You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November, 2008.
I ended up at a Wikiwandering destination worth sharing: Manhattan schist.
This city is so fascinating. A curious person in New York is overwhelmed within two steps on the street. If it’s not the people, it’s just the city on its own as some fantastically practical triumph of human living. Dan touched on something I’d been thinking without articulating yet, that New York as a whole is marvelously real. It has no grand scheme, but there’s an organic efficiency as if human traffic worked as a stream carving out the city as we know it. It’s the feeling of lives intertwined by geography, even if you never know the people or see them. People live everywhere in tiny closets of apartments stacked floor after floor above delis and boutiques. In the rare pockets where people don’t live, they flock to work every day by commutes of several blocks or an hour on the train. The subway rumbles below it all.
Can you tell I love it cautiously? It will feel good to touch down on guaranteed ground, with nothing but trees living above or below or as far as I can see.
It takes about an hour on the Q train to get from Hell’s Kitchen to Coney Island at the far edge of Brooklyn. It was shockingly calm and quiet there, where only the ocean lull competes with conversation. Almost everything was closed, some of it possibly forever. While I was taking photos of the Cyclone rollercoaster, a man approached us to say we didn’t need to worry, it won’t be going anywhere. It’s a monument. He wanted us to know it would be alright, and something about new rides at Astroland.
It’s been a good year when you get to touch both oceans, from Grays Harbor to Coney Island. Nick couldn’t remember ever touching the ocean before, so I made him do it. It wasn’t even that cold. Clouds were coming in from the east while the sun set, and the bizarre lighting was somehow exactly how I imagined it.
You can’t see all the museums in New York in one week. There are lots of good ones, but they’re kind of draining both mentally and physically, not to mention expensive. If you pay $20 for a museum you feel obligated to stay all day to get your money’s worth, and there’s just too much else to see here. So in the end my museum priorities exactly corresponded with which ones have free nights, and most of those are on Fridays.
Aside from a rainy Tuesday, the weather here has been beautiful. It’s cold enough to see your breath in the evening, and today the sun came out to warm everything nicely. The various skating rinks around town recently opened and the holiday decorations show up more and more each morning. Enormous wreaths are hung with heavy-duty cables, holiday trees are going up in every square, and bundles of tiny apartment-sized trees are lined up on sidewalks awaiting homes. Musicians in the parks and subway stations are remembering the holiday repertoire.
I like Black Friday, but not for shopping. It’s a navigational challenge and character-building adventure to go brave the throngs, and what better place than the Macy’s flagship store on 34th Street? This is the view from the escalator around 11 a.m.
We checked out Madison Avenue as well, but it was pretty mellow. Amid troubling forecasts of a terrible retail season, it’s comforting to know there are still plenty of stores so elite they not only eschew sales, but aren’t even open for the day after Thanksgiving.
This is applicable since I was sort of there and it’s just something you all should know about. If you need the cultural background, it’s here.
It also gives me an excuse to mention a few other parade observations.
Whoever thought it was a good idea to thoroughly cover a tiny strip of swampy land with massive skyscrapers must have pictured a scene like this.
The Wall Street on Staten Island is not as interesting as the Manhattan one. Nick and I took the Staten Island Ferry just for fun and looked around a little when we got there. If there’s an interesting or impressive part of Staten Island, it wasn’t where we walked. They did have a pretty cool old courthouse.
This morning I got to see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade live, though like most sports events the seats at home were probably better. My photos are interesting to me, too, because the extra arm-length from holding my camera up really made a difference.
Lots of photos below.
This morning I found the new New York Times building, which is definitely no longer in Times Square but also not far from it. It’s right by Port Authority. I could almost imagine going there to work rather than to take suspicious photos.
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