Freedom Tower

Across the River

Holding Pattern

The slow Friday haul home from Jamaica turns to fits and starts just beyond Roosevelt, and by Manhattan, two trains ahead of us are stalled.  We creep south in increments, and grind to a halt at 23rd.   I get off the train, grab a coffee, hit the bank, and walk down to 14th.  On the platform, some poor sod strumming a guitar plays the same chord over and over and over, and affects a Neil Young whine.  I love Neil Young, but this is relentless. The song goes nowhere endlessly.  The longest more cheerless subway song in history. .At the same time, a ragged man beside me walks from the bench by the wall forward to the edge of the tracks, and shuffles backwards back again,  Forwards, back, forwards back, like an animal half-mad, bound to repeat its movements in a too small cage in perpetuity.
When it finally comes, the train is teeming, and the atmosphere inside more anchovy than sardine.  It's so crowded even the familiar vet. panhandler "I'm homeless and I'm hungry ..." can barely make his way along the car, and his voice, like the singer's, has a grinding, monotonous register.  It feels like a ride from hell.  Next to me a European tourist talks softly to his friend in a language I don't recognize, every so often breaking the flow with English - "Greenwich Veeeledge, "Madeeson Square Park",  the "Brookleeen Bridge."
This is how the weekend begins.

The Naval Hospital

Broadway (Q & N)

24 Hour Emergency: King Street

Auteur Alert

Filming takes place today on Sixth between 9th & 11th. James Franco is writer & director of the movie The Adderall Diaries, which is based on the book by Stephen Elliot. Mr. Franco will also be acting in the film. You have been warned.

Heading Home on Sunday

Sunday was a four-borough day.  I've still got to work on that five-borough jackpot.  We're in Queens quite a lot these days, and this auto repair shop at 34th Ave & 46th St. keeps catching my eye.  Finally I got the camera out for a quick shot.

OK - let's zoom in a bit...

and it's hello Volkowagen!  A swift and prudent letter substitution, which leaves every other detail of the signs intact, is an inspired move.  I also like that rooftop terrace ...

Real Estate Monday: Quiet Times on Fourth & Fifth

When was 491 Fifth last an active work site?  No action has been observed at this address for many a month.  The DOB lists open violations for the following:

PARTIAL STOP WORK ORDER(UNDERPINNING)ISSUED PURSUANT TO 28-207.2 & POSTED @ PREMISES.WORK  DOES NOT CONFORM TO APPROVED CONSTRUCTION DOCUMENTS &/OR APPROVED AMENDMENTS @ TIME OF INSPECTION ON ACTIVE CONSTRUCTION (7/14/11) SEC. BC 3303.3. OBSTRUCTION OF SIDEWALK AND STREET W/O DOT PERMIT. NOTED: AT TIME OF INSPECTION OBSERVED DOT PERMIT ON JOB SITE FENCE EXPIRED 7.26.13.JOB SITE FENCE PROTRUDES LOT LINE OVER 4'OBSTRUCTINGSIDEWALK (11/6/13) TEMPORARY CONST EQUIPMENT ON SITE-/EXPIRED PERMIT.4 STORY NEW BLDG UNDER CONST HAS 8FT HIGH WOOD CONST FENCE ERECTED UNDER #320063079-01-EQ-FN HAS EXPIRED ON 02/22/14 W/ NO RENEWAL IN RECORD.REM:RENEW PERMIT (4/10/14)

Back in March demolition was rolling along at 470 Fourth, the twenty million dollar development site at 11th Street, but it ground to a halt several weeks later.  As of Friday, construction plans for the new apartment building remain disapproved.

Grand Concourse: Sunday Afternoon

So Much Depends

Queens style on 33rd Street

Goodbye Gracious Sign

When did New Yorker Bagels (Fresh from the Oven to You) become plain old LIC Bagel?  I'm not around here too often, so this could have taken place a while back.

Underneath the Tracks

You only have to wave a camera in their direction.  Whether it's Roosevelt beneath the 7, or the nether worlds of sub-expressway Third, the buildings and the empty lots frame themselves with ironwork and fractured light.  Even the most ordinary resonate.  These are on 31st Street, Queens.

The Luxury of Queens

The Sports Club

On the Bay Ridge/Sunset Park border three venerable Scandinavian sports clubs are hanging on.  On 65th Street the Danish Athletic Club and the Swedish Football Club are close neighbors.  On 62nd Street there's the Norwegian Sporting Club Gjoa.  The Danish club was founded in 1892, in Red Hook, and moved to its current location in the 1940s.  You can dine here as a non-member, though on Saturdays the club is closed for party rentals.  I recently made the novice's mistake of turning up on the wrong night, but plan to return soon for a meal.  Lost City blogger Brooks of Sheffield paid a visit there a year or so back for his Eater Who Goes There? series. It's a great post, well worth checking out.  Earlier this year the Times ran a piece about the place too, focusing on the club's relationship with the local Mexican community.

I don't know much about the Swedish club, but it seems to be still active.  I think it's been around since the 30s.  I did find a Swedish film clip of a visit to the club several decades ago.  Appreciating it fully without a knowledge of Swedish is a bit tricky, but you can still enjoy the streetscape, the inside shots of the club, and the lively summer festivities out back.  And you can at least try to imagine what's being said.  The boisterous lady at the end of the film is very expressive.

The Sporting Club Gjoa was founded in 1911, and still has a successful youth soccer program. Regular membership numbers are scant though, as they are at the other two clubs.  I hope all three associations can gather enough support and community investment to remain in their old sporting grounds for years to come, and keep some of the old cultural traditions alive, even as the area's demographics continue to shift.  These places are a proud & important piece of city history.

Further reading:
The Scandinavian East Coast Museum
Saturday Afternoon Fever - a visit to Sporting Club Gjoa (New York Observer)
New People in Old Neighborhoods: The Role of Immigrants in Rejuvenating New York's Communities  - Louis Winnick (Russell Sage Foundation, 1990)

Real Estate Tuesday: Faces of Two Boroughs

223 16th St., a three-family, was listed on the market for $1,550,000 last fall, and sold this February for $1,370,00 to EB 223 Realty Inc.  Right now Skyworx is giving it the speedy brickface treatment.  Here it is back in September, at the far right of the picture:

All four houses, which look like they were built as a group,  have had their wooden facades hidden or stripped away.  I'd love to see pictures of them in earlier days.

Here's another set of covered-ups that caught my eye over the weekend, on 36th Avenue in Astoria.  On detached houses these facades verge on the surreal.

A block along the avenue, close to 38th Street, we can get an idea of how these boxy buildings once looked.

The house has got its own cover-up touches but the beautiful cornice and windows are still intact, and the asphalt shingling - a pre-vinyl, pre-brickface treatment - fits just fine here.  And thumbs up to yellow!
Purism about house stuff can become tiresome, and sometimes a freshly renovated frame, expensively period-perfect, can seem like a stage-set, more remote from its past than a vinyl-covered house of similar vintage.  Its stories and ghosts long fled.  I like wooden buildings because of their variety, and the ways they've evolved and survived.  They're homes first of all. But the ones I like best are like the little one above. Nothing fancy, in an out-of-the-way corner, it seems to have kept its looks by sheer luck.  Truer to its humble origins that a sleek & pricey restoration in Greenpoint or Park Slope ($3,000,000 anyone?), it whispers of worlds that no amount of money can recreate.

Yellow on 31st Street (Astoria)

Sevor

Great detail on this Sevor-ized truck.  Off Eighth Avenue, Sunset Park.

Link

Manhattan's disappearing gas stations (WNYC)

A recent analysis by the Wall Street Journal showed that more than 20 Manhattan gas stations have closed since 2003, almost all of them on the West Side. Of the 12 remaining stations below 96th Street, seven of them are in Midtown West, Chelsea and the Meatpacking District. 

That puts them into the orbit of the High Line and Hudson Yards, two projects that are radically reshaping the surrounding districts. 

"The West Side is going to be better than any other neighborhood," Polsinelli said. "There will be no land left unturned."

Farther downtown, two other stations are already on their last legs. The BP at Houston and Lafayette is expected to close this year to make way for a seven-story retail and office complex. A Mobil Station in Alphabet City is also expected to close shop. 

Stuck at Home

I've been sick for a couple of days.  As a result I've been housebound - sneezing and coughing, and swigging back gallons of PG Tips.  A sorry sort of business.
So here's a stay-at-home photograph courtesy of Brooklyn Visual Heritage showing construction work on the 4th Ave. subway line in Sunset Park.  The picture, taken in 1913, shows one of the neighborhood's grandest architectural intersections, Fourth & 43rd.  You can see St. Michael's church & school in the background, at right, and at left the magnificent Romanesque Revival 68th Police Precinct Station House & Stable, which was last used in 1970 and is in sorry shape today. The neo-classical Sunset Park courthouse was constructed some twenty years after this photograph was taken, and still stands at the north-east corner of the intersection.  Today it is used by Community Board 7 and the NYPD.  What an institutional hub.  This is almost as far as I have walked on my block-by-block loops from 9th Street south.


 

The police house today