riches to rags

The Metal Depot scrap and recycling center is located in the heart of Hunt’s Point, New York City’s most dangerous neighborhood.

Over half the population lives below the poverty line, consistently recording the highest violent crime rate per capita in the city with a lucrative drug trade and neighborhoods notorious for drug addicted prostitution.

google earth

This club, right up the block, 

managed to misspell “Gentlemen”.

But this squalor was not always so.

When the first Europeans arrived, Hunt’s Point was a rolling meadow with sparking streams and it quickly became a playground where the wealthy built their mansions.

Thomas Hunt Jr., namesake for this area, was the blue-blood-son-in-law inheritor from Edward Jessup who purchased the land from the Wekkguasegeeck tribe in 1663.

Founder of the Quakers, George Fox and his wife Charlotte Leggett and her son-in-law H.D. Tiffany of the famous TIFFANY & Co. are all represented in Hunt’s Point by street signs in their names. This was an elegant place on the sound back then.

But the period right after WorldWar 1 changed everything. A train line built along Southern Boulevard opened the door to industrial expansion and the Fox Mansion was finally pulled down in 1909. Hunt’s Point became a melting pot for heavy industry and the city’s misfits.

It would never be the same.