WILT: Neighborhood Cross Street's Namesake

One of my favorite apps is called Daily Art. If you like art even a little, and if you like the stories behind the art, then the free Daily Art is all you. Each day a new painting or sculpture is delivered with a snippet about its context. It's pretty rad.

A few days ago the offer was the following painting, "Winter Scene of Brooklyn" by Francis Guy:

The story talked about how the studio that Guy painted in looked out on this intersection, where Fulton, Front and a third street come together. In today's Brooklyn, the intersection exists, but the buttresses for the Brooklyn bridge are closeby.

We used to live very close to Fulton, but not this exact iteration, as this section is known as Old Fulton today.

In the lower left corner there's a couple with a kid, and directly above the kid is a gentleman walking to the left, carrying a parcel of some kind.

The parcel is a leg of lamb, and the man was the butcher. The butcher was actually named in the app's anecdote, as the interesting part of the painting's history is that many people from the neighborhood were placed in the painting by Guy. The butcher's name: Jacob Patchen.

WHAT?!?!? I said to myself when I read that.

The following picture is one I took from the top of our building in Bed Stuy, and it has probably graced this website before. The trailer we packed our belongings in and drove from California is seen at the bottom in the center:

The street we lived on was Halsey, and the near cross street at the corner was Patchen.

We lived on Halsey between Patchen and Malcolm X, but much closer to Patchen. And while I've of course heard of Malcolm X, this app's story was the first time I ever heard any reference to Patchen's namesake.