Racing across Brooklyn
In honor of the Brooklyn Half Marathon, we've uploaded a portion of a film from the BHS collections, entitled Walking Race: Heel and Toe Artists Hoof it to Coney Island. It shows a group of men race walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, as well as the arrival of the winner in Coney Island. The silent film is from a 16mm reel that was made around 1930 and found at a garage sale in the 1990s. The reel also contains a series of similar (but not Brooklyn-related) newsreel-style clips, all of which were recently conserved and digitized with a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation.…
The Atlantic Antic
The Atlantic Antic, Brooklyn's largest street fair, stretches along Atlantic Avenue from Hicks Street to Fourth Avenue. This Sunday (the 26th) will be the 36th year of the event. Some photos in our collection show the table that BHS had at the Antic in 1977 - the fourth year of the fair. BHS was still called the Long Island Historical Society, because we didn't change our name until the mid-1980s. Our display that year was in front of the old Independence Savings Bank building, which is now Trader Joe's. These days, the event draws crowds of more than a million people, with all kinds of food…