Porta-potties
08/31/03
Floyd Bennett Field (previous photos) is, it would appear, where porta-potties go to die.
Also:
Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn
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Color
08/30/03
#1 train between 14th and 18th Streets
Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
Murray Hill
Corona, Queens
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Looking down
08/29/03
Ozone Park, Queens
Union Square
Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
Fort Greene, Brooklyn
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Dog special
08/28/03
Harlem
Fort Greene Park, 6 a.m.
Hoboken
Fort Greene
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4th Avenue
08/27/03
Bulletproof liquor store. (See also bulletproof drugstore, #9.)
Any idea what religion this is? I'm stumped. The caption reads "We accept all sinners."
4th Avenue, the street without a neighborhood, Brooklyn
Also:
I had the idea for a bodega sign photo project independently (Times article), but I never did anything with it. I guess that's what separates professionals from dilettantes like me.
Wandering in Fairbanks: very nice street scenes of Fairbanks, Alaska. There's some truly bizarre stuff there, as you'd expect. But who would have thought Fairbanks would have five Thai restaurants?
At Lightningfield, photos of two creepy downtown buildings. I'd been wondering about the one on the Bowery, which is one of my favorite graffiti-covered New York landmarks. And don't miss Chairman Mao on the other building, which is much better known.
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MOB #7
08/26/03
Mob #7, tonight, was at St. Patrick's Cathedral in an area generally frequented by tourists, though there weren't too many tonight. The instructions were to form a single-file line starting at a wooden door halfway down the north side of the cathedral on 51st Street, wrapping around down Fifth Avenue and over to 50th Street. If anyone asked, we heard they were selling Strokes tickets there. "No cutting!" The line wasn't quite single-file, but it was a striking image, and definitely out of the ordinary.
(Perhaps I should call this mob #7.5, to avoid confusion with mob #7, the biggest mob yet?)
Confusingly, I saw an inexplicable line of about 500 people on 45th Street at 8 a.m. the next morning, undoubtedly waiting for White Stripes tickets.
More: Fred Hoysted, Moist and Tasty (with a picture of the dispersal signal)
( MOB #2 at Macy's | MOB #3 at the Grand Hyatt | MOB #4 at Otto Tootsi Plohound | MOB #5 in Central Park | MOB #6 at Toys R Us )
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Subway surprise II
08/25/03
What were these people so surprised by?
These:
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Subway surprise
08/24/03
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For sale
08/23/03
Broadway Junction-ish, Brooklyn
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Target, Queens. Sometimes the shopping-cart escalators don't work quite right.
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Basic black
08/22/03
Times Square
Bushwick, Brooklyn
Where Crazy Eddie went in his later years?
Hoboken
Corona, Queens
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Flattery goes both ways
08/21/03
This mash-up of blog and photo gallery is fluffed to absolute perfection.
The new photolog Jimmy Squid's Weapons -- named after a gun store in Chicopee, Massachusetts -- is off to an extremely auspicious start. I especially like today's entry. Check it out.
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Hoboken
08/21/03
John Stilgoe has pointed out that a lot of small towns in America consist of brick and masonry buildings of about the same vintage, generally because after the last of a series of catastrophic fires, the merchant class of the town was fed up and finally decided to rebuild in something other than wood.
That's how Hoboken feels, except it feels like it all happened in the last five years, after a fire in, say, 1997 that I wasn't previously aware of. All the buildings are 80 or 100 years old, but it looks like they all went up yesterday. There's not a speck of dirt anywhere in the main part of town; never have I seen so comprehensive a renovation. It's scary, actually, sort of like Disney swooped in and decided to build a turn-of-the-last-century theme park. As pretty as the buildings are -- and there are a lot of very pretty buildings -- they just don't feel real.
Oddly, I counted at least five or six enormous old school buildings that are now being put to more profitable uses. Where do today's children of Hoboken go to school?
(on a park bench)
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LES
08/19/03
Abandoned mezzanine, 2nd Avenue subway station. Can anyone date the ad?
Update: yukino has done some research, found scary archives of cigarette advertising, and suggests that the poster dates to 1987. I'm surprised the subway had cigarette ads so recently.
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More blackout
08/18/03
I know everyone's tired of hearing about the blackout. That's what the "Back" button is for.
Atlantic Avenue
I have no idea:
On the Manhattan Bridge
Two days after the blackout, New Yorkers were back to their normal petty-criminal ways, using the "Warning: No fishing! Contaminated by raw sewage!" flyers to hold bait.
Canarsie Pier
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Satan's BMW
08/17/03
Canarsie, Brooklyn
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Capitalist realism
08/16/03
North of Woodside, Queens
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Blackout!
08/15/03
Wow.
You know, I've always had a peculiar desire to live through natural disasters -- not ones with loss of life, but anything that shakes people up from their normal routines. I was disappointed that there were no major earthquakes when I lived in California, but I enjoyed the minor ones. And this? This was fantastic.
Times Square!
In my office, the power didn't go out so much as it started rapidly cycling off and on. After a dozen cycles or so, I yanked my computer's surge protector out of the wall. We spent 20 minutes or so trying to figure out what was going on; I first started to worry when I looked out the window at the Times Square video screens and noticed they were off. We quickly learned that the power was off in Albany, Cleveland, Ontario (Ontario!), and I began looting. (I only looted cold soda from the office, despite a popular suggestion that we hit the diamond district on 47th.)
I would have stuck around to see if the power came back, but I had a 6-mile walk ahead of me and I wanted to get home before dark, so I set out. Times Square was chaos, with people poring over bus maps as if they were alien artifacts.
Then down Broadway, which was overrun with pedestrians, as far as Union Square, where it became impassable and I cut over to 4th Avenue and then the Bowery. People employed some novel means of transportation.
I couldn't help but notice that this view down Sixth Avenue was a bit different the last time this many people had to walk home.
I made it to the Manhattan Bridge, which was madness -- two lanes of cars and about seven lanes of pedestrians, sometimes overlapping -- and saw people being evacuated from two stuck W trains, two hours after the power went out.
Flatbush Avenue was a zoo, as you'd expect.
The worst part? I dropped off my laundry, including my sheets, at the 666 Laundromat in the morning, and I could see it taunting me through the bars on the windows when I got home.
Talk about being in the right place at the right time...
Or the opposite.
Looting? Nah, just hungry Brooklynites the morning after.
My power came back on at 8 a.m. today, the laundromat was open, and the office has that we're-all-in-it-together feel to it. Actually, all of New York has that feel to it. I do wonder when the power will go back on below 42nd Street, though.
Elsewhere: I'm amazed by the people hitching a ride on the back of a bus at Gothamist, which also has some amazing aerial photos of a darkened New York. The closest I saw was people riding in the back of a 20-foot truck with the rear door open.
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Serve the vertical thirst
08/14/03
Long Island City
Astoria
Greenpoint
1:10 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack (1)
Tourists, Rockefeller Center
08/13/03
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Unprofessional
08/10/03
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MOB #6
08/07/03
Oh, how I hoped Mob #6 would be in Times Square proper, out in the open, with tourists gaping at us from all sides. (When, Bill, when?) Instead, it was in Toys R Us, and it was a cute idea, but in some ways it fell flat again. More on that later.
The instructions had us gathering on the second floor of Toys R Us, staring transfixed at the giant animatronic dinosaur for three minutes, then dropping to our knees and, for four more minutes, reacting to its loud roars by moaning and cowering behind outstretched hands.
The crowd, before the official starting time of the mob.
The actual moaning-and-cowering part only lasted a minute; the panicked Toys R Us staff shut the dinosaur off and scrambled to call the cops, at which point a massive exodus began.
By the scheduled end time, the dinosaur area was back to normal: just the usual Japanese tourists taking pictures of their families next to the dinosaur.
On our way out, the cop was pretty much useless, telling us to leave, which we were doing anyway.
Meanwhile, on the lower level, an Australian-sounding radio journalist interviewed utterly bewildered tourists about what had just happened, then explained it to them:
My verdict? A cute idea, but not public enough; again, it was in a store, with limited means of ingress and egress; I'd still like to see one outdoors in a heavily trafficked public place, where the mob can form from all directions and disperse in all directions as well, and where there are more spectators to bewilder. Once again, people jumped the gun, starting each phase too early and dispersing too early (why not cower at a dinosaur even after it's been turned off?). I estimated the crowd at 500+, easily the biggest inexplicable mob yet, and I can only imagine that the larger crowd was drawn by hopes of an outdoor mob in Times Square. But maybe that's just my bias speaking.
Don't get me wrong -- the mob was a lot of fun, in the same way that all the mobs have been. I just feel like we haven't really taken the next step yet, and I keep hoping we will.
More coverage: Fred Hoysted, Ginger, Dan Winckler, Fancy Robot, Queixa, Moist and Tasty (nice action shots from the cowering-in-fear part), Glowlab, CCE, Cheesebikini
I'm quoted in today's Philadelphia Inquirer. The article mentions mobproject.com, which is soliciting donations but is not affiliated with the mob project. It also sounds a bit like a pyramid scheme. I would not recommend giving them money.
( MOB #2 at Macy's | MOB #3 at the Grand Hyatt | MOB #4 at Otto Tootsi Plohound | MOB #5 in Central Park )
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722 miles
08/04/03
Over the weekend I finally finished riding the entire New York subway system. It took me six months, but I didn't put all that much effort into it. The last three pieces:
- the 3 train between 135th and 148th
- the R between Lex and Queens Plaza
- the F train between Bay Parkway and Avenue X
When and if they reopen, I still need to get the Q between Brighton Beach and Coney Island, the F between Avenue X and Coney Island, the B/D between DeKalb and Grand Street, and the connection between the Williamsburg Bridge and the 6th Avenue line. But I figure the City Hall loop and the round-robin track between Rockaway Park and Far Rockaway make up for some of the missing pieces.
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33 miles
08/03/03
Sunset Park waterfront
Hand-lettered signs, Corona, Queens.
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Horseplay
08/02/03
The other side of this mural:
Chinatown
Madison Square Park
Gravesend, Brooklyn
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26 Things
08/01/03
This is my entry in 26 Things, a photographic scavenger hunt. You can browse through hundreds of other entries there.Please click the thumbnails for larger versions.
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Brooklyn 11
Queens 3