In New York City, even two words can set off an intriguing exploration. An old guidebook I was perusing cited a “private street” on the far eastern side of Manhattan, where Midtown meets the Upper East Side, at Sutton Place. A private street in this city filled with hundreds of public streets? Yes, it’s a […]
Entries Tagged as 'new york'
Transported Back at 20 Exchange Place
May 14th, 2010 · 11 Comments · Explore New York
Buildings are like stories, marked by scenery, time and place, and plot. They often have a rise and decline, and maybe a rise again. Buildings evoke an era, and characters conceive, design, build, and inhabit them. Like the times when we read only a few pages or a chapter of a story, we may see […]
New York Places of Women Trailblazers
March 22nd, 2010 · 1 Comment · Be a Mindful Activist, Explore New York
Traveling in a horse-drawn buggy in the 1880s, Alice Austen carried cameras, a tripod, huge glass plates to record images, and other camera equipment with her so that she could photograph scenes on Staten Island. Sometimes the equipment weighed as much as 50 pounds. During the following decade, Austen ventured farther into New York City […]
Tags: architecture·Brooklyn·manhattan·new york·staten island·women
NYC’s Great Sunset Spots: Gantry Plaza
January 23rd, 2010 · 8 Comments · Explore New York
Many associate the term “big sky” with America’s West, Montana especially, where you can stand in the middle of a vast, unspoiled land, breathe deeply, and take in the wide-open sky. Who would think of New York City in this context? Believe it or not, New Yorkers have their own places to search out “big […]
Seven Joys Amid NYC’s Holiday Mayhem
December 22nd, 2009 · 7 Comments · Explore New York
“Children laughing, people passing, meeting smile after smile”…so go the lyrics of “Silver Bells,” the classic Christmas song from the 1950s that paints an idyllic scene of the holidays in the city. This picture of New York City at the holidays lives within many of us. Its images are of softly falling snow, carolers, bright […]
Lamartine Place: Saved for Posterity
October 16th, 2009 · 8 Comments · Explore New York
One hundred years from now, most of those who walk on West 29th Street in Manhattan may not know what Fern Luskin, Julie Finch, and a small group of local citizens did to preserve the block between Eighth and Ninth avenues. But in all likelihood they will see, largely intact, the mid-19th century row houses […]
Tags: architecture·historic preservation·landmarks·new york·women
Summer Day’s Meditation at the Ashokan
August 25th, 2009 · 4 Comments · Beyond Gotham
It’s the very essence of calm, a still surface of blue-silver water reflecting billowy cumulus clouds above. Large shafts of light pour down through the clouds at angles on the shoreline, creating swaths of light-green trees in the middle of darker pines and bejeweled light on the water. On a 90-degree humid day, I can […]
Taking In the Subway’s Old Powerhouse
August 10th, 2009 · 4 Comments · Be a Mindful Activist, Explore New York
It was on the perimeter of a legendary slum that back then fit its name, Hell’s Kitchen. Yet it was conceived and designed by men in suits who believed that fine, grand civic buildings served to reflect the great accomplishments and ambitious aims of a city crossing a threshold. The Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) […]
Tags: architecture·cities·historic preservation·manhattan·midtown·new york·terra cotta
The Glories of New York’s Stoopscapes
July 27th, 2009 · 2 Comments · Explore New York
Like other city dwellers, New Yorkers follow the progress of the days and seasons on the details of the buildings and structures around them, from the rosy-pink and golden light of dusk upon the brick and stone to the melting of snow on window sills or the glint and angle of sunrise caught between two […]
Tags: architecture·art·historic preservation·museums·new york
New York’s Great Sunset Spots: Pier 84
July 17th, 2009 · 4 Comments · Explore New York
Several children splash through the dancing waters of an interactive fountain, a guitarist plays at P.D. O’Hurley’s bar, a woman points out a gargoyle in the flower garden to her toddler daughter, and dogs and humans socialize at the dog run. A man lies on a landing, with his khaki-dressed legs draping over the steps, […]
A Summer Walk at the Irish Memorial
July 10th, 2009 · 3 Comments · Explore New York
“Could it be possible that a landscape might have a deep friendship with you? That it could sense your presence and feel the care you extend towards it?” John O’Donohue Beauty: The Invisible Embrace If we are blessed with such kinship, then the Irish Hunger Memorial is a place of its embrace. This small. lush […]
Tags: landscape architecture·manhattan·meditations·nature·new york·spiritual places·stone
Teach-In Set at Underground RR House
May 26th, 2009 · 2 Comments · Explore New York
In the mid-19th century, runaway slaves found protection in an Underground Railroad “safe house” on West 29th Street in New York, as they fled northward to freedom. A century and a half later, a group of Bronx high school students plan to take a journey of their own in defense of this house. The students, […]
Tags: architecture·historic preservation·landmarks·manhattan·midtown·new york·women
Sparks Over an Underground Railroad Site
May 11th, 2009 · 2 Comments · Explore New York
Is the architectural and historical integrity of a New York City mid-19th century row house that served as a “safe house” for the Underground Railroad during the Civil War being imperiled again? Neighbors and local historic preservationists certainly believe so, and they’re again fighting to stop construction at the Hopper-Gibbons House, at 339 W. 29th […]
Tags: architecture·historic preservation·landmarks·new york·women
Thirty-Minute Tour: Bowling Green
May 3rd, 2009 · 2 Comments · Explore New York
Stand in Bowling Green Park in New York City and look around at the park and the buildings on its perimeter. At one time or another over the centuries here, Native American tribes gathered in council, men and women bought tickets for ocean passage in a couple of the nearby buildings, and John D. Rockefeller […]
Earth Day in New York: 1970 and 2009
April 22nd, 2009 · 6 Comments · Explore New York
John Lindsay was mayor of New York. It was the spring of 1970, when the United States was bogged down in a far-off land in the Vietnam War and divided at home, labor strikes roiled the country, and the Beatles officially broke up. On April 22, 1970, 39 years ago, a spirit of passion, anger, […]
Tags: green energy·nature·new york
Springtime at the Irish Hunger Memorial
April 15th, 2009 · 1 Comment · Explore New York
New York City may seem like a curious place to go looking to see gorse, the small shrub that thrives in rural fields and along hillsides, its yellow flowers rippling across the countryside in spring. But there’s at least one sure place I’ve enjoyed the sight of it in New York – the Irish Hunger […]
Tags: landscape architecture·manhattan·nature·new york·spiritual places
The Place That Powered the Subway Lines
March 29th, 2009 · 4 Comments · Explore New York
Its architecture and ornate decoration reflect the City Beautiful movement, in which public buildings were expressions of a city’s beauty, order, and harmony. Yet it had a belly-of-the-beast interior containing massive boilers, conveyors, engines, steam pipes, and seven bunkers capable of holding up to 18,000 tons of coal. The Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) Company Powerhouse […]
Tags: architecture·cities·historic preservation·manhattan·midtown·new york·terra cotta
Wanna Buy an Art Deco Gem? Ask AIG
March 20th, 2009 · 11 Comments · Explore New York
When corporate kingdoms fall, they often lose their castles. That may well be the case with AIG. The bailout-dependent conglomerate that has made “bonus rage” a media catchphrase said Wednesday that it’s considering the sale of its legendary 66-story headquarters at 70 Pine Street in Lower Manhattan, Bloomberg confirmed. Like other assets that the American […]
Coney Island’s Off-Season Vibe
March 8th, 2009 · 3 Comments · Explore New York
Scrawled on the cornice of a dilapidated building on Coney Island’s Surf Avenue is “Shore Hotel. Nature’s Paradise By the Sea.” But paradise this isn’t. On Coney Island’s main thoroughfare, it sits in the midst of a mish-mash of garish-colored patches of buildings, “Stores for Lease” signs, boarded-up windows, and neon that heralds “Eldorado Auto […]
Tags: Brooklyn·cities·Coney Island·new york
Whose Dreams Will Revive Coney Island?
February 27th, 2009 · 81 Comments · Be a Mindful Activist, Explore New York
Say the words “Coney Island” to New Yorkers, especially of a certain age, and you may well get a dreamy kind of pause and a vivid memory: feeling the sensation of a drop on the Cyclone roller coaster, seeing the steel top on the gigantic Parachute Jump from the distance, riding the fast Steeplechase horses, […]
