Sarah Wrote That | photography

Columbus Circle, 1892
Museum of the City of New York

These electric poles are terrifying.

Ringing in 2012 Around the World:

A woman wrote with a sparkler the number 2012 in the air near St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, Austria.

Georg Hochmuth/European Pressphoto Agency

The Third Avenue El with Grand Central Depot on the right:

Looking down the 42nd St Branch not long after it was converted to a shuttle in 1879.

[Joseph Brennan, Beach Pneumatic: Alfred Beach’s Pneumatic Subway and the beginnings of rapid transit in New York]

Dusk
Central Park at West 65th Street

“A Glamorous Aerie Overlooks the Brazilian Atlantic”

photo: Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

anticipatedstranger:

Bernice Abbott, by Man Ray

Reblogged from Anticipated Stranger

Margin Call is out on iTunes (so soon?). Rotten Tomatoes viewer responses are split between “boring!” and “this is how it works.”

I think it absolutely nails it. It’s also, in a stage-like way, very physical. The limits the filmmakers (and no doubt their budget) set—tight clock, few locations—leave us with the differences in how the actors occupy those spaces: the slender twenty-somethings, the walrus-jowled, thick-handed fifty-somethings, the golden boy; the lesser golden boy who missed the baton (yeah, it’s pretty much all dudes, and Demi Moore, who still has traces of a tremble that wouldn’t fly in the job she’s cast in). Other than that, everyone’s actions seem wholly grounded in their awareness of their physicality; how directly it corresponds to what possibilities are open to them.

And then Jeremy Irons enters the room—the lion, and the rest of them are cubs.

[photo: zacharyquinto.com]

Harold Brodkey
photographed by Richard Avedon in New York City, January 28, 1958

“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.

mopostal: liquidnight:

Ben J. Lubschez, New York City

Sunbeams

From Pictorial Photography in America 1921

Penn Station?

Ooh, it’s Gatsby, chapt. 2:

At the news-stand she bought a copy of TOWN TATTLE and a moving-picture magazine, and in the station drug-store some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Up-stairs, in the solemn echoing drive she let four taxicabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with gray upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and, leaning forward, tapped on the front glass.

“I want to get one of those dogs,” she said earnestly. “I want to get one for the apartment. They’re nice to have — a dog.”

We backed up to a gray old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John D. Rockefeller. In a basket swung from his neck cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an indeterminate breed.

Reblogged from Maury Postal