From Brooklyn Bridge 2

A few more shots from the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge.  Above and below right, around the Gehry tower.


West past City Hall, above left, and past the Verizon building to the Municipal Building, below.

From Brooklyn Bridge

From near the Manhattan end of the bridge, above, downtown is a brutal wall of ugly.  There are still a few appealing towers in there from the '40s aerial shot to the left, where the tallest buildings were slender as the Woolworth Building.

But I found just one newer building I like, below left.  The rest are fat boxes featuring schlock color or clumsy patterns, that manage to make whatever they're made of look cheap and artificial.


There's more visual interest created, unintentionally, in canyons between humbler buildings, like above right.  And as much as the I dislike the crooked Global Elite / Wall Street money that made Gehry's tower possible, I'd rather look at it and the buildings around it, below, than further downtown.

Manhattan Bridge View

Above, downtown looks squeezed, with Gehry's wavy tower on the left and the curvaceous Chatham Green Houses below it, expanding toward the tanks and towers on the right.


Above left, the Gehry tower throws a big shadow on the Woolworth Building.  Above right, work goes on under the Brooklyn tower of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the white curtains outside the chutes I visited earlier hang along the middle of the bridge.

And below, the Gehry tower looks puny enough to be a muffler on the HVAC unit on top of a building on the Brooklyn end of the bridge.

Building Bridges

Some bridges between buildings.  Above, on 24th St. between Madison and Park Ave. South.

Below left, in the middle of the Manhattan Detention Complex, aka The Tombs, on Centre St. downtown.  Below right, above 15th St. near 10th Ave.


And below, my favorite, formerly bridging parts of Gimbels flagship store, above 32nd St. between 6th & 7th Aves. near Penn Station.

Brooklyn Bridge Chutes

Corrugated metal chutes have been installed on parts of the Brooklyn Bridge for maintenance work.  Above, tourists shoot photos above the car chute.

Below left, out past the wall and curtain, the Watchtower complex looks like an old beach resort.


Above right and below, (bikes shoot through) the pedestrian chute.

Across the Manhattan Bridge 3

Above: The Woolworth Building and Manhattan Municipal Building in the distance.


Above left, looking over the red building's other shoulder.  Above right, Henry St., with vertical signs lined up like teeth.


Above left, one of my favorite pictures of the red building.  Above right, looking down busy East Broadway.


Near the end of the bridge walkway, above left, the graceful curve of a highrise off Division; seeing the ropes makes me wonder how window washers feel about dangling a few hundred feet up against a curve.

And above right, heading uptown on Elizabeth St., the Chapel of San Calogero.  When I looked in the open doorway, there was a man sitting at a table in a small, worn vestibule, all of it looking like it's sat there unchanged since maybe 1910.  I will leave it to a real reporter to find out if the "chapel" is just what you see in the window, or a magnificent religious chamber (or social club?) beyond the vestibule.

Queensboro Bridge Revisited 1

I'm not sure why, but both entrances to Queens nearest me are visual wonderlands.  Here I make another visit to the Queensboro Bridge.

Lee Lee Go Pee Pee

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as ...

It's heartening to see a tagger take that first step toward poetry -- especially with such well-formed script -- but I'm still upset the Williamsburg Bridge maintenance crew saw fit to erase the Chance Mexico Map above (before left, after right) but preserve lee lee go pee pee, right.

I'd like to thank TV, the Internet, and the Academy for the gutter I find myself swimming.

Titillation and humiliation rule Culture, and I am just a lowly entertainer, a spastic dervish clown dancing for your pleasure, spinning faster and faster, turning redder and redder, slipping and flopping but never stopping.

Forget the tree falling in a forest; do I exist when you stop looking at me?

Middle of Nowhere, Queens

Continuing my walk across Nowhere, some sights from 58th St. as it runs north out of Maspeth in Queens.

First up, above, an inscrutable security system on a building in deserted (weekend) Maspeth.


Above left, a scene out of any flat place in the U.S. (though I believe that is the backside of beleaguered St. Saviour's over there).  Across the tracks, above right, the backside of the Clinton Diner, looking greasy enough to give Bill pause.



Above, the distinctive Petro Cube; I regret I've never been by at night to see if it lights up.  To the left, just down the block, an equally cryptic antenna complex.

To the right, the sad view of Mt. Zion Cemetery nearly squashed under the Long Island Expressway.

The monuments below are in Mt. Zion; the one on the left was "erected in memory of the victims of the town of Bobrka, Galicia, slain by the barbarian hordes of Nazi Germany during World War II."