Thursday Morning in Gerritsen Beach: Gerritsen Beach Volunteer Fire Department's Annual Thanksgiving Day Ragamuffin Parade starting at Avenue W and Plumb 2nd Street

(Video copyright Mike Wright courtesy Midwood-Flatbush News)

Thursday Morning in Marine Park: Salt Marsh Nature Trail at Marine Park

(Video courtesy John Lee)

Thursday Night in Marine Park: Head Over Heels at Marine Park

(Video courtesy Mike Beitchman)

Early Friday Morning in Marine Park: Driving in the Snow Along Avenue U and Flatbush Avenue

(Video courtesy Bill Russo for Fabintro)

Wednesday Night in Marine Park: The Rockinghams at Marine Park

We went back to Marine Park in the old neighborhood this evening to see The Rockinghams, a local '60s pop song tribute band.

They played songs like "Ticket to Ride," "This Diamond Ring," "There's a Kind of a Hush," "I Get Around," "Sherry," "Dawn," "Because," "Hang On Sloopy," "Have You Ever Seen the Rain," "Sweet Caroline," "Glad All Over," and "She's Not There."

There was a surprisingly large crowd of, as you'd expect, mostly older people from the area who were sensible enough to bring their own lawn chairs.

It was definitely a low-key, neighborhood affair without the garguantan crowds of Marty Markowitz's big-star shows at Wingate Field and Asser Levy/Seaside Park. It felt funny to us to listen to songs we first heard maybe 40 and 45 years ago when they were new and we were teens.

The demographics may have resembled a Tea Party gathering in some respects, but we had to say it was more diverse racially and ethnically than we'd ever seen at the Williamsburg Pool Parties, last Saturday at the Rock Yard, or even last night with the Metropolitan Opera at Brooklyn Bridge Park. We heard people talking Creole and Mandarin and Spanish and saw people wearing yarmulkes, hijabs and at least one dastar and one niqab each.

Most people under 25 at the concert were being held or pushed in a stroller by their parents.

The younger demographic was mostly nearby at the basketball courts.

Older kids came by on their bikes, mostly by accident. We used to ride our low-slung bike back here and pretend we were The Flash.

A few older people eschewed the music for a lively game of bocce.

To everyone who saw MGMT at the McCarren Pool in 2008: This is you in 2040.

Yum! Hot dogs!

Yum! Some kind of candy and inedible toys!

Our dad and sometimes our mom used to jog (that's what it was called) around the track here back in the 1970s. Today, on his 84th birthday, Dad got up at 4 a.m. so he could walk his 4-5 miles in Arizona while it was still a cool 88 degrees.

The old Marine Park field house by Fillmore Avenue is being reconstructed with new restrooms, community space, storage and workspace for the park staff. The "temporary bathroom" is the most luxurious we've ever seen in a New York City park.

This evening was one of the oldies summer concerts series sponsored by State Senator Marty Golden (R-C-I, 22nd District). According to an article in the current Brooklyn Paper by Thomas Tracy and our dear friend of three decades Helen Klein (whom we last saw in June at a New Jersey bat mitzvah), Sen. Golden has never had a Democratic opponent and is trying to keep it that way.

The Rockinghams were actually quite good. It can't be easy to do so many songs in so many disparate styles that effectively. And they certainly did get some people up and dancing.

Even if it took two buses and two trains (the truncated B48 from Lorimer and Skillman to its new terminus at Franklin and Fulton; the Franklin Avenue Shuttle to Prospect Park; the B train to Kings Highway; and then the B100) to get to Marine Park (though we only had to cross one street in Williamsburg) - we're glad we got back to the park where we spent a lot of our childhood and adolescence.

Sunday Afternoon in Marine Park: Open House New York at the Hendrik I. Lott House

Alerted by a post on the always-interesting Marine Parker blog, we headed this afternoon to near where we grew up and lived for over 20 years. We wanted to see the historic Hendrik I. Lott House, which is still being restored but which was open to the public today for Open House New York, the weekend that is America’s largest architecture and design event, offering admission to some of New York’s most coveted sites that are usually closed to the public.

On a weekend when most subway lines are messed up due to service work, we made our way past the crowds at the Lorimer Street station, where people were getting off and on the shuttle buses to Myrtle/Wyckoff and all stops in between, and had a fast trip to Marine Park with the G train to Fulton Street, the Q train to Kings Highway, and the B-100 bus to Fillmore Avenue near East 36th Street.

One of our close friends (we had lunch with him just on Thursday) from Brooklyn College lived with his family just up the block from the Lott House, but we have no memories of it, though we've got a vague recollection that two elderly women lived in the house that was turned the wrong way, not facing the street but at an almost 90-degree angle to it.

We didn't think much of it, either because we were either too stoned when we'd be hanging out on the block in the early 1970s or because we lived just half a block from Mill Lane between East 55th and East 56th Street which also had houses not facing the street and didn't think this was that unusual. We did know these kinds of houses were usually old, before the current street grid.

Although we didn't know it in the 1970s, the two old ladies who lived there were descendants of the Lott family, who originally owned much of the property now in the Marine Park neighborhood. In fact, they were great-great-great-great-granddaughters of Johannes Lott, a member of the New York Colonial Assembly, who purchased land in then-rural area of Flatlands in 1719 to be used for farming.

According to Wikipedia,

Lott expanded the family holdings from Kings Highway south to Jamaica Bay and "Lott's Landing." On this property, Johannes built his homestead just east of the present house. Johannes died in 1775, leaving the farm to Johannes Jr., who occupied the property until 1792.

The Lott family quickly became leaders in the area. When Hendrick I. Lott married Mary Brownjohn in 1792, he found his grandfather’s house too small, too old, and too outmoded for an established member of a prominent family. Hendrick built a larger, grander house, combining Dutch architecture with that of the English, making it into a distinctly American building.

Hendrick did not abandon his grandfather’s house entirely, however; it served as the kitchen wing being moved to the eastern end of the new house.

He balanced this 1720 wing with a west wing, creating the symmetrical composition.

Although Hendrick added Federal-style dormer windows, the gambrel roof with graceful spring eaves is typical of the Dutch Colonial architectureal style. The interior features eighteen rooms organized by a center hall plan.

In the 19th-century, at its peak the Lotts’ farm included more than 200 acres (0.81 km2).

Like most large farmers in southern Kings County, the Lotts relied heavily on the labor of slaves to grow the crops that they sold in the markets of Brooklyn and Manhattan.

However, the Lotts freed their slaves by 1805, long before the abolition of slavery in New York State in 1827. Later, it is said, the House may have served as a stop on the Underground Railroad.

By 1825 the 200-acre (0.81 km2) farm, on which the Lotts raised cabbage, potatoes, vegetables and wheat, included outbuildings, barns and a separate stone kitchen. The foundation of which, that was located between the home and the present East 36th Street, was excavated in 1998 by the Brooklyn College Archaeological Research Center.

[Two years ago we posted on Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn our account of “Disappearing Dutch Brooklyn – Where Have All the Houses Gone?” -- a presentation at the Lefferts Homestead by anthropologist and archaeologist Christopher Ricciardi, who showed slides from the dig.]

For two centuries descendants of the Lotts lived in the homestead and used the land for farming. The last farmer, John Bennett Lott, died in 1923. The majority of the land was sold, leaving only three-quarters of an acre surrounding the house.

The last Lott descendant to live there, Ella Suydam, a great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Johannes Lott, lived in the house until she died in 1989.

The Hendrick I. Lott House, which sits on its original location on three-quarters of an acre of land, and its grounds are currently closed for restoration.

Well, not today from noon to 4 p.m. We got there a little before 3 p.m. and spoke to some of the neighborhood folks involved in the restoration and took the pics here of the house and grounds, which will eventually be a park. They dressed it up nicely for Halloween.

We read all the information on the signs inside and looked at the amazingly well-preserved house and its artifacts.

The house was bought by the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation in 2001 and operated by the Hendrick I. Lott House Preservation Association, and is a member of the Historic House Trust.

The restoration of the Lott House is a joint effort of the City of New York/Parks & Recreation, Historic House Trust of New York City, Marine Park Civic Association, and Hendrick I. Lott House Preservation Association.

We're really grateful to all of them for the project, which can use your help, and to their participation in Open House New York.

After saying our goodbyes, we headed back to Fillmore Avenue but decided that rather than go back to Kings Highway on the B-100 bus, we'd walk toward Flatbush Avenue (and our old block) on Fillmore Avenue, which had this non-historic house with more contemporary Halloween decorations out front.

It was a beautiful, not-too-cool, bright and cloudless autumn afternoon. We caught the Q-35 bus south of the Floridian Diner, by the now-shuttered old gas station (Amoco, we think) where we used to fill up the tanks of our mom's '70 Pontiac Custom S and our own '73 Mercury Comet and took it to the last stop by the Junction.

On our way to the 2 train, a lady with a West Indian accent asked us if we knew where Lord's Bakery was.

We pointed her in the right direction up Nostrand Avenue but didn't tell her that Lord's Bakery cookies were probably why we weighed more in the early 1970s in our early twenties than we do know.

Of course we stopped getting the munchies about 30 years ago. Still, when we got back to Williamsburg, we did get a slice of marinara pizza at Sal's on Lorimer and Devoe.