Site Report 1

As I was driving to my block I expected to see lots of businesses and interesting buildings.  However, when I arrived, I was disappointed to see that it was essentially all residential.  The houses I walked past at first were all pretty run down.  It didn’t look like the kind of street where people spend a lot of time making their lawns look nice, or repainting the outside of their houses.  There were very few people around when I went to visit my block, which makes sense because it was in the middle of the day.  There were a lot of businesses around my block, including a pizza place which made the whole block smell so good, but nothing on my block.  Along 12^th Avenue, the last street I walked through, the houses did seem a bit nicer.  And on the corner of Brooklyn and 52^nd Avenue, there was a newer looking apartment building.  It was the only building on the whole block that did not look old and outdated.  There were a lot of busses that drove past and stopped on my block, so the most noticeable smell, after the pizza of course, was the smell of bus exhaust. 

While I didn’t find anything too fascinating during the first “deep read,” I did have some questions.  The first one is that I would like to know how old the houses are, and what of people live there (older people, families with young children, college students, etc).  Another question is I would like to know when the newer apartment building was built, and why the owners chose to put an apartment building around so many smaller houses.  My third question would be that I would like to know what was on this block before it became a residential area.  The houses are probably a few decades old but I’m sure it wasn’t always residential.  Or maybe it always has been, and maybe the blocks around were residential too until they became businesses.  I hope to learn more as I start to do further research.