Bikes Push Pedestrians Off Bridge

Scavenger Cart and Pedestrians Clog Pulaski Bike Lane
I'm way too slow; Miss Heather beat me to this last week.  But I think it's worth emphasizing because it's the perfect example of Bloomberg's cosmetic treatment of environmental and transit issues, where the city paints bike lanes and installs Cemusa "bus shelter" ad platforms at the same time it's fostered a massive increase in the number of SUV-friendly luxury condo developments.

In this case, faced with the hard choice of taking a lane away from vehicle traffic on the Pulaski Bridge, Bloomberg's city takes the sidewalk away from pedestrians.

Bikes are fine -- fun for the rider, and good for the environment if it takes the rider out of a car.  But bikes do not belong on the sidewalk.  The sidewalk is transit's last resort, open to anyone and everyone -- old people, young kids, people in wheelchairs, scavengers pushing carts.  And it's unfair and unsafe to subject them to bikes whizzing by inches away, from behind, at maybe 10 times their speed.


Above left, the Long Island City end of the Pulaski sidewalk.  Above right, the sidewalk leading to the Vernon-Jackson 7 Train station that's the destination of most pedestrians coming from Greenpoint.  Note how the sidewalk "wheelchair ramp" lets bikers smoothly swoop down from the bridge, and right up to the racks and Cemusa luxury condo "bike shelter" beyond them.


Above: It's a 2-lane Bike Autobahn, just like biking through the Alps!


Above left, pesky pedestrians invade bike lane; above right, I understand the "dismount bike" signs will be removed, because they don't make sense -- now that it's a bike lane!


Above left, day-glo stripes on bridge equipment too, so bikers won't hit it when it's dark, and they're talking on their cellphone, like above right.

Inconsiderate Jerks Push Baby Stroller in Bike Lane
Bloomberg's city sells the idea that it can bring a suburban biking experience to NYC because it fits in with the rest of the suburban trappings it uses to decorate the rampant chain and luxury development it's encouraged.  It is building what amounts to a freeway system for bikes -- across bridges and down selected avenues -- that would be fine if it was relatively isolated from pedestrians, like suburban bike trails.

But there's no way it can be that isolated in NYC, and -- because (a majority, most?) urban bikers fly through whatever space is available, on the road or sidewalk, against lights and traffic -- that makes the life of pedestrians more difficult and dangerous.

It's great that bikers can enjoy riding around the city, but the sidewalk belongs to pedestrians.  The Pulaski bike lane is a bad joke.

[ Pulaski Bridge Bike Playground ]
[ Pulaski Bike Sidewalk Yuppie Graffiti ]
[ Nothing New: Bikes vs. Walkers on Pulaski, NYDN ]

Ornate Facades

A few ornate facades I've had laying around for way too long.

Above and left, fragments of the face of the Wolcott on 31st off 5th Ave.  Too bad the hotel's website manages to ruin the flavor of its 1904 opening brochure, which touted "Little chickens that come unplucked from the Jersey farms," "Music that accompanies, but does not annoy," and "Never a servant to annoy you with superfluous attention."

Below left, columns on the skinny end of 840 Broadway, at 13th, high above Forbidden Planet.  And below right, a beauty on S 4th in Williamsburg near Bedford.  Note the cracks in the building at right foreground, thanks to the huge Developer Hole next door.

Vignette: The Middle of Something

Basement Living
Thinking hurts no matter how you do it, so why think small?

I wake up putting the finishing touches on a Grand Unified Theory of Everything so simple a nine year old could understand it, then forget it as I stare into the mirror, shaving.

After lunch I strap an old AM radio to a calculator that leaks interference, tune the radio to static, and make the calculator compute the square root of (the square root of (the square root of pi)) over and over until they're locked in a feedback loop that sounds like a fleet of levitating spacecraft.

Before long I'm interrupted by the landlord pounding on the door.  "I'm getting complaints about strange noises down here!"

"I haven't noticed anything," I yell back.  "Now could you please excuse me?  I'm in the middle of something."

And after all these years, I still couldn't tell you just what it was.

Thank You MIKE Bloomberg

Mailed to my cats Snagglepuss Jr., Ms. Meow, and The RatMaster 5000
Thank you MIKE for all the big sturdy campaign ads I keep gettin' in the mail!

In between me, my 5 cats, 3 dogs, my surrogate taxpayer rabbit Mr. Chuckles, and the "Dirty Dozen" rats I been trainin' to pull the miniature Santa sled I found in a dumpster -- all of us registered to vote -- we been gettin' 20 mailers a day!

Soon I will have enough to paper the walls, ceilin' and floor of my tar paper shack down here by the crick, near where Kings County meets the Queens.  (I don't want to tell nobody which crick, 'cause then they'd all be movin' down here!)

Thank you, thank you, thank you!  Thank your ad people for usin' such good lookin' models, and thank your momma for bequeathin' you such a nice soft pleasin' face yourself -- since I'm gonna be lookin' at all y'all for the next 10 years at least!

In fact, since I hear there is no way you can lose, might I suggest you just get elected every 8 years?  'Cause these things is that sturdy -- sturdy as a country girl who can churn butter before breakfast, plow the field all day, and birth a baby in between supper and singin' the chickens to sleep!

Loquaciously Yours,
Festus T. Tennessee, Esq., PhP, DoD

Yup, the T. is for Tennessee too.  My friends call me Tennessee, MIKE, and you can too!  Done forgot what them letters after my name is for, so I can't rightly throw 'em away now, can I?

My Two Cents

Above, police man the intersection at 57th & Park Ave. a few days ago, to handle all the black SUV convoys going to and from the U.N.

GOP politicians must be dying of envy, seeing one deadly crackpot faction after another from Iran, Libya, etc., fully in charge without having to mess with all the tiresome institutions -- law, elections, etc. -- that it does.

Right-wing propagandists make an ACORN pimp skit and a right-wing hack calls it "the Abu Ghraib of the Great Society" -- equating that Bush/Cheney torture funhouse with Medicare, Head Start, etc.

The GOP has reached its logical conclusion and become America's Taliban.

It keeps selling its bitter audience on the idea that -- if only they could get rid of government (and by extension, society) -- they could live in a Little House on the Prairie, by their wits and weapons, and not have to put up with all these filthy other kinds of people.

They conveniently forget that Cavalry Capt. John Wayne killed all those Indians for them while he was working for the government!

The next time I read the term "bipartisan" used seriously, my head is going to explode.  While corruption and lies exist wherever humans do, only one party -- the GOP -- has adopted them as its philosophy.  Forget the jackboot cheerleaders at the FOX Noose Network, who at least serve to remind us what the world would be like if Germany had won World War II.  It's the cynical collaborators who run other media empires who really piss me off, who maintain this "bipartisan" hoax that helps them sell ads in between endless phony "He Said She Said" news that generates buzz for ad sales' sake.

A Few Picturesque Tanks

Above, a water tank on 125th St. between 7th & 8th Aves.  Working days over, it's retired to picturesque.

Below left, I would be shirking my duty as a photographer if I passed up the alternate shot of the same tank plus scantily clad model.  And below right, a working tank perched on scant support above 50th near 8th Ave.

Queens Pictures

Some pictures of Queens I've held onto for a while.  Above, black smoke; perhaps a Citibank executive -- gasoline can in one hand, a fifth of bourbon in the other -- is burning evidence in a field.


Above, baseball games seen from the Queensboro Bridge.  I'm pushing my camera way past its limits, but notice the guy sitting in the trees on the right, as the game comes to him.


Above left, from near the Hunters Point train stations, one of the most photogenic spots around.  Above right, a mysterious maintenance machine (a jet engine used to burn vegetation and dust the wires?) seen through the dense wiring of the LIRR, from near Queens Plaza.

And finally, below, yet more proof that Queens has more wires, poles, and stuff in general, than just about anywhere else on earth.

Note on Blogging

I try to remember that this is the Internet, where the tension of the next click is always hovering, so that (unless a lot of words are necessary, say for autobiography, politics, or good bs) the operating principle should be:

If you can't say it in one sentence, don't say it at all.  Just publish a good picture and move on.

The trouble is, it takes passion -- positive or negative -- to produce this stuff.  And to explain the source of the passion, you have to sort through the particulars.  All of that adds up to a jumble of words twisted by emotion, which in my case takes time and the pressure of publication to distill.

This post has been brought to you by my struggle with recent posts.  Plastic backyard burka photo above courtesy of the Internet.

Taggers

Best tag on the Williamsburg Bridge
Taggers are a constant disappointment.  They piggyback on the reputation of graffiti, but are too lazy or inept to develop picture skills.  They piggyback on the reputation of political protest, but are too lazy or inept to develop a political message.

When they show daring, marking the top of a bridge or a haunted warehouse, it's all about ego and the thrill of the act.  But taggers usually attack easy targets -- like public property, old warehouses, modest residences and corner stores -- and leave bank branches, corporate headquarters and luxury condos untouched.

Above left, the best tag in Williamsburg -- because it defaces Warehouse 11.  Below left, tagger clubhouse on Williamsburg Bridge.  Below right, note how the tagger leaves the 2nd Ave. Bank of America pristine.

The Subway Is Satan's Penthouse

Scientology Sales Engineers in the Union Square Subway Station, 2007
From year-old email, my comments to a friend concerned about her son:

> He is "debating" people who do not believe in evolution, on the web.

I cannot think of a more noble (and foolhardy) pastime.  A possible debate point for him: "Are you saying that God invented the iPod?  Exactly how, with all the other stuff He has to do -- like guiding the Super Bowl winner to victory, rescuing a farmer trapped under his tractor, and giving Miss Texas the perfect facelift -- could He possibly have time to design the iPod for Steve Jobs?  He's not Superman!"

> I just hope he won't get hung up in any weird pseudo-scientific cults.

They piss me off so much I had to stop and take a picture of one of Scientology's E-meter teams in the subway (up top).  All that red is for Satan!

I miss the days when people did drugs to alter their own reality, instead of trying to alter the world and subject the rest of us to their fascist acid dreams.

Left, and center, up top: the E-meter prop used to figure out if you are (1) a sucker, and (2) able to pay exorbitant amounts to prove it.

Starship Surgery

These two seem to go together; must be the hint of surgical procedure.

Above, the Cooper Union Starship gets its parts probed.  To the left, someone unplugged the ventilator at Roebling & S 3rd in Williamsburg, in the middle of school surgery.

[ Cooper Union Cooper Square ]

The Morning After

(After yesterday's painful bit of reality, that is.)  Above, an eloquent accidental sculpture at the Brooklyn end of the Williamsburg Bridge.

You're drunk, walking home across the bridge; it starts raining; your $3 umbrella snaps in half.  Soaked like a sewer rat, you put the parts together and leave a beer gearshift, a sunny ad for a tropical vacation package that includes air, hotel, and all the drunk driving you can do before you run over some kids, get caught and beaten to death by the locals.

You're halfway across the bridge when you're confronted by the trolls who live there (and sleep during the day in hammocks hanging from the roadway), warming themselves around a bonfire under a tarp.  They look like shrunken pirates, and are leering at you like you're a French poodle in furs.  You start running, but they get hold of you, like hyenas on a ... French poodle in furs!

In your final drunken thoughts -- as the trolls hammer your anesthetized body with their tiny fists & boots, and the rain pitter-patters softly on your bloody, contorted face, lit from the side by traffic on the bridge below -- you are not dying this wasted death.  You are dying for your country on that tropical vacation -- drunk, deadly, proud... an American!

Back to tiresome reality, left, I don't care if the ad does have a Yankees theme, this liquor store is on Nassau in Brooklyn, not the Bronx.  Alcoholic territorial pride is just not what it used to be.

And below, if you stand in the right place on Broadway (at 34th here), and unfocus your eyes so you can take it all in at once -- the green, the dots, the red tourist buses, and people hustling to work -- last night's buzz will come back!  At least for a few seconds, long enough to dream of a tropical paradise.

Protest Vote (Plus Pile Driver)

(Note morning-after update, below...)

Above: No doubt using money guaranteed by your taxes, luxury development resumes at N 12th & Bedford in Williamsburg (destined to be 8 floors of plastic).  It was twice as loud in person.

I hate this development; it's the capstone of suburban development in Williamsburg, built for Wall Street incomes and the Wall Street mentality, where money is the beginning and end of meaning, and "innovation" means finding ever more contorted ways to pull counterfeit value out of (software) thin air, screw the destabilizing effect on the rest of the world.  Bloomberg and the rest have tied our fates to Wall Street's trickle-down Titanic.

The city rubber stamps SUV-friendly developments, then paints bike lanes -- lipstick on plastic -- and puts up traffic lights that just encourage drivers to honk & speed down narrow streets to make the lights.

Today's Primary Election

I'm hoping turnout is so low that my vote means something.  I'm voting for Tony Avella for Mayor and Norman Siegel for Public Advocate.  I will go with whoever seems least tainted, or No One, for the other races.

Avella may not be the manager, blah blah blah, that Bloomberg is.  And it's easier to complain than to figure out how to solve problems.  But Avella seems to have a conscience, instead of the chrome hole in place of a soul that Bloomberg and his mercenary elves have developed, to accelerate the flow of Wall Street and developer cash and make the world safe for aristocracy.

Update: The morning after; Bloomberg is still sitting pretty and this post still sucks, even though I tried to fix the "protest vote" part a few times.  When you start out half baked, you usually end that way -- I didn't know enough about Tony Avella to make the argument he deserves.

What I did know was that a huge amount of money was spent on this election -- I received a tree's worth of mailers, and maybe a hundred units of voice spam died on my answering machine.  The thought of all those ambitious junior insiders, seeking to rise to the top of the machine, would warm my heart if I thought they had a chance to resist the pull of billionaire favor.  But once you are inside the warm inner sanctum of power, how could you want to buck the system and bring the chandeliers crashing down?

[ The Morning After, Less Hinged to Reality ]

[ Lost City Endorses Tony Avella ]
[ Queens Crap Endorses Tony Avella ]
[ Noticing New York's Vote Notes via Queens Crap ]

Concrete Drawing

From back in the day when builders had respect for those who have to look at their products, the building at Park Ave. South and 22nd St.

A geometric fade is built into the skeletal surface of the building, with columns that mimic roped bunches of bamboo, stepping back into and filling space at the same time.  The building face is a great example of implied and actual volume working together, bridging the fat parts of our brains that deal with the concept and reality of depth.


The building has a Disney cake-castle air to it, but it's saved by its good bone structure and good skin.


Originally named the Church Missions House, it now houses the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies; it was designed by Robert W. Gibson and built in 1893.  Here's the New York Times article about it from 1893.

Atlantic Yards Arena Design Process

Top to bottom:

1) Inspiration.
2) Placement.
3) Make it sexy!

High Line 3

Some views from the south end of the High Line.  Above, tourists ponder a relic of Meatpacking Past, sticking up a few floors from the street: "You think they made the cows jump out that door?"

Left, some excellent rooftops to the northeast.

Below left, the monumental, warm brick garbage barn on the near side of the Hudson.

Below right, across the hazy river, New Jersey.  That's where -- because the wind generally blows west to east -- all of North America's used air accumulates before it makes its final push across New York City to the Atlantic.


[ High Line 2 ]
[ High Line Show ]

High Line 2

More pictures from my visit to the south end of the High Line.  Above, the "Lower Your" Standard Hotel, where guests are encouraged to share their flesh and love with picnicking strangers below.

Left, someone had to water the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, too.

Below left, servants scurry about below, picking up picnic scraps dropped from the Line.  And below right, the banner ads -- you didn't think the view was free, did you?


[ High Line 3 ]
[ High Line Show ]