B&W Challenge, Day 4 - ICP

An iconic institution for people who share my passion, the new quarters of the International Center Of Photography on The Bowery, just south of Houston Street in lower Manhattan. (I think the school is still at the old place on Sixth Avenue in Midtown.) This street used to be New York's skid row, but, like much of the island, it is becoming thoroughly gentrified.

It you look closely, you can barely see the white lettering in the pavement featured in the post of November 12. Of course almost no one notices it.

I think I'll finish this series with three of my favorite B&Ws from the archives.  

Signs In The Street (In Saecula Saeculorum)

Most of the time you need to keep your gaze forward while walking the streets of New York. Don't run into the hoards of other pedestrians, food vendors' pushcarts, potholes or traffic. (Although New Yorkers, including me when I'm back, have a particularly aggressive way of crossing the street, as if saying to oncoming drivers C'mon. I dare you to hit me. I've got a badass lawyer.)

But sometimes you should look down at the pavement for unusual detail. The words in the first picture are painted onto the sidewalk at the entrance to the International Center of Photography, much beloved of us shooters. For ever and ever throughout the universe? So, after our species extinguishes itself, which does not seem a remote possibility, the computers that may replace us can use your image millennia from now on billboards on Tatooine? The lawyer in me says nobody who enters the building sees this and the release is unenforceable.

Further down, playing cards that have somehow affixed themselves to the sidewalk on E. Houston Street (New Yorkers pronounce it HOW-stun, not HOU-stun), and a stencil that is all too believable.

A Town So Nice They Had To Name It Twice

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New York, New York, my home town. I love it. Not that I'm sorry I live in St. Louis these days but there's no place like it on earth. (Right, Olivier?)

Carolyn and I drove in with our nephew, Michael, yesterday afternoon. We went to someplace I've wanted to see for years, a temple of sorts, the International Center for Photography at 43rd Street and 6th Avenue. Ironically, you can't take photographs inside. Then up 5th Avenue to Rockefeller Center, back west to 7th Avenue and through Times Square. The top picture was taken on 42nd Street just west of 7th Avenue. We all agreed the phrase "sea of humanity" was coined to describe midtown during the week after Christmas.