Covering ground I had previously posted photos of from the late 1990s, only this time a couple of years later, just a heartbeat before 9-11, in August 2001. We're once again heading south on the Interstate 278 Brooklyn Queens Expressway, which had gotten some touching up over the two years since I'd last shot it. Eventually we hit the split where Interstate 278 traffic takes the right fork and keeps shooting down the BQE through Williamsburg toward Fort Greene, while the left tine of the fork heads off to the Williamsburg Bridge and Manhattan.

Jeep Liberty billboard dominates the background here, while alcoholic beverage ads held court on the east side of the expressway. Lovely combination isn't it, high speed arterial travel combined with liquor and beer billboards.

A super shy orange diamond construction sign seems to be encouraging everyone to get off at Metropolitan Avenue.

The massive overhead green directional sign is still there warning of the big split ahead. Sorry but those big white, roadway arrows struck me as vaguely obscene.

One of the last landmarks we pass before the Williamsburg Bridge split is an aged tenement apartment house to the right hosting a haunting billboard imploring the public to come froth with any information on a then young woman, a Flatbush, Brooklyn resident named Kristine Kupka, who went missing October 24, 1998. By 2001 when I shot this, the billboard was up about a year, rented by the missing woman's grieving sister, who had rightfully blasted the NYPD for not acting on her sister's disappearance for a full week. The billboard is no longer there, gone at least since the oldest Google Earth view snapped in 2007. I don't recall how long it remained up, but renting the billboard was pretty expensive, about $6,000 a month. The apartment house, located on North 8th Street just off of Meeker Avenue, now has a huge, stark gray Williamsburg Northside School building towering behind it, built in 2014. To this day as I write in 2018, Ms. Kupka remains missing. Her then boyfriend, Darshanand "Rudy" Persaud was long suspected of murdering her, but ultimately was never charged. He's a dentist in Tampa, Florida, rated a whopping 2 stars on www.RateMDS.com and according to VoterRecords.com he votes Democrat.