Wandering in New York, Fall 2017 Part 1

Here are some photos from my wanderings around New York City.
 
I was recently at the Whitney Museum, and looking at a show of selected paintings from their collection.  There was a painting entitled "Pittsburgh" by Elsie Driggs of the smokestacks of a steel plant.

According to the caption, Driggs said about this painting  "This shouldn't be beautiful.  But it is."    So she painted it.

Sometimes I feel the same way when I take pictures.

Below are pictures from assorted wanderings, mostly in Brooklyn and Queens.   I am still fascinated by the pace of change in the New York cityscape, where desolate and abandoned industrial buildings abut shiny new residential buildings.  

I was walking by the Gowanus Canal on a grey day when I came across this alarming vision.   I know the the canal is an EPA superfund site, and that it is supposedly being cleaned up, but these images show some kind of horrible pollution which is happening now.    Perhaps the polluters know that they have a friend at the EPA?  In retrospect, I should have called someone in the city government.

Red, yellow, and blue in the midst of the sickly green:

The photographer Lee Friedlander has a new book out with photographs with chain link fences.  I like them, too.

A sunny day in Long Island City, with wonderful late afternoon winter light.

These are in fact used mufflers, stacked up against a fence corner.

There is something contradictory in this picture:

Back in Manhattan:

Demolition:

Yet another demolition site:

Light on walls with old signs:

Around the Hudson Yards construction site:

This is part of the construction site for the Culture Shed, a new arts center:

Part of the High Line:

Back to Long Island City and Williamsburg:

Under the Williamsburg Bridge: