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Photographer Jesse Chan-Norris caught the aftermath of an attempted murder in Manhattan this morning. From his Flickr page:
At 5:40am I was jolted out of sleep by a noise. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. I raced outside, I looked down, I saw the black car with its door open. I saw another car next to it. I saw the body in the middle of the street. I stood. I gawked.
The entire collection of Kim’s Video in the East Village, all 55,000+ hard-to-find films, is now headed to a formerly abandoned town in Italy that is now run entirely by artists.
In a notice pasted on a wall inside the front door [of his video store], he wrote, “We hope to find a sponsor who can make this collection available to those who have loved Kim’s over the past two decades.” He promised to donate all the films without charge to anyone who would meet three conditions: Keep the collection intact, continue to update it and make it accessible to Kim’s members and others.
(thx, cliff)
Gothamist reports that a small memorial service was held for beloved NYC veggie peeler salesman Joe Ades on Saturday afternoon in Union Square.
As an answer to questions of how Joe’s legacy of unique salesmanship would be carried on, Ruth answered “My father always told me that my inheritance would be forty cartons of peelers, and it was. He left them all to me. I’m going to go home and practice on some potatoes, and then come out to his old spot on 17th and Union Square West and show all of you.”
His children also said that two days before he died, Joe received his US Citizenship.
In Rockefeller Center Ho!, published in the Talk of the Town section of the Feb 11, 1956 issue of the New Yorker, John Updike described the discovery of a path from the Empire State Building to Rockefeller Center that didn’t make use of 5th or 6th Avenues. Instead he cut through building lobbies, parking lots, and underground passages on his way through the thicket of Midtown’s tall buildings.
Recently a pair of New Yorker staffers set out to discover if Updike’s journey could still be made and brought back photographic evidence.
A stingy parking attendant refused to let us pass through his gate to Fortieth Street. Faced with no other option, we offered to pay the half-hour fee to park a car; his bemused manager finally let us through without charge.
Many who work in Midtown use shortcuts like these on especially cold days (like today) to minimize the time spent outside while walking from the train or bus. I only worked up there for a couple of years, but I still learned a cut-through trick or two.
Mayor Bloomberg held a press conference today to address the mysterious maple syrup smell sporadically experienced by New Yorkers since 2005. The cause? Fenugreek seeds.
The source of the odor was a plant in North Bergen, N.J., which processes seeds of the herb fenugreek to produce fragrances.
Update: Gothamist has more details.
NY Times food critic Frank Bruni notes that in this down economy, it’s easier to get reservations and deals at even the hottest restaurants as they struggle to remain profitable. And the service is less haughty.
“The attitude that a number of places used to have, they don’t have that anymore,” Ms. Rappoport said, her tone of voice communicating equal measures bewilderment and relief. “That attitude of ‘we’re doing you a favor,’ that frosty condescending attitude — I don’t find that anymore. And I’ve experienced that change over and over again.” Servers, she said, make double- and triple-sure that her table has everything it needs. Managers circle back to the table more often than ever to ask, with new urgency, if everything’s O.K.
For opportunistic diners, there are at least three big advantages to this trend.
1. Great food at relatively reasonable prices.
2. Dining opportunities at great but previously unavailable restaurants at good times.
3. The chance to become a highly valued regular at your favorite restaurant. If they’re doing things right and you support them when times are tough (visit often, tip well, etc.), they’ll gratefully reward you in better times with reservations at prime times, VIP treatment, and dishes “courtesy of the chef”.
Joe Ades, the gentleman vegetable peeler salesman familiar to all who roamed the streets of Manhattan, died on Sunday. He was 75.
Ms. Laurent said she sometimes went to look for him at the end of the day, but he would have packed up and left after selling out. She could tell where he had been. “He cleaned up really well,” she said, “but still there were these little shreds of carrots that said, ‘I was here.’”
Ades was such a fixture on the streets of New York that it never occurred to me that one day he might not be there. :( David Galbraith posted a tribute and correction to the Times piece.
None of this myth busting denigrates the fact that Ades was a charming and charismatic New York character. But if, in future, Ades is remembered as an aristocratic, fancy suited, upper-class English dandy that hawked vegetable peelers as an ironic hobby, that would be wrong and actually less interesting.
(thx, david)
Christoph Niemann makes New York things out of Legos. Fresh pepper and Greenpoint are my faves.
A bill sponsored by Council Member David Yassky would legalize beekeeping in NYC for license holders. David Graves must be tickled.
Peter Stuyvesant was the director-general of the New Netherlands colony from 1647 to 1664, when the Dutch lost it to the British and New Amsterdam became New York. When Stuyvesant arrived in New Amsterdam, he brought a pear tree with him and planted it on his farm, which encompassed much of what is now the East Village. After a trip to Amsterdam following the English takeover of the colony, Stuyvesant returned to his farm in New York, where he lived until his death in 1672.
His pear tree persevered. As Manhattan’s grid sprang up around it, the tree remained bearing fruit on the corner of 13th Street and 3rd Avenue. Here’s a stereoscopic photo of the tree from the 1860s.
In 1867, over 200 years after the tree was planted, the last known living link to the Dutch rule of Manhattan was felled by a vehicle collision. The NY Times ran a short piece about the death of the tree: Untimely End of the Stuyvesant Pear-Tree.
The well-known pear-tree planted by Gov. Stuyvesant, and which has stood for two centuries, came at last to a sudden demise during the latter part of last week. This old and famous tree stood on the corner of Thirteenth-street and Third-avenue, in a circular enclosure of iron railing, erected, we believe, by Mr. Wainwright, a descendant of the old Dutch Governor. It had its traditions, though it was less renowned than the famous Charter Oak of Connecticut, but like that old tree, it had been made the subject of many a sketch. Its decay was marked year by year in the declining average of its blossoms, but it was not considered beyond bearing before the occurrence of an accident which cleft the ancient trunk in twain. The destruction of this old landmark is stated to have resulted from a collision of vehicles, one of which was thrown against the tree with sufficient force to break it down. Laborers were engaged in removing the limbs and trunk yesterday, which were proclaimed obstructions to travel.
I found one of those many sketches in a book called History of the School of the Collegiate Reformed Dutch Church in the City of New York, from 1633 to 1883.
A plaque now marks the corner where the tree stood and in 2003, a new pear tree was planted in the same spot, hopefully to live for another 200 years.
N.B. From what I can tell from my research, the plaque may be wrong about the date that the tree was planted. It states that Stuyvesant brought the tree back with him after the English took control of New Amsterdam in 1664 whereas most other sources on the matter indicate that Stuyvesant brought the tree with him when he came to assume control of the colony in 1647.
A short piece in the Times about NYC newcomers.
Newcomers suddenly realize either that the city is not working for them or that they are inexorably becoming part of it, or both. They find themselves walking and talking faster.
The subway begins to make sense. Patience is whittled away; sarcasm often ensues. New friends are made, routines established, and city life begins to feel like second nature. In other words, newcomers find themselves becoming New Yorkers.
The BBC did a flight simulation of US Airways flight 1549 that shows what the water approach looked like from the cockpit. (thx, david)
I’m still fascinated by the water landing of US Airways flight 1549 on the Hudson River late last week. Here are a few more things I’ve seen related to it over the last couple of days.
First the videos. Someone visiting the Bronx Zoo caught the plane on video, flying low in the sky just after the bird strike. A Coast Guard video monitoring station got a shot of the plane just after it splashed down…you can see the spray from the impact flying in from the left of the video just after the 2:00 mark.
Soon after the plane hits, the camera zooms in and you can see just how quickly people get out and onto the wings. And then this video shows it most clearly:
Look how low and level and steady Sully guided that thing in! Amazing!
The NY Times has a couple of good pieces in their extensive crash coverage. I loved reading what various passengers had to say about the crash, lots of little moments of heroism in there.
The life raft attached to the plane was upside down in the river, just out of reach. Mr. Wentzell turned and found another passenger, Carl Bazarian, an investment banker from Florida who, at 62, was twice his age. Mr. Wentzell grabbed the wrist of Mr. Bazarian, who grabbed a third man who held onto the plane. Mr. Wentzell then leaned out to flip the raft. “Carl was Iron Man that day,” Mr. Wentzell said. “We got the raft stabilized and we got on.” A man went into the water, and the door salesman and the banker hauled him aboard. He curled in a fetal position, freezing.
The Times also comes through with the 3-D flight graphic I asked for the other day but they upped the ante with a seating chart of the plane where you can click on certain passengers’ seats to read their thoughts. Mark Hood in seat 2A described the landing:
When we touched down, it was like a log ride at Six Flags. It was that smooth.
The whole thing is still so amazing. Looking at the underside of the plane as they lifted it from the water last night, you can see the damage to the bottom of the plane and just how close they all were to being flung all over the place or sinking quickly or a number of other different outcomes.
Now available for sale on CafePress in men’s and women’s sizes:
The mayor gave Sully the key to the city for landing the airplane safely into the Hudson River but surely he deserves more…like a job in the Obama administration as the Secretary of Transportation (no offense to Mr. LaHood).
A comment via email from my dad, himself a pilot, about yesterday’s Hudson River plane crash:
This pilot ran out of altitude and airspeed but not ideas. He did a great job of flying, and as a CAPTAIN, he has shown why he wears the four bars!!!
This is an example of quiet professionalism, training, skill, and bravery. Our craft usually goes unnoticed many times a day, but today, we saw our best work!!!
I remember once going to collect my dad after he’d landed his plane in a farmer’s field in an emergency. Of course, it was a much smaller plane — they’re a lot easier to land without engines and glide well. That and he was accustomed to landing amongst the corn and hay…we had a grass strip cut out of the field behind our house that he used all the time.
A US Airways plane bound for Charlotte just crashed into the Hudson River after aborting its takeoff from LaGuardia Airport. It’s still sitting in the river, slowly sinking with people standing on the wings being rescued by ferries. Photos on Flickr.
Update: Ferry rescue swarm. Very close-up photo of people standing on the wings waiting for rescue by Janis Krums.
Update: Here’s a screenshot from a flight tracker showing the altitude of the flight….1800, 2800, 3200, 2000, 1600, 1200, 1300, 400, 300… The flight tracker has since taken the data offline.
Update: Reports are that everyone is OK. !!! Here’s a nautical chart of the area in question showing the dept to be around 50 feet.
Update: Some media coverage at NY Times, CNN, and Gothamist. From the CNN article:
The plane approached the water at a gradual angle and made a big splash, according to a witness watching from an office building. “It wasn’t going particularly fast. It was a slow contact with the water that it made,” said the witness, Ben Vonklemperer. “It appeared not to have landing gear engaged. This was bigger than a puddle-jumper or sea plane. It was a silver aircraft and it basically just hit the water,” Vonklemperer added.
Update: They’re saying it’s a bird strike…sounds like a bird got sucked into an engine? Here’s another photo of people standing on the wings, waiting for rescue.
Update: Looks like they got everyone off and that the plane is sitting quite a bit lower in the water.
Gothamist reports that the plane is being towed to Chelsea Piers.
Update: The NY Times has this helpful map:
Also, an office mate (from Buzzfeed) just got back from checking out the plane and he said by the time he got to the river, the plane had past Christopher St. and when he left, it was pretty close to Canal St. and “moving amazingly fast”. (thx, scott)
Update: Another Flickr set of the plane floating in the river.
Update: Maybe this is what the crash looked like?
Wikipedia notes that water landings where everyone survives aren’t all that unusual, although this seems like a larger plane than most of the others noted.
In 1963, an Aeroflot Tupolev 124 ditched into the River Neva after running out of fuel. The aircraft floated and was towed to shore by a tugboat which it had nearly hit as it came down on the water. The tug rushed to the floating aircraft and pulled it with its passengers near to the shore where the passengers disembarked onto the tug; all 52 on board escaped without injuries. Survival rate was 100%
The flight details on FlightAware are back up. (thx, jesse)
Update: Here’s a brief video of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 which crashed in the Indian Ocean after being hijacked and running out of fuel.
125 out of 175 passengers died.
Update: On the always-timely MetaFilter, a bird strike researcher has some interesting things to say.
The first recorded birdstrike happened in 1908 to Orville Wright, no more than a few months after the first powered planeflights.
Surely years and not months… (thx, mike)
A live shot on the TV just now (6:00pm) reveals that the plane is now down at the Battery and they look like they’re trying to secure it or haul it out of the water (likely the former).
Update: A blogger at i’m not sayin, i’m just sayin mapped the plane’s location leading up to the crash using the info from FlightAware. Does anyone want to bang out a quick 3-D version in Google Earth that shows altitude as well?
Here are a pair of articles from 2002 on street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, who currently plys his trade for the NY Times. (I love Cunningham’s On the Street dispatches.) The first is Bill on Bill, where the photographer recalls how he got interested in fashion and photography.
As a kid, I photographed people at ski resorts — you know, when you got on the snow train and went up to New Hampshire. And I did parties. I worked as a stock boy at Bonwit Teller in Boston, where my family lived, and there was a very interesting woman, an executive, at Bonwit’s. She was sensitive and aware, and she said, “I see you outside at lunchtime watching people.” And I said, “Oh, yeah, that’s my hobby.” She said, “If you think what they’re wearing is wrong, why don’t you redo them in your mind’s eye.” That was really the first professional direction I received.
The second article is a collection of recollections of Cunningham from some of the people he has photographed.
He taught me how to tell a story with pictures and that it didn’t always involve the best image. I’d say to him, “But isn’t this a better photo?” And he’d say, “Yes, child, but this photo tells the story better.” For him, it wasn’t about the aesthetics of photography. It was about storytelling.
Both articles mention that Cunningham got his first street photography into the Times when he shot a photo of the famously reclusive Greta Garbo walking on Fifth Avenue. I couldn’t find Cunningham’s Garbo photo anywhere online so I tracked down the Times article and found only this poor scan:
Here’s another shot Cunningham made that same day which didn’t end up in the paper (Garbo’s got her hand over her face). Interestingly, street photos of Garbo were not particularly rare. Here are a selection from the 1980s, including several that feature Garbo in similar clothing. Many of them were taken by creepy paparazzo Ted Leyson, who stalked Garbo for more than 10 years in NYC. Leyson took what is believed to be the last photo of Garbo before she died in 1990.
Even in Manhattan, abandoned buildings can still be found. Jake Dobkin took some photos of an abandoned school in Harlem.
This building looked like it had been empty for twenty years. Trees were growing out of the floors and poking out of dozens of holes in the roof. All the windows were gone, and the floors that weren’t covered with snow were thick with dust and the skeletons of dead pigeons. There wasn’t any evidence of human habitation — no footprints, homeless encampments, or graffiti.
He also found an abandoned ballroom, also in Harlem.
Update: Whoops, looks like Bluejake got swamped. I removed the links so the server can recover…here are the photos on Flickr instead.
Jauntsetter does a useful weekly roundup of travels deals specifically for New Yorkers. This week’s selection includes cheap fares to Cancun and Europe.
The Danziger Projects gallery in New York is running an exhibition called Can & Did, a collection of art, graphics, and photography from the Obama campaign. The opening party is on Inauguration night (Jan 20) and it runs through the end of February. All details in the press release.
A fifteen-year old foodie used some of the money from his summer job to go dine solo at Per Se. In an attempt to secure the hard-to-get reservation, he asked to be excused from his classroom and dialed the reservations line while hiding in the bathroom.
It was September 29th; exactly two months from the Saturday of Thanksgiving break and one of the few times I would be able to make the trek up to New York to dine at Per Se. I would have to call to make the reservation at Per Se at exactly 10 A.M today if I had any hope of getting that Saturday reservation. The only problem? I had school.
I sat patiently in my 9:30 - 10:25 science class as the clock neared 10. Very strategically, at exactly 9:57, I innocently asked to use the bathroom. I walked, no sprinted to the bathroom down the hall. I scrolled down my contact list until I reached Per Se, then dialed, and waited…
A beautiful heart-shaped map of the NYC subway system is among the several such maps done by a pair of Korean graphic designers calling themselves Zero Per Zero.
A portable map version is available for sale, but the shipping cost from Korea to the US is a bit steep.
A.A. Gill goes on a Sex and the City tour and loves to hate it.
You remember the episode where Carrie spills the cappuccino because she’s looking after the dog and has lost the manuscript with a description of oral sex with the Russian and then oh my God she bumps into Big who she hasn’t seen since that time with the martini olives and the hemorrhoids? Well, if you look to the right, that’s the cafe, and it’s like oh my God bad hair dog blow job cappuccino hell. You remember that of course.
Oh, just one more excerpt:
I suppose a vibrator might be an impulse buy, and buying yourself one in front of 50 strangers with whom you then have to share a bus journey might be considered the height of liberated insouciance. But buying a sex aid because some actress has faked an orgasm on TV with it is evidence that there’s more wrong with your social life than can be fixed by a dildo.
Included in the NYPL’s recent addition to the Flickr Commons project is Changing New York, a selection of photos taken of NYC in the 1930s by Berenice Abbott as part of a government program for unemployed artists. Here are the Starrett-Lehigh Building and looking north from Washington Square…so open! And the buildings are so low too. The Cyanotypes of British Algae set is worth a look as well.
Here’s a video from 1905 of a NYC subway car going from 14th Street to 42nd Street. It’s funny to see all the men in suits and hats running for the train…it takes some of the formality out what seems from photographs to be a more dignified time. Also, anyone know what line/train this is?
Update: The inbox consensus seems clustered around the opinion that this train is running on the contemporary 4/5/6 line. Here’s a 1904 map which shows the then-IRT line in question (in red). At 42nd St, the line runs crosstown to Times Square and then up the 1/2/3. (thx jason et al.)
Locations of interest in New New York (with photos), the setting for the events of Futurama in the year 3000. Includes Citihall, Taco Bellevue Hospital, Little Bitaly, the Metropolitan House of Opera, Original Cosmic Ray’s Pizza, and Commander Riker’s Island Jail. (thx, anthony)
Eat me daily rounds up a recent AIGA event about food. The most interesting tidbit came from Matteo Bologna’s speech. Bologna designs restaurants, most notably for Keith McNally (Pastis, Balthazar, Morandi, Schillers, etc.).
Really fascinating was what he and McNally did for Pastis — it doesn’t actually have a visual brand. McNally wanted the restaurant to look like it had been in the neighborhood for years, so Bologna constructed this narrative of a family that had maintained the restaurant for a century, and each generation some element gets updated or redesigned, but without going for consistency or even style. The result is completely different-looking signage, awnings, menus, wine lists, checks… everything uses a different palette, type set, but its essential Frenchiness ties everything together. It’s an anti-brand.
The name of the restaurant is thus a play on pastiche in addition to being named after the French aperitif. (via eater)
More on the Saigon Grill saga: the owners were arrested yesterday on over 400 counts of “violating minimum-wage laws, falsifying business records and defrauding the state’s unemployment insurance system”.
“Like so many restaurants across New York City, Saigon Grill was run on the backs of its workers,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement. “These workers allowed the business to thrive, and in exchange they were allegedly cheated out of wages, fined for ridiculous reasons” and, he said, “pulled into a painstaking ploy to cover it all up.”
(thx, nick)
Richard Howe takes photographs of Manhattan street corners. From March to November 2006, Howe took a photo of every single street corner in Manhattan, around 11,000 in all.
I photographed each corner just as I found it, almost always as seen from its diagonally opposite corner. Some of the photographs have no people and no traffic, others are completely dominated by people or even, in some instances, by traffic; the majority are somewhere in between. Most of the photographs simply show what people were doing on the corner when I got there: crossing the street or waiting to cross it, shopping, hanging out, riding a bicycle, and so on — in short, doing what people do at almost any street corner anywhere in Manhattan.
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