what about the plastic animals?

2011 Hairball Update

Back in 2008 I promised an update on the hairball in the 72nd Street IRT subway station.  Here it is!  Or should I say "Hair it is!"?

The hair mass doesn't look all that different than it did in 2008 or 2005.  It hasn't rained in a week so the hair's extra frizzy at the moment.  A correspondent who uses the 72nd St. station much more than I reported that the hair mass was very disgusting this winter.

This is a must-see attraction on the "Schmutz of NYC" tour.  If anyone wants to see the hairball in person it is on the downtown-most set of stairs on the uptown platform.  No need to rush, unlike the quilt show, this work of art should be around for several more years.

Stay tuned for my next report in late 2013 or early 2014.

Presidential Visit

I had a hunch this afternoon that I would see the president's motorcade if I could get close to the Red Rooster.  The top photo was from 127th and Lenox.  The restaurant is right behind the police SUV.  You couldn't get any closer.  Given the street arrangement it seemed like the motorcade would come across 126th St. from 5th Avenue, so I headed there.  Perfect position! 

Soon after getting there the NYPD locked down every block.  I got my camera out, set it to video, and started recording every time it looked like a motorcade was arriving.  When the motorcade arrived for real I accidentally hit the record button twice, so all I filmed was three seconds of motorcycles turning the corner.

After a bit of public cursing that did not draw the NYPD's attention I got to see president Obama as he drove by.  The president's limo is pretty cool!

Obama is the third president I've seen in person.  I saw George H. W. Bush give a speech about corn and ethanol in Lincoln and I got to shake President Clinton's hand after he gave a speech at an American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in the late-1990s.  I got lucky there, in that I arrived early enough to get a front row seat and figured out which side of the room he would be entering and leaving.

To make up for my lack of videographic skills I hope you enjoy this sewn and quilted likeness of President Obama's largest predecessor.

Borders and Morley

I enjoyed the quilt show so much I returned yesterday for another hour of red and white goodness.  Since I was not too far away walked down Park Ave and paid my respects to the soon-to-be-no-more Borders at 57th Street.  As a bonus I believe that is 60 Minutes host Morley Safer walking in front of the store.

The Park Avenue Borders is the second largest store the chain will be closing as part of their bankruptcy.  When I first arrived in Bowling Green in the summer of 1990 I asked several people where I could find a good bookstore.  To a person they said Thackeray's in Toledo was great but even it paled in comparison to Borders in Ann Arbor.

Once I received a paycheck and was solvent again, I took the slightly-over-an-hour's drive to Ann Arbor.  Wow, people weren't kidding.  The State Street store was an unending labyrinth of books.  There was a seemingly random assortment of walls, nooks, and steps up and down, the shelves filled with books of all kinds.  Following a visit to Borders you could walk around the corner to Drake's Sandwich Shop on N. University and enjoy "the Cornell" sandwich upstairs in the Martian Room.  Drake's closed first, being replaced by a Bruegger's and their terrible bagels.

To a reader who grew up in a county with no general interest bookstores (it has one, a good one, now!) Borders was overwhelming.  Oh, I had been to the Nebraska Bookstore, (when it was on R St. and good and after it moved to 14th St. and became a crappy souvenir store with books as an afterthought) many times, and I had been to Powell's in Portland, but the State Street Borders was in a different league.  They lost a lot of charm when they moved to the old Jacobson's on E. Liberty but I went to see Douglas Coupland, Tom Robbins and David Foster Wallace give readings there.

I haven't bought anything from the Park Ave. Borders in years, mainly because 57th and Park is not somewhere I ever need to go and because the post-Borders brothers Borders turned into a large, but not very interesting, chain many years ago.

Red Rooster

Not my best photo but the Red Rooster is chef Marcus Samuelsson's newest restaurant.  President Obama is holding a fundraising dinner there on Tuesday night.  I wasn't invited.

Infinite Variety of Red and White Quilts

Holy crap, people!  If you are in the New York area you owe it to yourself to see the quilt exhibit at the Park Avenue Armory on the Upper East Side.  On display in Infinite Variety:  Three Centuries of Red and White Quilts are 650 quilts from the collection of Joanna S. Rose.

The title is accurate as there is a seemingly infinite variety of quilts on display.  Squares, circles, diamonds, stars and snowflakes are all present.  As are historical events and people.  I saw presidents Lincoln and Taft.  Taft!  There are religious quilts and quilts made of flour sacks.  Toward the back of the armory is a small section of crib quilts.

I'll post more photos to this Flickr set, but the quilts are better seen in person.  If you want to go you've got to hurry.  The free exhibit closes on Wednesday.  I liked them so much today that I might actually pay a return visit tomorrow.

Happy Land Fire Anniversary

I was reminded earlier today that the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire wasn't the only tragic fire that happened on March 25th in New York City.  On this day in 1979 a jealous ex-boyfriend set fire the the Happy Land Social Club on Southern Blvd. in the Bronx.  Eighty-seven people, mostly Honduran immigrants, died in the blaze.  There is a small memorial in the median of Southern Blvd.  This photo is a couple of years old, so I'm not sure if this mural is still there.

Duck

It's a duck.  A lady duck.  Next to the pond in Morningside Park this afternoon.

Here is a short video from the same pond.  Wait for the excitement toward the end.

Tesla's Wardenclyffe Laboratory

Around the turn of the last century Nikola Tesla, inventor of alternating current electricity transmission and father of radio, built a laboratory on the Wardenclyffe estate in Shoreham, NY, just a few miles from the Wading River beach.  The lab was designed by Stanford White and largely paid for by J. P. Morgan as a radio transmission facility.  Secretly though, Tesla was working on a method to wirelessly transmit electricity around the world.  This gets to be a complicated story so I'm going to skip the details and say that Tesla ran out of money and was forced to abandon his project and sell the facility.  Behind the building was a 187-foot high transmitting tower.  The tower was torn down in 1917 for fear that the Germans might use it to send signals back across the Atlantic. 

The building changed hands over the years and currently Agfa, the photographic film company, is trying to sell it.  A non-profit group would like to purchase the site and turn it into the Tesla science center.  Agfa won't lower their price because the company wants to cut their losses after spending millions cleaning the land of toxic chemicals.  Thus, the building sits in real estate purgatory today.

Wading River

Back to Long Island.  If the ocean isn't your thing it is only a half-hour drive to the north shore and Long Island Sound.  We didn't go to Wading River in Wildwood State Park nearly as often as we went to Smith Point.  The north shore beaches are rocky, and full of interesting things to find, but the water is much calmer.  The beach is also just a couple miles away from something very interesting.

I don't know if anyone pays attention to the "recent comments" link over to the right, so I'll bring your attention to the odd recent activity on this post.  Except for Dane's comment back in 2008, all the other comments are from a single person in the UK having a conversation with himself (despite the different names all the comments originated from the same computer).  The comments aren't link spam so I haven't yet blocked them.  It is only a matter of time though...

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

It was a hundred years ago this Friday that the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire occurred.  There's been a lot of attention paid to the fire on its centennial.  A hundred and forty six people, mostly young women and girls, mostly Jewish and Italian immigrants, died when a fire started late on a Saturday afternoon. 

The fire only burned for eighteen minutes.  In that time twenty died when the fire escape they were on collapsed.  Thirty people died when they plunged into an elevator shaft trying to escape the flames.  Fifty people either jumped or were pushed to their death out the eighth and ninth story windows.  Many of the remaining victims were found huddled next to doors that were locked to prevent them from leaving the factory floor during work hours.

American Experience on PBS recently broadcast a documentary on the fire.  It can be watched online.  Starting tonight HBO is running Triangle:  Remembering the Fire.  For more in-depth information visit the Cornell University Industrial and Labor Relations School site Remembering the Triangle Factory Fire.  Two of the clippings above are from a March 26th, 1911 New York Times article on the Cornell site.  The headline is from a March 27th, 1911 article.