously unreliable, in newspaper articles and government records. In any case, the homes certainly date to before the 20th century, much earlier than when the rest of Bay Ridge was primarily developed. The land they stand on once belonged to Teunis G. Bergen. The Bergens were one of Brooklyn's founding families and Teunis was a surveyor, politician, and local historian. The homes have been on and off the market over the last few years (initial asking price in 2017 was $2.75 million) but have not been sold.

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.