photographs and random miscellaney from my brain
When I was taking the bus across town this morning to drop by the new place, we passed this accident about a minute after it happened. A cab went out of control and crashed into the side of a building at 66th and Central Park West…
that took forever edition…
So, I was all excited today, because I got my new iMac, delivered to my office, sooner than expected.
Pretty cool, right? The only problem was that I clearly needed to take a cab, as the package weighed almost 30 pounds and I wasn’t about to drag it onto the subway. So I catch a cab outside of my office, and when we get down to around 23rd street, it becomes quite apparent that traffic is not moving. So I get out of the cab prepared to drag the computer the final 3 blocks, and when I get closer to my building, there’s this…
There was apparently a suspicious package, right on my corner. Once I got inside my building, the police actually wouldn’t let us back out, thereby pissing off a bunch of people who are apparently incapable of cooking dinner. I, of course, was just curious about what would happen. Because when there’s a suspicious package 50 feet away, and they’ve got the guys in the full body-armor bomb squad suits wandering around, it makes perfect sense to hang out in your building lobby right behind the giant plate glass windows. In the end, it turned out to be nothing. Well, not nothing, there was some sort of box taped to a lightpole, but it wasn’t a dangerous box.
My personal theory? it somehow got left in all of the detritus from Saturday’s street fair on my street, and was probably an improvised trash bin from one of the vendors that didn’t get cleaned up at the time. Because on Saturday night after the fair, there was trash everywhere, including piled up on the median in the middle of the street.
The reason I was actually up in my new ‘hood tonight was because I had tickets with friends to see Lucinda Williams at the Beacon Theater. Which was awesome, because she’s always awesome. This is the third summer in a row that we’ve seen her play (last year also at the Beacon and the summer before that in Central Park). I love her so much that I even bought her Live at the Fillmore CD when it came out, ignoring the fact that I already own the original albums with almost all of the songs already.
Tonight she actually played a bunch of new stuff (she tests out new songs on her audience), and for the most part it was pretty great. But the best part of the show? Was when she said that she had an old friend backstage that she was going to ask to come out and help her sing a song…
…and it was Elvis Costello. People in the audience kind of went nuts at that point. They were great together, and it was just such a great little surprise.
It was announced overnight that NYC was eliminated in the second round of olympic voting. I can’t say that I was particularly surprised, but I did feel a little (very little) twinge of regret.
I was always of two minds when it came to the olympic bid. The proud New Yorker in me was always, "yeah, of course we should host the olympics. We’re the greatest freakin’ city in the world! I can’t believe we haven’t hosted them before." Then of course, the part of me that actually has to live here day in and day out was not exactly looking forward to 7 years of olympic construction mixed with an influx of an extra several million people. Which is pretty much how everyone else felt as well. Doctoroff never managed any sort of groundswell, in part because of the west side fiasco, but also because there were too many folks who were already plotting how to get out of town if we actually won the bid.
And also, in Singapore, every other bid city sent their country’s leader and we sent…Mayor Bloomberg and Hillary Clinton? Don’t get me wrong, I personally much prefer the two of them to Bush, but when Moscow sends Putin, London sends Blair, France sends Chirac and Spain sends their Prime Minister, it just looks like we’ve got a lack of national commitment when our delegation’s highest luminaries are a city Mayor and one of a hundred Senators. It also served to emphasize, yet again, how separate NYC is from the rest of the country.
They’re discussing it on the radio now, and are saying a few other things about the process, including that NY’s bid was very "ego centric", i.e., all about the awesomeness of New York, whereas bids like Paris’ were much more "international" in that they emphasized that many of its "temporary" structures could be dismantled and sent to a place like Africa to help with a future bid on that continent, which up until now has been considered an impossibility.
And they’re announcing the bid right now on the radio. It’s down to London and Paris. and it’s…
LONDON.
Wow. I was sure that Paris would get it.
And I do mean everyone. After work yesterday, I spent some time both walking up sixth avenue and taking the bus home, and I was somewhat perplexed by the number of tourists I seemed to be encountering. Now, there are always scads of confused-looking folks in pleated shorts and fanny packs wandering around on a Friday afternoon, but it was out-of-control yesterday. This morning it hit me. Two enormous, crowd-attracting events that have a pretty small margin of audience overlap.
First, Billy Graham is here (or, more accurately, in Queens) for his last crusade. Which, I mean, it’s not really my thing, but then I’m reminded of the fact that New York City has more religious structures (churches, temples, mosques) per square mile than anywhere else in the country. In fact, if you stand on any corner in Manhattan, you will find at least one church within a three block radius.
And today, the lavender line runs down Fifth Avenue with the Gay Pride March. They were setting up the parade barricades on Fifth last night while I was waiting for the bus. It’s always pretty difficult for me to avoid this one, since the route goes right past the Flatiron building on their way down to Christopher Street. Most parades don’t go this far downtown, but it really wouldn’t be a gay pride parade if it didn’t end up in the West Village.
I’m telling you, I’m somewhat glad that I’m stuck inside waiting for the cable guy today (yes, again). It’s going to be over 90 degrees today, and a mix of evangelical christians and drunk, barely-clothed transvestites and Chelsea boys is something I can live without. Then again, talk about your free entertainment…
Oh, and for those of you who want something a little less religious and/or gay, you can go watch the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, where topless women marching in bizarre fish costumes is actually considered fun for the whole family.
See? something for everyone. I’m just hoping to get to see March of the Penguins at some point.
So it looks like the west side stadium is dead in the water, and with it, NYC’s chances to host the 2012 games. I get that no one wants a massive stadium in their backyard, but it’s not like what’s there now (a bunch of below-street level railroad sidings) is particularly appealing. It’s not like they planned on tearing down, you know, a major cultural and architectural gem to build their sports complex (yeah, Comcast, owners of that "rabbit-warren" MSG, I’m talking to you). And Silver’s complaints about preserving lower manhattan ring particularly false, since (a) it’s his district, so he’s clearly playing neighborhood favorites, (b) they can’t find any tenants for the buildings that are already in lower manhattan, so there’s nothing to really "take away", and (c) no one likes working in lower manhattan – between the crazy security, the lack of good restaurants (particularly for lunch), and, essentially, a second commute for anyone coming in from the ‘burbs (read: law firm partners, investment bank managers, etc.), it’s the least-liked business location in the city. There’s a reason that price per square foot downtown is less than half of what it is in midtown.
I’m not saying I wanted a stadium. Not being a sports fan (and certainly not a Jets fan at that!), I wasn’t looking forward to thousands of tailgaters looking for parking spots on 9th Avenue, and the Olympics in NYC is nice, in theory, but everyone who actually lives here would actually take the two weeks off and flee like it was the largest memorial day weekend in history. And frankly, the lack of a backup plan for the Olympics rests solely on Doctoroff’s shoulders – he’s no Robert Moses. Moses, of course, being the man who, when wanting to tear down Castle Clinton (and a good portion of lower manhattan) in order to build a Brooklyn-Battery Bridge (rather than the now existing tunnel), could only be stopped by FDR sending in the Navy to form a blockade. In lower Manhattan. During World War II.
I think the thing I have the biggest problem with is the way that the state and the city relate to each other. NYC residents send, on average, $3 BILLION in taxes, per year, to the state that we never see again, but we’re constantly treated like either an afterthought or a parasite on the rest of the state. The city spent years on this proposal, and to have it held up by a three-person appointed commission and a clearly biased competing sports complex with deep pockets? annoys me to no end. That being said, I’m sure that the city thought that it could force through the proposal by shouting "olympic bid! olympic bid!" over and over again.
What is it they say? the enemy of my enemy is my friend? I didn’t like the stadium, but I don’t like the other guys even more.
It’s a darn good thing that I wasn’t planning on going anywhere this weekend, as Manhattanites appear to be trapped on our little island.
The West Side Highway has been shut down thanks to a wall collapse that spilled tons of debris all over the road. And don’t think about taking the train from Jersey, because a rail fire has shut down service between NYC and Newark.
Oh sure, there are still egress points, but I’m pretty sure that most folks don’t want to spend their entire weekend sitting on the Harlem River Drive. Because I’m pretty sure that most of our roads are at or near capacity without losing half of them. On the radio this morning, commentators were suggesting (a) going through Brooklyn and Queens to get out of town (which seems like a really big detour if you’re trying to go west) or (b) taking the day off if you need to commute into the city (They were even joking about the fact that it’s Friday the 13th, so clearly people would want to lock themselves in their homes all day and not even attempt to do anything).
And apparently no one was injured in either of these incidents, which is why people feel free to joke about them. I mean, an avalanche? In Manhattan? I thought we were supposed to be completely devoid of any and all natural phenomena here on our little concrete island.
Now that my web hosting provider has upped my storage capacity from 250 MBs to 5 GBs, I feel much more free to start posting some additional photos from time to time.
As I’ve mentioned before, I tend to wander around the neighborhood taking pictures in my spare time. Lately though, I’m beginning to wonder if there’s something wacky with my digital camera (of course, I was playing with some of the settings to see what they would do). Here’s the result. First, a building on 6th Avenue that is just really nice to look at…
Taxicabs in motion…
Then, on my way home from work, I stopped to take some pictures of the Metropolitan Life Tower, which turned out a little bizarre. Check out these two pictures from the same spot, one with a flash and one without:
How cool is that?! I don’t even know what I did, but it’s pretty wild looking, huh?
One of the really awesome things about living in an urban area is watching people come up with creative, even radical, ideas for old spaces. One of the premier examples of this is the development of the high line.
Essentially a defunct railroad siding that travelled through (as in "inside") the meatpacking plants and other factories on the far west side (made defunct, obviously, by trucks), it’s being turned into a unique, elevated public park space. One that will still travel through some of the older buildings in the neighborhood.
Now, if they could just get the meatpacking district to, you know, stop smelling like the meatpacking district (I know it’s somewhat amazing in this, the 21st century, but they do still have working plants in the neighborhood!), it might be a great place to have a picnic (hey, if they could move the Fulton Fish Market to the Bronx, anything’s possible!).
Last fall, some friends of mine and I tried to go visit the high line during Open House New York, (where historical, but not normally open to the public sites are, well, open to the public) but we were somewhat spastic and decided to run all of our errands and get lunch before we went over, meaning that by the time we got there, there were so many people waiting that they were no longer allowing people to even join the line.