Category: Gotham

The city that never sleeps

Dave Taft offers a splendid 24-hours sampler of the wildlife to be found within New York City, be it animal, vegetable, or fungal; native or alien invasive. He even finds something remarkable about the ickiest species on his list, Macrobdella decora:

Generally an animal no one wants to find, the American medicinal leech is attractive, as far as leeches go. Green or dark brown overall, this native leech has orange spots with a lighter belly.

The color illustrations by Matt McCann, in the online edition of this story, really pop.

Halfway down the block before realizing that you’re headed the wrong way

A simple, analog solution to SOSED (Sudden-Onset Subway Exit Disorientation): low-profile wayfinding signs on the stairway risers, designed by Ryan Murphy and documented by Vicky Gan. Much more useful than smartphone beacons, also discussed in the post: who wants to be staring at a screen when you and 1,000 of your new best friends are trying to get off the platform and into the light?

New York snaps

the viewEvery once in a while, I get a look at New York that turns me into a happy-snapping, cornfed tourist. This view of SoHo, Tribeca, and the Financial District, with 1 World Trade Center in the background, taken from the sky level of the New Museum, is one such.


can't resistCan’t resist stopping for building-mounted street name signs. Bleecker Street, just down from the intersection with Carmine Street.


retrofit?I saw dispensers in two buildings encouraging the BYO water bottle idea: at New York Law School (filling stations from Filtrine), and here at the American Museum of Natural History.

Roosevelt Island and nearby

almost from QueensI took a vacation day Monday, before my training classes midweek, to explore some offbeat places in New York. I’d never been to Roosevelt Island before, so I got that tram ticket punched. The park at the southern tip of the island was closed, but the views across the East River from just outside are just as good.

northern lightAt the northern point is a lovely, tiny lighthouse, dwarfing the Triborough Bridge in this perspective.

still a few aroundBack on the “mainland” of Manhattan, a painted advertising sign persists on 2nd Avenue. I look at the sloped lettering of PORTOVAULT and now I understand where Ben Katchor’s signs come from

In the down under

Two trip reports of illicit underground (sewers, subways, and steam tunnels) explorations of New York by Steve Duncan and Erling Kagge offer different perspectives. Jacki Lyden’s long piece for Weekend ATC is relatively straightforward, albeit with a dose of Radiolab sound effects. Alan Feuer’s diary for the New York Times, on the other hand, takes a hard left turn midway. The story turns into the story of the documentors of the project.

Wednesday, 12:15 a.m.
114 Delancey Street, Manhattan

…there are problems: the entourage has gotten too large. Everyone wants to go into the subways: me and a photographer from The Times; Jacki and an NPR producer; Andrew the videographer; even Will Hunt, the spotter. There were four of us in the sewers; now there are eight. What, I think, has happened to the intimate expedition?

Steve senses the concern and hastily announces that he, Andrew and Erling will go ahead; the rest of us can follow at a distance. I fail to see the point in exploring without the “explorers.” I confront Steve, tell him this is useless. Is this an expedition, or a media event? Disillusioned, I leave.

4:03 a.m.
West 181st Street, Manhattan

From home, I e-mail Steve and Erling: “I understand why you guys wanted to publicize this poetic adventure. … Unfortunately, the thing that wanted to be publicized was slowed down and rendered moot by the distracting number of people you brought in.” I add that it’s become impossible to describe two men on a journey when, in fact, a media army — with sound booms, cameras, video equipment — is in tow. I wish them well, offer no hard feelings.

3:32 p.m.
620 Eighth Avenue, Manhattan

An e-mail and an epiphany. The epiphany: When Ernest Shackleton went to the South Pole in the early 1900s, he himself documented the journey in a diary. Not so, in 2010, in media-soaked New York, where, it dawns on me, the crowd of chroniclers is fitting in its own way.

Another twist in Feuer’s version of the story that is more This American Life than The Gray Lady is the abrupt end to their visit with the woman known as Brooklyn, dweller in the Amtrak tunnel: B.K., her boyfriend, shows up and throws the whole lot of them out.

I’m uncomfortable with Lyden’s lack of reciprocal acknowledgment that another reporter and photographer were accompanying the urban spelunkers.

At any rate, the naturalist in me finds it interesting that one of Duncan and Kagge’s routes follows Tibbetts Brook through the Bronx, a waterway long ago confined underground by pavement.

Franzen decoded

Richard Katz has just knocked off work on a construction job on White Street, in Tribeca, on page 198 of Freedom:

Darkness had fallen. The snow had dwindled to a flurry, and the nightly nightmare of Holland Tunnel traffic had commenced. All but two of the city’s subway lines, as well as the indispensable PATH train, converged within three hundred yards of where Katz stood.

For suitable values of “three hundred yards.” If Richard is still somewhere on White Street, he can’t be both within 300 yd of the 7th Avenue IRT (under Varick Street) and also within 300 yd of the F (under Essex Street). Even if we smear Richard along all of Canal Street, he is still not that near the stations of PATH trains (which take him home to New Jersey) at World Trade Center (to the south) and Christopher Street (to the north).

But let’s be generous, and place Richard in sufficient proximity to all the lines that run in Manhattan, one way or another, south of Canal Street, leaving the L (14th Street) and the 7 (42nd Street) as the “all but two.” And we still haven’t accounted for the G: it serves New York City, just not Manhattan.

Riding the rails

When I interned in New York back in the late 1970s, my colleague/mentor Glen taught me how to ride the Long Island Rail Road in comfort. The rolling stock was fitted with five seats across, with the center aisle dividing them into a bench of three and a bench of two. Trouble was, there was really only enough room for four to sit easily. So what the two of us did, per Glen’s instructions, was to sit in the three-seat bench “and look big.”

The other thing I remember—dimly—about commuter rail in New York was the bar cars. It turns out that the tradition of alcohol service is still going strong in the New York metro, with the added assist of bar carts on or near the platforms. Michael M. Grynbaum reports on new data released by the MTA about differential tipple preferences between Metro-North and LIRR riders.

Ready for Maker Faire

Antique Trades Dept.: As A.G. Sulzberger reports, blacksmiths for New York’s parks department still hand-build hoops for the city’s basketball courts. The dare-we-say artisan rims are sturdy, and hence cost-effective.

They have survived endless rounds of slam dunks, and occasionally served as chin-up bars and, for the especially nimble, even as spectator seating. Once, the blacksmiths strung a cable around a rim inside the workshop, which they used to tow a van halfway off the ground.

Late-arriving post card from New York

Leta and I visited her cousin and various family in New York for the Thanksgiving holiday. It was a trip of initialisms: Sam explained all about TBIs; we rode the new R-160s, which are running on the Broadway line under a pilot program, which line Leta has taken to calling the NRBQ line. We found a nifty organic eatery in Brooklyn Heights called Siggy’s (Aliens eat free!); brunch with Dennis at Junior’s.

sunny daychecking the tea thingsMuseum stops for the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and the new Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea: works of art performed for the removal of physical or mental obstacles.

fadera world of pupsVarious gawping at the streetscape.