Sarah Wrote That

“Nightfall in Lower Manhattan with Brooklyn Bridge”

Scan of an undated, uncredited postcard I bought when I first moved to the city and never sent. From the absence of the Chase Building and bulky office blocks on Water Street, and with all those working piers, it must be from no later than the late 50s. Artists would have had lofts in the nineteenth century buildings along Pearl Street; the El still curled around the feet of the towers, cigarette smoke through the offices. I love how, by night, the markers of eras vanish between the lights, how recent and fast this feels.

None of which occurred to me when I bought the card. I liked it because it looked like Starry Night.

Should I apostrophize?

love, the English teachers of America.

nprfreshair:

Between 4:30 and 5 p.m. on Dec. 20, 1932, Berenice Abbott’s camera was hanging off an upper floor of the Empire State Building recording New York City at Night.

A 2008 Times article explored how, relative to Abbott’s New York, ours has gone dark:

Gone are the days when cheap electricity, primitive lighting technology and landlords’ desire to showcase their skyscrapers kept floor after floor of the city’s highest towers glowing into the night. Now, rising energy costs, conservationism, stricter building codes and sophisticated lighting systems have conspired to slowly, often imperceptibly, transform Manhattan’s venerable nightscape into one with a gentler glow.

Instead of tower after tower shining at all hours — the World Trade Center stayed aglow long after its occupants went home — the skyline is becoming a patchwork of sparsely sparkling buildings decorated with ornamentally lighted tops.

(note also the Sixth Avenue El tracks from lower left to upper right. I would love to have ridden one of the Manhattan Els before they went… but, like the electric blaze of fully lit, empty office floors, I’m glad they did).

Reblogged from NPR Fresh Air

20 Dec 2010 12:53

ilovecharts:

The Neighborhoods of Manhattan. [Kurt White]

Mmm, mid-morning snack… 19th Century neighborhood names… So many blocks on this map have long since been de-mapped into superblocks for WTC, NYU, others, or for bridge approaches (and note the train yards, now Trump towers, in the blank triangle to the left of Lincoln Square; and the absence of the Battery Park City landfill). I don’t think I’ve heard lower Midtown/upper Chelsea referred as the Tenderloin since the late 90s. Clinton seems to have more or less surrendered to Hells Kitchen (which: yes, though too bad not to have maps with “Clinton Chelsea”).

Reblogged from The Corcoran Group

Michelle Forbes as Helena Cain in Razor

Details, details

In the story I’m writing the characters are discussing mosquito repellent, a detail I originally wrote in because they were on a deck in summer twilight. Turns out they have opinions that are much more interesting than what I’d planned for them.

This semester I’ve told several of my composition students something along the lines of “trust details, and they’ll tell you where to go” (in a cover letter, don’t say the Marines taught you leadership; say you led [x] number of Marines doing [y])—a variation on Nabokov’s “caress the divine detail,” of course, but, I thought, more practical and, um, socially appropriate?

I liked the cadence, too. Then I realized why it sounded familiar. Entertainment Weekly, what was the advice of Battlestar Galactica’s Admiral Cain?

”Hold on to that anger, and you keep it close. It’ll stop you being afraid the next time, and it’ll tell you what to do.”

So… next semester maybe I’ll refine my phrasing.

photo: Keith de Lellis Gallery

Streetscapes visits the never-successfully used airship mooring platform atop the Empire State Building:

The terrace is perhaps two and a half feet wide, and the parapet could not be any higher than that; it’s like standing on the raised lip of a Campbell’s soup can, a quarter-mile up. And because the terrace is circular, each side disappearing left and right, there is an uncomfortable sensation of being pushed outward.

I love the empty Midtown skyline behind it, with only 500 Fifth Avenue (home of Nat Sherman) busting out up on the corner of 42nd Street. 500 Fifth Avenue’s north side has essentially undecorated stonework all the way up; in the 1920s it was assumed buildings of equal height would someday line the block, until this little financial crisis came along…

theeconomist:

GDP since Jesus: China’s economy has returned to being one of the world’s two biggest, a position it has held for most of recorded history

I’m interested in this chart’s omissions, some selective, one a result of its format:

Russia
Spain
pre-Columbian S. and C. America
Britain’s completely disproportionate influence relative to its GDP, 1700-1940. From this chart alone, one might conclude the nineteenth century U.S. displaced India and China. But where did all that wealth go? Most went to London (and technically, I suppose, output for India from c. 1850-1950 could be added/co-opted to Britain’s total?). But counting only the home (aka colonizing aka imperial) country, Britain, with lower GDP than Germany by 1900, ruled 2/5 the world’s land area, prepared the way for U.S. expansion by sowing English worldwide, and arguably/unintentionally made the Kaiser jealous enough to start a naval arms race that was key in starting World War One, which was… so, yes. Britain. Damn.

(Leaving aside whether we can meaningfully quantify ancient societies, which I’m very not qualified to judge, and whether GDP is a useful measure, which I’m not sure it is, at least of quality of life).

Reblogged from The Economist