There is an interesting new residential building on 57th Street and the Hudson River by the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. It is a startling sight, especially in New York where so much of the architecture is pretty straight forward. It looks like this:
People leave bottles just anywhere in New York..
Would I want to live in it? I don't know. It apparently has an interior courtyard, but it is pretty much at the edge of things at the end of 57th Street.
Riverside Drive and Riverside Park never cease to amaze me. The section north of 96th Street has some beautiful old mansions on it, and eventually you get to the area around Grant's Tomb, Riverside Cathedral, which really starts to feel almost Parisian, with its green spaces and churches, etc. And ornamentation abounds.
Who was it that was buried here?
At the end at 125th Street you descend to see great views of the Riverside Viaduct, an engineering masterpiece from around 1900. At the moment it seems to have some kind of a diaper which looks like it is meant to keep parts of it from falling on the street below.
The new train station at the World Trade Center designed by Santiago Calatrava has partially opened to the public, and we went to see it. The original intention behind the design was to create a great public space. Rather than create a routine, pedestrian type of station, the idea was to create something along the lines of Grand Central Station. As in the case of many such enterprises, by the time the bureaucrats and the security people and the politicians got through with it, the design was compromised, and the costs way, way over budget. But the results are certainly exciting, if you don't think about the costs. And it will continue to cost, if they try to keep all that white clean. And there is a lot more that is yet to be finished, so I await the final version.
Some pictures:
