Park Central Hotel

At 7th Ave & 55th St.  Built in the late 1920s, I think the odd updates -- the modern metal panels and windows -- are what caught my eye.

Like reupholstering an old sofa in a more modern style to make it "look newer," the updating just degrades whatever dignity the original had.  But the hodgepodge surface of the building is still interesting, and rich in its way.

Note the brick arches barely peeking through the metal plates below right.


The hotel once housed luminaries like Jackie Gleason and Eleanor Roosevelt, and the mobster Albert Anastasia was murdered there.  [ via Wikipedia ]

And when I looked (in vain) for a decent photo of the arched base I stumbled on this fascinating bit of recent mayhem: 'Top Model' Chaos Erupts Outside Park Central Hotel.

7 WTC's Clear Complexion 2

Above, 7 WTC from the Manhattan Bridge on a foggy day.

Left, from 6th Ave. in the Village, a 7 WTC wannabe (the "Trump Soho") that proves a reflective surface cannot redeem crappy design.  Note how the charcoal cutout up top helps suggest an overlord gazing down on his realm.  And note 7 WTC in the distance to its left.

Below left, 7 WTC from the Williamsburg Bridge.  Below right, from Trinity Place, across the Twin Towers site.


Both below are from near City Hall Park to the east.


And finally, the shot below is from a ways up the West Side Highway.


[ 7 WTC's Clear Complexion 1 ]

The Crookedness of Queens

I'm not sure why, but the photos here -- looking toward Queens Plaza from the bridge over the LIRR to the south -- look crooked no matter what I do to straighten them out.  Above and left, to the northeast.

Below (closeup left), on the southwest side, what looks like "Cleaning Time" worn off around a missing clock on a building in front of Citicorp.


And below, the always hectic sight of traffic hurtling through the Plaza beneath the MTA tracks.

7 WTC's Clear Complexion 1

The surface and detail of a building can affect viewers in the same visceral way size and shape do.  So even a huge box like the World Trade Center's 7 WTC, above, can avoid crushing its surroundings if it has a good complexion.

Of course a reflective surface that mirrors the sky and other buildings makes that easier (and if too many buildings were reflective the city would turn into a giant light-amplifying death ray) but 7's surface is not just reflective -- it has a translucent depth that embodies the thought put into it.


An example of a thoughtless, ugly surface is right across the West Side Highway, at the World Financial Center (WFC), just above and below left.  Its surface looks like brown plastic mailing tape, and the "grand entrance" on the complex's south side, above right, should come with a warning that -- like Lot's wife leaving Sodom -- bad things will happen if you take a good look at it.  You will turn into plastic.

The WFC towers look best when light hits them at the angle below left, but still worse than the most clichéd shot of 7 WTC, below right.


Even 7 WTC's corrugated chrome looks good, below.  Note the speeding pigeons near the bottom left.


[ 7 WTC's Clear Complexion 2 ]
[ The See-Through Skyscraper, City Room ]

School Daze

From the excellent season 4 of The Wire
Sure there's the deadly recession and the wars, and the fascist harpies on FOX chanting night and day for our destruction.  But there's a whole 'nother world of problems out there too, like... education.

Obama Calls for a Sweeping Overhaul in Education Law, today's NY Times editorial hails movement toward National School Standards, at Last, and Texas conservatives are rewriting textbooks to make their battle against facts, logic, and decency sound heroic.

The way public schools churn out kids doomed to failure -- and the street corner and prison -- is the cruelest of social problems, and the most difficult to solve because school is where everything -- poverty, race, rights, religion, taxes, etc. -- hits the pavement, and because school systems are such large and complex organisms.

On a hopeful note, Building a Better Teacher unearths a few clues to the mystery of classroom success, in the hope that middling teachers can be turned into really effective ones.  Two of the article's key ideas: there's a method to maintaining order and focus in the classroom, and teachers need to not just understand the subject they're teaching, but how it might be understood (and misunderstood) by 30 young minds.

Meanwhile, Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change.  They are concerned that students will not be ignorant enough to vote for them, so they're forcing textbook publishers to extol their "philosophy," which I believe has been distilled since Reagan to the verse...

What's mine is mine
What's yours is mine
And if you don't like it
F*ck you!

...and stuff about how Republicans were 100% behind the Civil Rights movement until the Black Panthers arrived (carrying shotguns without NRA cards) and proved that Government is the Problem.

I was lucky enough to go to decent public schools.  I had issues, misunderstood all kinds of stuff, and didn't take advantage of school the way I should have, but I remember some great teachers (and even administrators, like the grade school principal who rescued me from multiplication table failure, so I now have the ability to understand... just how financially screwed I am right now).

I've said before that I think a lot of the meaning of life has to do with what you pass along and, as one of the researchers profiled by Building a Better Teacher says, "You could change the world with a [great] first-year teacher."

Frigid Fingers Plus Parking Mystery

Now that the weather's hinting at spring, some snow photos from 2 weeks ago.  Above, the frigid fingers of Madame Tussauds on 42nd.

Below left, snow cuffs on garbage cans at Herald Square.

And below right, one of those mysteries I shouldn't waste time on, but: Here we have an SUV parked overnight at an exclusive spot in the middle of Broadway, a few blocks below 42nd, under a sign that says "No Standing Anytime except vehicles with NYP plates."  Apparently NYP plates are press plates, and the SUV plates do have an NYP, but from Pennsylvania.


Meanwhile, below left, the red & white Williamsburg Bridge -- pocked with the tags that serve as banner ads of the Outernet -- looks like Santa with tattoos.  And from the looks of the bridge's mini high-ranger, below right, tagger elves have been more busy than usual, eating away at the solid of surface of reality, like wolves pissing on ice.