New Website Provides A Glimpse Into Southern Brooklyn’s Past

There’s a pretty cool new website in town.

Part Forgotten-NY, part Fading Ad Blog, The Faded Past — the brainchild and creation of Vlad Iorsh — was “created to serve the Brooklyn communities almost as a catalog to the past, and to those that are vanishing and fading into obscurity.  Having nostalgic memories are important and believe we can all learn from them.”

Amen to that, brother.

On his site, which I discovered via the Facebook page of Forgotten New York’s Kevin Walsh, Iorsh allocates images from Brooklyn’s history, both old and not as old — and from the looks of it, for now, it seems to have more of a Southern Brooklyn bend — into the categories of “Institutions,” “Store Fronts,” “Then and Now,” “Buildings,” “Signs,” and “Advertisements.” He also has a Flickr page.

I want this website not to be exclusive, but inclusive.  I want you, the viewer to interact with this site.  If you send scanned classic photos to me, that would be helpful in making this website great! We can only do this by sharing our pieces of history. I stongly believe with the fast moving society we live in; that we should take it slow and take in the beauty and history of what was here before us.

I particularly enjoyed the “Then and Now” category, as it also gave me the impetus to post one of my own, pictured above, created from an old, 1920s-era postcard of the Ocean Parkway section of Brighton Beach, which I found floating around the annals of the web, and its modern-day equivalent on Google Maps.

What a difference 90 years makes, right? And, yet, not so much.

There are plenty “Now and Then” shots — and more — on The Faded Past, so go check it out. I know I will.