What happens in The Hole tends to stay in The Hole. But that’s about all this forgotten Brooklyn neighborhood has in common with Vegas.
Far removed from the from the rush and glitz of Manhattan, a neighborhood on the border of Brooklyn and Queens resembles the iconic scenery of the Midwest and a hard-hit industrial cities like Detroit.
But home is where the heart is, even when it lacks many of the simple comforts of basic infrastructure, such as a sewer system.
The Hole is a New York City community of five square blocks that time forgot. Sunken 30 feet feet below sea level, men on horseback patrol down streets hemmed in by mountains of rubble and garbage, lunch comes hot off the radiator of any given Cadillac, and a Mafia dumping ground still contains dead victims waiting in a marsh for the FBI to uncover.
It sounds like the setting of an absurd sci-fi novel, but the reality is truer than many New Yorkers know or understand. A new documentary bearing the name of this area sheds some light on The Hole, its rough history, and some of its more distinctive characters: The Federation of Black Cowboys, a collection of horse wranglers who hold an annual rodeo nearby, tan leather, and show youths the way around town a saddle.
The crew of “The Hole” spent a month filming along the streets there, which are ironically named after precious jewels—Ruby Street sits underwater much of the time, and Sapphire parallels a failed housing development and field of refuse building materials.
Shot by Courtney Sell and Billy Feldman, the documentary portrays this New York City anomaly, where post-apocalyptic visions of the future meet the forgotten past of the Shore Parkway. Watch the first minute below, featuring interviews with some locals. “The Hole” will screen throughout January in the greater Manhattan area.
The Hole Preview from Alley Oop on Vimeo.
Images courtesy of Ashley Conner
