Brooklyn, As Seen From The Elevated Subway Lines

There are few sights as comforting to the homesick Brooklyn native as the borough’s skyline whizzing by as you sit aboard an elevated subway, looking down on your domain. Yet, despite the sense of place it delivers, it’s not an often celebrated view, perhaps easily taken for granted.

Bensonhurst native Dave Mandl gets it. So he took to borough’s many elevated subway lines recently, and captured some of the stunning, purely Brooklyn views it affords – even through its mucked-up windows.

The photos were featured in Flavorwire, where he wrote:

One day this past February, with the city blanketed in snow and illuminated by amazing winter light, I decided to toss my perfectionism aside for a month and make a virtue of necessity, shooting a series of warts-and-all landscape photos from Brooklyn’s elevated subway lines — called, naturally, Elevated Landscapes. Since there’s no other way to capture these particular shots, aside from possibly renting a helicopter, it seemed a shame to let them get away.

Although there are many shots of Brownsville, Gowanus and Bushwick, Mandl paid a solid amount of attention to capturing Southern Brooklyn, including Sheepshead Bay, Bensonhurst, Coney Island and Borough Park.

It’s no surprise that Mandl would spend a great deal of time looking at the neighborhoods below hipster DMZ line. Aside from being a native, he’s also a bit of an emissary for the area, communicating our alien eccentricities to the cool classes up north. He’s done photo essays on “unknown Brooklyn” (yet very known to us), the Bath Beach roots of Iggy Pop, Bensonhurst’s tradition of colorful nicknames, and even finding a few treasures we didn’t know about, like one of Brooklyn’s last unpaved roads.

Check out the rest of the photos here.

Photos courtesy of Dave Mandl, used with permission.