More Street Milling: Garden Place to Start Tuesday

Oh, McKenny Street! What a tiny little street that no one talks about anymore. You won’t find it on any street-sign, though one short block still exists and it lives on in official city maps.

McKenny Street is (mostly) parallel to, and one block to the west of, Hicks Street. It originally ran 2 short blocks from Doughty to Poplar. Now it just runs from Doughty to Vine. It was basically an alley to Hicks. (Most of the properties on Hicks ran straight back to the east side of McKenny, sometimes with an outbuilding fronting on McKenny…only the Doughty and Poplar corners had separate buildings on the east side of McKenny. And the west side was mainly the sides of buildings on Doughty, Vine or Poplar.)

I think the street was opened up when the Hicks brothers laid out the North Heights because most of the land that is now Squibb Hill was a separate farm owned by Cary Ludlow (and not immediately turned into development lots), and McKenny allowed access to some of the land up the hill south of Doughty that would otherwise be too far from a street. The Hicks-McKenny block on the Poplar side is slightly shorter than the Doughty side because of constraints from the Ludlow farm.

Supposedly it’s named after a John McKenny, who was an eighteenth century Brooklyn constable, or Roman Catholic leader (or both).

Today, at the corner of Doughty and McKenny, the McKenny side has a “Hicks Street” sign (across from New Xcell, by the east side of the JW 29 Columbia Heights building). But you can see it labelled accurately on the city’s official maps — try http://maps.nyc.gov/doitt/nycitymap

Here’s a map of McKenny Street in 1855:
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?1268421

Grace Court isn’t listed on the CB 2 notice. Are there signs up saying it’s going to be milled Monday?

None of those streets actually intersect with the BQE; rather, they intersect with the street which is onramp for the BQE, just south of Old Fulton Street.