Look at all that parking! So few cars! The downside of Leroy Street from 75 years ago is no trees. I'll take the trees and Leroy Street (aka St. Lukes Place) as it is today.

The New York Public Library has a great collection of photographs of New York City in its Digital Gallery and it's fun to look back at what the city looked like 50-100 years ago.

The pictures are great, but the captions also contain illuminating nuggets of information. The top caption talking about the Hudson Park Branch includes:

"The eastern side of the building exactly marks the old eastern boundary of the Trinity Church Farm, which was originally one of the Dutch farms confiscated by the Duke of York, and was deeded in perpetuity to Trinity Church by Queen Anne."

The second caption is even more interesting:

"A view solely of the Hudson Park Library during improvement by the Works Progress Administration. This agency also constructed a swimming pool in the easterly portion of the Park that adjoins this structure. During same, several gruesome objects were recovered, as this was formerly St. Johns Cemetery."

In a future post I will write more about those gruesome objects.