Manhattan

November 9, 2015

Would We Call That A Cowgoyle?

Good luck all around: I got to spend a week in New York and the weather was mostly beautiful. I must have walked 100 miles!

Headed south along the Hudson River in midtown, New Jersey looked picturesque:

2015-11-01 13.34.44

In Manhattan I’ve always got tourist neck from walking with my head thrown back to take in the architecture. New York’s buildings of a certain age are loaded with decorative frills such as carvings, cornices, balustrades. (I’m confident I know what one of those words means.) There is even the occasional gargoyle.

2015-11-01 15.30.51

On my walk along the Hudson, I discovered a yard for old building decor. Mammoth stone pieces lay scattered behind chicken wire fence.

2015-11-01 13.50.18

There was even a cow’s head. Or, apparently, two.

2015-11-01 13.49.57

Such pieces were built to last, so I couldn’t tell how long they’d been sitting there.

Certainly, there was a whole lotta building going on nearby.

2015-11-01 14.38.57

I’m hoping the decor yard is a storeyard, not a junkyard. But it’s been a long time since construction trends in the U.S. favored such ornamentation.

Perhaps the pieces can be repurposed in a cemetery with really large mausoleums.

(The WP Photo Challenge was Ornate.)

Advertisement
November 30, 2014

Phototravelog: Williamsburg Bridge Walk

The Williamsburg bridge connects Brooklyn with Manhattan and is a marvelous application of Erector Set construction principles:

2014-10-09 17.32.26

My latest trip to New York, I walked the Williamsburg bridge on a dark but lovely afternoon. To my left, I saw its more famous cousin, the Brooklyn bridge, along with the Manhattan skyline:

2014-10-09 17.34.32

On the Williamsburg bridge, the pedestrian walkway is a cage. The human eye quickly adjusts to this and ignores the bars, enjoying the view beyond. My phone camera, however, ignored the bars only in the few places where I could position the camera smack next to the grid, lens between bars:

2014-10-09 17.27.49

Even when the cage is not prominent, the view is cluttered, which adds a distinctive industrial beauty:

2014-10-09 17.28.16

2014-10-09 17.34.13

Pedestrians walk above cars here:

2014-10-09 17.50.54

And alongside trains!:

2014-10-09 17.29.48

It turns out the subway is not just subterranean. Here are two trains passing, bread-‘n’-butter, in opposite directions:

2014-10-09 17.41.02

This video almost catches a train exchange. Behind the trains, note some reasons not to drive:

I think I remember reading that a public art project made some pink decisions:

2014-10-09 17.38.27

The public art continues to evolve:

2014-10-09 17.55.59

2014-10-09 17.32.44

Underfoot I found my favorite:

2014-10-09 18.00.03

On the Williamsburg bridge, even the eroding asphalt paint looks good:

2014-10-09 17.59.12

(The WP Weekly Photo Challenge was Angular.)

September 29, 2014

Easy Glitter

2014-09-28 21.05.15Can you guess what this is? (To learn whether you guessed right, keep reading.)

Nighttime has always been my special time. For years, I complained that I was a night owl trapped in an early-bird world, until I got tired of hearing myself complain about it. My natural clock wants me up until 3a every night, but that never jived with the schedules of my jobs or my kids’ schools, and over the years I’ve been ruined by those demands. Given half a chance, I still stay up way too late – but I am now incapable of sleeping past 7a, no matter how late I go to sleep. No fair.

Actually, nowadays I get up at 4a, to work on the sequel to Nica of Los Angeles before I go to exercise class and start trying to outrun the steamroller that is my day. I was surprised at how quickly I adapted to this horrific new alarm clock time, and how much I love writing that early in the morning. Then it hit me – getting up at 4a is almost as good as staying up until then! Maybe better, because I’m fresher to enjoy the spooky magic of darkness.

One thing I like about nighttime is how often it lets me take cool photographs in dim light, provided all I want to shoot are the lights themselves…

I love this shot across the East River from Manhattan to Queens, as seen through the rooftop bar of a skyscraper. The cluster of lights at bottom are the candle at my table, reflected in the window.

hotelbarview

This next shot makes me think of water in moonlight. But it – like the teaser photo at the top of the post (did you guess right?) – are reflections of lights on a glass table on my patio:

2014-09-28 21.04.13

The table was reflecting these lights. (For the reality mongers out there, it was the camera and not my patio that was tilted.):

2014-09-28 21.03.19

(The WP Weekly Photo Challenge topic is Nighttime.)

July 15, 2013

Manhattan, Very Early

Last year I got to take my kids to New York for a few days. Our return flight was early one morning. I love this shot of my son – up way before his body clock would usually allow – taking in his last views of Manhattan before we departed. We were almost the only ones up…

Goodbye, New York.

Goodbye, New York.

Another crack-o’-dawn morning on the trip, my daughter and I walked out to the East River to watch the sun rise. That’s my daughter huddled on the side of the photo – it was colder than we had anticipated.

OK, we saw the sunrise, now let's go back to bed.

OK, we saw the sunrise, now let’s go back to bed.

(Posted for the latest Weekly Photo Challenge.)