The Same Old Picture

I'm going back and forth between Theatre Crawl and NYC photos. This is the Nth iteration of the shot of Manhattan approaching La Guardia Airport. The air quality was pretty bad and this has been heavily edited in Photoshop. Still, when you back away from it you can get a sense of how small the island really is, although it seems infinite when you are walking through it.  

The Little Island Where I Was Born

14 miles long. Two and a half miles wide at most. Manhattan  where all the world comes and where I came into it. Taken during final approach into LaGuardia Airport.

We're going a ways up the Hudson today for something special.

B&W Challenge Day 5 - 120 Wall Street

The last building on Wall Street in New York, where it meets the East River. My father worked here much of his adult life. I loved to go there with him on Saturdays, play with the office machines and watch the boats in the river.

Taken from the walkway on the Brooklyn Bridge.

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.  

Times Square 2

The hordes. I don't think I've ever been there when it wasn't busy. And if you are a New Yorker, the sign in the first picture will resonate. 

Note Olivier in the right of the third picture.         

Times Square 1

Everyone has seen pictures of Times Square and many of us have walked through it. It used to be rather tawdry but the city cleaned it up, after a fashion. Now it's all megawatt advertising glitz and family friendly if your eyes aren't too sensitive. During my recent visit, many of the blinding signs were advertising movies. Incongruously, the display on Walgreens pharmacy was rotating beautiful black and white photos of African people. It was packed during a damp, chilly autumn evening.

Tomorrow, some of the people in the swirling scene.       

9/11 Museum

Beneath the plaza of the World Trade Center is a museum about the devastating events of September 11, 2001, and the thousands of people who died that day. I've been there once before and I still find it a very difficult place. The horror and suffering it depicts are overwhelming, almost too much to bear for the living sixteen years later.

Olivier and I visited it on the last afternoon of our meet-up in New York. I took a lot of pictures on my first visit. but could not make more than a few this time. It was just too hard. As you descend the escalator into the cavernous space you are met with the sign in the first picture and wonder if it will literally be true. Just beyond is the mangled fire truck. The blue escalator in the last picture is the exit back upstairs. Stairway to heaven? The color could not have been accidental.     

Oculus

One dictionary defines oculus as a circular or oval window or a circular opening at the top of a dome.  I do not know how this new building at the World Trade Center got its name.  It has ribs that flare in like a cathedral ceiling and then back out like wings. The general shape, seen from above, is something like a football; maybe sort of oval. The eye reference may be that it contains a major transit hub, completely reformed after the tragedy of September 11, 2001. Then throw in an upscale shopping mall (there are Apple, Kate Spade and Hugo Boss stores). The name doesn't exactly work, other than it is memorable.

But it is such an eyeful! Every angle, every view has something uniquely interesting. Sometimes, like in the second picture, you get the tower of One World Trade Center in the frame.   

Legos In Rockefeller Center

If you've been to New York, you can imagine how expensive ground-level retail space is in Rockefeller Center. Some companies will pay up, though, to show off their stuff in a spectacular, high-traffic location.

There is a big Lego store on the concourse leading west from Fifth Avenue to the central plaza and skating rink. The picture above is a model of just that, all made from Legos.  The second photo looks like a giant Lego insect buzzing the entrance to Radio City Music Hall.  

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.

Roosevelt Island

Roosevelt Island is a very unusual bit of New York. A long, narrow island in the East River between Manhattan and Queens, it was known as Welfare Island when I was a kid. The development started with a tuberculosis hospital in the 19th Century, apart from the slums of the center city and the beneficiary (back then) of fresh air. Other public hospitals were added which, over time, fell into disuse and disrepair. In 1971, redevelopment began to turn it over to mostly residential use and its name was changed.

It is quiet, a bit isolated, yet right in the face of midtown Manhattan.  There is one small bridge from Queens, a subway link from both sides, and an aerial tram to 60th street and Second Avenue. The low and mid rise apartment buildings on island itself are not that photogenic. The main attraction is the spectacular view to the west in morning light.

There is a park at the southern tip dedicated to FDR's memory. On a November afternoon, workers used air blowers to send the fallen leaves into the East River.      

 

In The Subway

New York, New York's a wonderful town.

The Bronx is up and the Battery's down.

The people ride in a hole in the ground.    

                                                                   - from On The Town, 1949 

I started riding the subway by myself in seventh or eighth grade, then used it to commute to high school in The Bronx for four years. Fifty years later, I found that there were so many portraits I wanted to make in the cars: the middle-aged Asian woman with weary eyes, her teen-aged daughter asleep on her shoulder; the beautiful young Latino couple standing by the door, much more aware of each other than the next stop; all the runners who had just finished the marathon, weary but proud, draped in their blue thermal capes; the Middle Eastern man who graciously gave up his seat to an elderly gentleman; the innumerable people absorbed in their smart phones. (There is free WiFi in the stations now, although not in the tunnels.) Nobody reads the newspaper in the subway any more.

But it's not easy to do that, even with a little camera with a flip-out screen. Everyone is so close together inside the cars. It could possibly get you in trouble, and there's no place to back away when the train is in motion. The platforms are easier to work with.

 

U Pick - Franco-American Relations - Delicatessen - On The Plaza - WTC - 14,557 Steps and 19 Floors - My French Is Horrible

I'm exhausted. Good thing I have to go to work this afternoon so I can get some rest. Two old guys do Manhattan and take a lot of photos. Jack, who helps manage City Daily Photo, asked for some pictures of the two of us. Pick your favorite. From top to bottom, at Rockefeller Center, The Oculus at the World Trade Center and Katz's Deli on Houston Street. Pick your favorite.

Home this afternoon. Sunday's stair climbing efforts were due to many subway rides - most of it isn't accessible. The language issue was still a bit of a struggle but we got by with the help of AI systems. Next year in Paris, I hope.

Manhattan - High Line - 16,592 Steps - My French Is Terrible

LONG day with Olivier. We met on Roosevelt Island (never been there before), a long, thin residential sliver in the East River. Then took the tram to Manhattan. Then subway to the High Line. Then walk and walk and walk. Then to the Whitney Museum. 

The health app on my iPhone says I took 16,592 steps, probably a one-day record for me. My legs hurt - Olivier is in better shape. I think I'm hot stuff when in France because I can get something to eat or drink, buy something, pay the bill and, on a good day, ask directions in the street. But general conversation with a Frenchman? Non. Olivier's English is equivalent to my French and it was a struggle at times. The noise level of the city didn't help. We tested Google Translate's bandwidth. 

These shots only scratch the surface of what I took yesterday. 

Four Boroughs

Didn't get anything of Brooklyn on this trip except for the bridge shot already posted. Otherwise, from top to bottom:

Queens - Silvercup Studios in Long Island City. When I was young Silvercup was the major brand of white bread (which everyone ate) in NYC. When our family drove back to Sunnyside on Sunday nights after visiting my father's family, the air would be full of the aroma of fresh baked bread as we passed. Now it is an enormous film, photography and television production site. 

Manhattan: a halal street food trailer outside the Staten Island Ferry terminal. Street food in the city used to be mostly Hebrew National kosher hotdog carts. Now things are more ecumenical. Note the worker wearing the soccer jersey of the Argentine (and therefore presumably Catholic) Lionel Messi. 

The Bronx: nothing needs more explanation. I went to high school in this borough.

Staten Island: floor mat on the ferry.

NYC political nomenclature is confusing. There are five boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx and Staten Island. But each of them is also a separate county of the State of New York, sometimes with different names. Manhattan is New York County. Brooklyn is Kings County. Staten Island is Richmond County. It's just to confuse the tourists.