Wandering New York

Part of the fun of living in New York is exploring its many different areas.   A friend recently sent me a link to a blog done by someone who decided to walk every street in Manhattan.   I would love to do that to!   In the meantime, there are always surprises and changes, good things and bad things, but always something of interest.
On a recent slightly snowy day I was walking around the World Trade Center area, hoping to walk along the river.  Unfortunately, it began snowing so hard that I needed to go inside.

Thus I was in what used to be called the Winter Garden.  It is now a very glitzy high-end shopping mall with the usual retail suspects.   They do have a nice light show, though, and a very good food market.

One major focus of interest in the area is the gigantic and expensive transit hub designed by Santiago Calatrava, which is a truly startling piece of architecture.   One part is open now, a pedestrian tunnel leading from the Brookfield Place shopping area to the world trade center area.  It is very strange, all in pure white stone (marble?).  Beautiful and very sterile at the same time.

From the outside, the transit hub is a strange apparition, especially on a snowy day when everything is white and grey (and I am tilting my camera).

Seen from inside Brookfield Place.

On another day, I went to an exhibit at the New Museum, which I will write about elsewhere.   Being in the Lower East Side, it seemed like a good day to walk across the Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn.   The bridge has a great pedestrian path, above the traffic and separated from the bicycle path.   It was a grey day, and the bridge itself is a peculiar combination of grey with pink railings and fences.   Everywhere you walk, you are surrounded by fences.

The beginning.  Not a lot of people on a cold and grey day.

Views to the side of the traffic coming in to Manhattan.

 Now I am looking through fences. Pink is everywhere.

People have drawn very long lines on the pavement. They go on for a very long time.  A conceptual art project?

A slightly different color.

Now the grey starts to take over.

Eventually, I start to get dizzy.

Near the top.

A subway goes by right next to me.

At the top, there is  place where you can stand right over the subway tracks.

The remaining building of the Domino Sugar Factory (soon to be a huge development on the Williamsburg shoreline).

Eventually, the bridge comes to an end. I've had enough pink and grey.

Constructions in Color

I have always been fascinated by construction sites, even when I know that often times I don't really like what is the intended end result, as in yet another high rise condo, etc.   To begin with, the entire process of assembling all the various components out of what appears to be a great deal of chaos is seemingly impossible to comprehend; I really don't know how they do it.    But often times I think that color is a part of what helps everyone keep things going.   I like to lurk around construction sites and look for both improbable and complex structures in color.  The photos that result are mostly abstract; I am looking for color patterns and juxtapositions of shapes and things that intrigue me.   I like the haphazard nature of all kinds of things piled together.
These were all taken on the extreme west side of Manhattan at an enormous  project called "Hudson Yards" being built on top of railroad yards.

Click on a photo for the slideshow version.

                                 

                                
                       
     

Old Photos

I recently found a large box full of negatives of photos made by my long-ago relatives, and have been scanning them.  Some of them are glass plate negatives, dating back to the nineteenth century.  Most of them are family photos, of interest only to family, but some of them had some additional appeal, so I thought I would post them.
One of the sets of photos was taken by or for my paternal grandfather, who died before I was born.  He grew up in New Jersey, but in his early 20's, around 1911, he moved to Tuttle, Colorado.  (I have no idea why he went there, but I have a suspicion that he was doing a 1911 version of "finding himself".)  He lived in a one room shack, and for some reason, there were a lot of photos taken either by him or by a local photographer.     I find the pictures to be a fascinating glimpse of what it might have been like to live out there.   My grandfather didn't stay there, and the town was abandoned some time soon after that.
From a website devoted to ghost towns:
"In a 1900 census of Kit Carson County, Tuttle had a population of about 15, including a blacksmith, postmaster, a photographer, and a novelist. Sadly, the last resident passed away the same year WWI erupted, in 1914. All that remains of this small town are some foundations of the old buildings, the ruins of the local Lutheran Church, and the all but collapsed remains of the Post Office. "

Growing up, we never knew anything about my grandfather; he had run off with another woman and was never mentioned.

Home:

 Neighbors?

Harvest?  Still life?

Inside his cabin:

My grandfather as a cowboy:

I also found lots of photographs of the kind that turn up in collections of odd family photographs:

Who is that hooded figure in the background?

 My aunt and her boyfriend:

Our dog would never put up with this!