what about the plastic animals?

Two Saints

St. John the Divine school and cathedral and St. Luke's Hospital overlooking Morningside Park.

A Day Apart

The leaves in the top scan were fresh off the shrub yesterday.  The bottom scan is from this morning.  I believe these are witch hazel leaves.  I found them by the 120th Street stairway in Morningside Park.

That's all from me until after the holiday.  Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Bear On A Barrel

As seen in Morningside Park on the way home this evening.

Autumn Leaves

Over the last couple of Sundays I gathered a bunch of colorful autumn leaves and run them through the scanner.  If you were in Morningside Park and saw someone stuffing leaves into the folds of the Sunday Times that was me.  The first batch is on Flickr.

These yellow guys were from the second batch.  The second batch didn't turn out as well as the first.  There were some amazing leaves that I pressed into the pages of Webster's Third International Dictionary with The Complete Calvin and Hobbes on top for weight.  By the time I got the scanner revved up on Tuesday night most of those leaves had turned brown.

My artistic abilities are limited so I have to let the leaves tell their own story.  Christophe Niemann is much more talented and clever, as his amazing Bio-Diversity set of manipulated leaves attests.

Is There a Way Out of Here?

This is what Morningside Park looked like on Sunday morning as I was climbing to the greenmarket by Columbia.  We've gotten enough rain this spring that everything looks very lush and green.

I was headed down the stairs this evening when, at pretty much this exact spot, a guy going up asked me "Is there a way out of here"?  I pointed to the top of the turret and replied "Up.  The stairs go all the way up."

Behning and Sons

Here's a mystery.  Somebody left part of an upright piano, the heavy part, next to a garbage can in Morningside Park over the weekend.  Who thinks "How should we get rid of our old piano?  I know, let's take it apart and bring it to a park!"

The piano was made by Behning and Sons.  A cursory search doesn't turn up much information about the company.  Henry Behning started the business in 1856 and it became Behning and Sons in 1880.  After Henry's death the name changed to the Behning Piano Co.  I can't find a date.  In 1926 the company was sold to Kohler.  That would make this piano about a hundred years old, plus or minus a couple of decades.

Zip codes were introduced in 1963, so Hans Deutsch tuned this piano at least forty-five years ago.  Mr. Deutsch lived in a handsome four-story townhouse at 38 W. 74th Street, just off Central Park.

City Bird Home

Bird week wasn't supposed to have an encore but I saw this bird's nest in Morningside Park this morning.  The successful city bird adapts to the shortage of twigs and abundance of human debris.

Duck

The last entry for bird week is a duck.  I don't have anything to say about the duck.

Broken Wing

This poor goose has been hanging out in the Morningside Park pond for the past couple of years.

Signs of Spring

The daffodils are slowly beginning to emerge in Morningside Park.  The snow drops are in bloom as well.  Spring can't be too far away.

John T. Brush Stairway update:  The City Room blog at the New York Times wrote about the same Polo Grounds stairway that I presented here last week.