Food!

Workers buying lunch from a food truck, ca.1965, v1988.37.39; Anthony Costanzo Brooklyn Navy Yard collection, ARC.023; Brooklyn Historical Society.

Anyone who has spent even a little bit of time in Brooklyn knows you can eat pretty well around here without much effort.  I saw this through fresh eyes while cycling around the borough with my brother this past weekend.  If we hadn’t eaten such a big brunch, he might have been able to succumb to the unbelievable smells emanating from the donut truck on Bergen Street.  Alas – and he was indeed very sorry – he had to pass it up.

Food trucks actually began with cattle drivers.  Spending weeks beyond the boundaries of a kitchen, the chuck wagon was conceived to dish out decent food to ranchers.  By the 1890s, New York City was an adopter of the food truck .  Since then, food trucks of increasing variety have only multiplied throughout the city.

This mobile canteen satiated the many employees at the Navy Yard.  This picture was taken by Anthony Costanzo one year before the Brooklyn Navy Yard ceased operation as a working shipyard.  Costanzo worked there as the Public Information Officer for the U.S. Department of the Navy until the yard was decommissioned.  You can find out more about the history of the Yard here.

If you would like to continue or increase your intake of delicious local food, do visit us next week for Brooklyn Bounty where we’ll have the best of Brooklyn food vendors under one roof.

Interested in seeing more photos from BHS’s collection? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images. Interested in seeing even more historic Brooklyn images? Visit our new website here.  To search BHS’s entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections visit BHS’s Othmer Library Wed-Fri, 1:00-5:00 p.m.