Best Restless 2009

Best Restless Photo Semifinals Slideshow at Flickr
Note that "Best Restless" sounds like, but would be a terrible name for, a motel chain.

Ranking & rating is an inexact science subject to attention span, mood, etc., but I forced myself to pick 5 pictures and 5 posts I published in the past year that I like a lot.  Photos from the semifinals, thumbnailed above, are in this nice Flickr slideshow.

Here are the winners:

                

Bullet Train Poem
Cooper Union Cooper Square
Queens Means Tourism
Vignette: The Middle of Something
Urban Shed Competition

While I'm at it, I guess I'll make the sleepyheads from last week my Official New Years Picture -- and hope that your new year makes your past year look like crap!

Picturing the '00s

I took up the NY Times "Documenting the Decade" challenge [ Lens ] and picked five of my photos to represent events of the '00s, and wrote a short bit about each.

My words are downbeat (as are Paul Krugman's in his excellent recap of the decade, The Big Zero) and I focus on changes visible in New York City -- but the pictures are nice, and I already published one, so there's only 4 left...

(Documenting the Decade used | these | three.)

Skies of Brooklyn Before the Luxury Flood.  Williamsburg before the luxury condos (and before the twin Maspeth Ave. gas towers, on the left here, were blown up in the summer of 2001).  A city needs not just a sense of balance, but modesty.  And Williamsburg functioned in a perfectly decent, modest way before the city sold it to developers who've built massive plastic castles for Wall Street aristocrats and SUV suburbanites.  Williamsburg did not need saving, and now it's being sterilized like the rest of NYC.

Welcome to Tycoon Island.  The luxury condo explosion has turned Manhattan into Tycoon Island.  It seems like every rich person on earth wants a penthouse aerie in NYC, and the Bloomberg administration has done its best to make them happy, so that tipsy aristocrats feel at-home whether they're in St. Tropez or on the Bowery.

Phony NYC.  NYC gets phonier every year, turning into a corporate simulation of a city.  You'd think the crush of 8 million people would be hard to tame, but you'd be wrong.  With block after block of bland condo hives rising above storefronts that only banks, cellphone outlets, and chain stores can afford -- and sidewalks furnished with condo-styled Cemusa bus shelter and newsstand ad platforms -- the organic city is being replaced by units spun from a single, simple formula.  With enough development, there soon won't be any reason to look up from the sidewalk, because everything will look the same.

Hiding Behind the Flag.  The Bush administration used the opportunity posed by 9/11 to lie its way into a needless war in Iraq, and used Reagan's cynical claim -- that a civil society can be had for free if we just unleash the market and its opportunists -- to reward the rich and give Wall Street all the freedom it needed to show Al Qaeda how professionals go about destroying the world.

Along 5th Ave

I'd noticed some ugly, newer buildings along 5th Ave. between 14th & 23rd, but somehow never looked up at the one featured in the top 3 photos here, near 15th St.  While its neighbors worry the eye with pointless subtleties of material, craftsmanship and detail, this one looks like the backside of a cinder block tenement.

I can only guess that the original design featured the most beautiful facade ever imagined, and the developer -- fearful of showing-up the neighbors -- rotated the building 180 degrees, to turn its humble ass toward the street instead.


Then below left, up at 141 5th, I don't notice the creaminess from this angle so much as the way the eye holes on top make the building look like a giant Jules Verne mechanical worm.

And below right, up past 23rd, where crowds of tourists take pictures of the Empire State or the Flatiron, I've noticed a new tourist favorite: One Madison Park blocking out the sun.  Not quite Darkness at Noon, more like 10 AM.

Corlears Hook Houses

The weathered brick and dramatic location -- on the Lower East Side just south of the Williamsburg Bridge -- give the Corlears Hook Houses a vaguely cliff-like appearance.  They were built in 1956 as cooperative housing by the ILGWU (NY Songlines).


The towers look great in the right light, from the view through to Brooklyn across the East River, above, to the notched balcony pattern, below left.  And if you have nothing better to do, you can study the stuff-collecting habits of the tenants, below right.


[ Corlears Hook Parking Lot Drawing ]
[ Reclaiming the Depraved of Corlear's Hook, NY Times, 1870 ]

Warm Snowy NYC

Above, sleepyheads in the window at Silver & Crystal Collection, on 5th Ave. near 29th.

Below left, affordable housing built in a parking space in Greenpoint.  And the same fresh snow gave Jesus a hoodie on Park Ave. South near 38th.  Note how some higher power or janitor has moved the bench since the last time I visited.

Construction High & Low

Frank Gehry's Beekman Tower grows out of Pace, above, and makes the Woolworth Building look like its "little buddy," below left.

I wonder if the Beekman will throw a shadow over City Hall?  It's so tall you can't tell what the crew's up to, way up there in the orange stratosphere.  They could be snoring on hammocks when the elevator alarm goes off, and still look busy by the time the authorities arrive.




It must be harder to lolligag at the work site at 61st and York, seen here from a few hundred feet above, on the Queensboro Bridge.

Still, if you look closely at the photo above right, you can see that a good portion of the crew is approaching its tasks with all the caution safety demands.


[ Beekman Bondage Angels ]
[ Earlier at 61st & York ]

Aughts Thought

Not Lost in Space
(A mild complaint on the '00s...)

It used to be that public space was full of people; now it's full of their exhaust as they each tunnel into private space, sealed in SUVs, circling on cellphones, or stumbling down the sidewalk, texting friends.

Cafes are just places where people park their bodies as they continue their work or home life, sharing dull intimacies and spreadsheet intricacies with everyone around them.

It's enough to make you want to lay down in a nice green public place, close your eyes, and imagine the world before everyone, everywhere, was connected all the time, and disconnected from the space their bodies inhabit.

[ Picturing the '00s ]

Holiday Picture Roundup

Above, Santa prepares to beam up to the mothership on E 60th.

Below left, a sign on Queens Blvd. just south of the LIRR tracks says SHOP in red & green.  Below right, it's not Christmas in Greenpoint until the tree lot on the corner with TWO "Got Hemorrhoids?" billboards opens, at Greenpoint & McGuinness.


Below left, a bland tree sits like a lump of coal in the heart-hole of Bloomberg HQ on E 60th.  Then below right, Trump Tower at 5th & 57th wears its tacky heart on its facade, with Casino Gift Shop clip art lights.


But Sony HQ at 56th & Madison beats them both to the bottom with the giant chrome "blister tree" it plops in its arcade every year, below left -- so ugly I won't force you to look at the whole thing -- along with a menorah that looks like a cold, methodical executive desk toy, with one toggle switch per light at the base.

Thankfully, below right, Uncle Jack (on 56th halfway between 5th & 6th) brings out the fabled Christmas Steak!  It's modeled after the one that Santa eats (along with 5 assorted pies) during the coffee breaks he takes each 15 minutes as he flies around the world.  He has to keep his weight up, after all; it wouldn't do if he looked like Mr. Burns by morning.

Bergdorf Goodman Windows 2009 4

The animals and mannequins get musical in the 57th St. windows.  A well dressed wolf tickles the keys for stark naked polar bears ...


... while albino penguins worship the black boots of hot pink rockers -- whose mic seems to have caught fire.

Around Queens Plaza

The saving grace of Queens Plaza is its crusty pink spine, which is likely too expensive to replace, so all the banners, benches and condo glass in the world won't be able to yuppify it.

Above and to the left, at least during construction, the Batman Building, aka Gotham Center, fits right in.


Meanwhile at the other end of Queens Plaza, past the NYPD cruiser keeping an eye on the Scandals strip club above right, a graffitist tells us "cash smells" (or offers cash 4 smells?), below left.  Then below right -- trying to minimize the odor of money spent -- the new budget hotels share the same design, no matter what the brand.

If this insults your refined architectural taste, just remember that if the hotels were forced to come up with a brand new design every time they put up a pile of bricks -- that's strong enough to withstand 10 floors worth of sturdy maids stomping down halls and overweight tourists bouncing on beds -- they would have to move the hotel another quarter mile out from the plaza, and the drunken 4 AM walk back from Scandals would be twice as long.


[ Queens Plaza Playaz Club ]

Hanging Off the Roosevelt Island Tram

Walking across the Queensboro Bridge early yesterday, I saw a Manhattan-bound Roosevelt Island Tram stopped dead on the cable high above the East River.  I was about to take a picture when it started moving, then continued toward the station, below left.

Then I noticed that the tram going toward the island was not only stopped, but two men were dangling off it, a few hundred feet above ground.  And they were still climbing around outside as it started moving; dark fuzzy video of it moving, at YouTube.