Brighton Beach

My grandmother, born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, left behind a beautiful photo album of her childhood and college years. I digitized it recently, since it’s ancient and crumbling.

After cleaning the photos, physically and digitally, the fun has been researching the photos to see if I can find out where they were taken. This is complicated by the fact that my grandmother was very literary and clever, so sometimes the captions are puns or poems or places.

These photos were captioned “Brighton.” I assumed this was whimsical, as a few pages later some photos were labeled “Cairo.” I was wrong! These are of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, from roughly 100 years ago. You can see similar contemporary photos of Brighton Beach at oldnyc.org.