It’s hard to believe that this former industrial and waterfront area became, before Williamsburg, another bridge neighborhood, became an extremely wealthy enclave.
During this time, over along the waterfront, it was all trash and abandoned cars. It was also a home for a lot of homeless people who built shacks. The common site would be a bum, sitting on a chair surrounded by trash with large rats just crawling around, including crawling over him. Actually, that was pretty common in deteriorated neighborhood back in the day. Coney Island was much worse. Finally, when Giuliani got elected, he actually filled underneath the boardwalk with sand, so it was impossible to be underneath the boardwalk.