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I climbed but didn’t jump, partly because my oldest brother, who did the hump at 11, got an ear infection there. Partly because I was/am a terrible swimmer. Jumped the reservoir pump houses many times.
I grew up on KBT, with first year at OLA ’69. I saw this video some time ago. A couple of things: the boat handler is talking as if he just happened upon the kids, seeming amazed that there are still tough guys like back in the day, when he was a tough guy doing C Rock. But the camera filming him is the one filming throughout! There’s a kid, that looks like Horowitz in ‘Bad Boys’, that bares a resemblance to yer man. Also, this was filmed in what – 2012? Nobody was.hanging on C Rock after around.1980. Guy got killed a few years earlier. Cops were there every time. This is a vanity video for them to show to their friends and clients after referencing Basketball Diaries. ‘Yeah, that’s what it was like on Johnson Avenue back when. We were bad. But we only smoked a little pot.’.
Meant to write that the pictured markers would have been set at the corner of property as measured from the nearest official monument (obelisque). How the corner was determined would have been determined by reading deed descriptions and maps. NYS real property law follows English Common Law, which made made things simpler.
There’s an interesting story to these and other monuments in Kingsbridge area, and if I could remember you would all be impressed. Sorry. I heard it while studying title insurance at NYU. I can tell you these monuments are survey monuments that were measured using the true north baring, with chains as the tool for determining length. There is a geostationary monument, in Battery Park maybe, which Army Corp. Surveyors used as a reference point to set down the short obelisque markers one sees on side of state roads, especially. The markers along Broadway, between the Battery and Albany are the oldest in the U.S. (that may be much of the story I can’t recall). How old you ask? Pretty damned old. The markers pictured herein would have been used as starting points when lands were further subdivided. Subsequent surveyors placed rods, and later brass pins, at beginning corners, which later surveyors use as starting points. Incidentally, There are two other main geostationary monuments in the U.S. – in Colorado and S.F.
I was a title examiner in the Bx, beginning in ’83. The record room, then on 161st St, flooded in the early ’70’s and many maps and libers could not be saved, making searches against properties in some areas problematic. During the depression,.the WPA had put people to work creating a block and lot indexing system with maps of what was conveyed by deeds recorded against lots in the block – tracing paper pages were added when lot lines changed. Together with Title Guarantee’s plant, and back and forth to the indexes and libers, everything could be insured. I vaguely recall I was put on the property you mention. Some brain cells are telling me it had to do with the land under water, but I don’t know. Land under navigable water was/is conveyed by the Federal gov, or the owner of the recorded Letters Patent Uncle uses to convey. However, since early last century it is uncommon to obtain Letters Patent in areas like the one in.question (there is also a $1 redemption clause the gov inserts in LP). The foot bridges over RR tracks, that one sees along the Hudson River are there to keep the LP valid. No access means abandonment, which would extinguish. I don’t think I ever found the Letters you searched for, which could have been granted any time after the Revolution.
