Big city of dreams.

Pictures of New York by Louis Faurer via Everyday I Show.

I know the clocks change this weekend but for the past few weeks I’ve been up early in the dark. Today, as I was sitting on the living room floor, stretching, I looked up and saw the sun through the drawn shades. Nothing like the sun to start the day off  on the good foot.

Our good pal Mark Lamster had a long piece in the New York Times last Sunday. You don’t want to miss it:

IT sounds like something out of a dime novel, or maybe a Nicolas Cage film. Behind the mute facade of a largely windowless neo-Gothic tower lies an ingenious system of steel vaults traveling on rails. Within those armored containers, which have been in continuous use since the Jazz Age, are stored some of New York City’s most precious objects and, presumably, a good number of its darkest secrets.

This building actually exists, and you will find it on an otherwise unremarkable stretch of Second Avenue, just north of the end of the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge. It is the Day & Meyer, Murray & Young warehouse, and since it opened in 1928 it has been the storage building of choice for many of New York’s wealthiest families, most prestigious art dealers and grandest museums.

The company’s early client list reads like a condensation of the New York Social Register, with names like Astor and Auchincloss, du Pont and Guggenheim, Havemeyer and Vanderbilt prominent. The press baron William Randolph Hearst stored entire rooms bought in Europe there during the construction of his castle at San Simeon, Calif.

Congrats to Mark for the story, and another job well done.

It’s cold today, not autumn chilly but the start of winter cold. Last day of what has been an enjoyable baseball season and I am sorry to see it end.

I saw these guys on Broadway when I got out of the subway, walked over and felt the ground shake beneath me. A good feeling, watching men work, the ground vibrating.

Where else but Retronaut?

More NYC goodness from Vivian Maier (via Retronaut):

It was dark when I got up to write this morning. Before I got started, I checked my e-mail and learned about Hunter S. Thompson, last night’s game, and that my friend’s dog died yesterday. Later, I heard my wife get up and go to the bathroom and when she was finished, I got up and followed her into the bedroom. She called after our cat, Moe Green, who usually joins her in the morning, but it was me instead and I leaned down and hugged her after she got back in bed and under the covers.

When I got to the subway station I talked about the game with the token booth clerk. He’s my friend and he told me that in January he is switching stations. “You’re the only one I’ve told so far,” he said. I learned about the best stations (238 and 215) and the worst stations (242 and 231) to work uptown.  On the way downtown, I read about Wild Bill Hickok and wagon trains, a man whore and whisky. The story was interrupted by a mother sitting next to me. She scolded her daughter about using pen instead of pencil in a school workbook. “You should never, ever use a pen, ever.” Then she read airfare rates from the newspaper and asked her kid where she’d like to this winter.

It was cool in midtown when I got off the train and my eyes followed a woman with short blond hair, a long, beige skirt and red shoes, as I walked up to the street. On Broadway, I saw a family standing on the corner looking confused and speaking in French. I asked them if they needed any help and gave them directions to Central Park and spoke a few words in French and felt good about that. I thought about everything I’d already read or seen already as I walked to work to begin the day.

My mother has a hard time sitting still. Even when she sits down to relax, her hands are busy with something–she’ll smooth out the edges of a napkin, or turn the pages of a magazine. She used to sew when we were kids, by hand and also with a machine, but I never saw her knit. I’m not sure why it didn’t appeal to her but I know many women, including The Wife,  love to knit (and some men dig it, too). They find the practice calming and productive, though I also hear The Wife curse and growl when she’s messed-up a pattern; that’s when she undoes a bunch of work and starts again.

It would drive me mad, but it doesn’t stop her, and when she’s finished, with a hat or a scarf, she’s got something handmade to give as a gift. This gives her a kind of satisfaction that is hard to replace.

Saw this on the train last night and I wondered what those balls of yarn will become.

[Featured image by Darwin.Wins]

I love the shots of the wet city streets in “Taxi Driver.”  They have an almost hallucinatory feel. I thought of those images today on my way to work, when the morning looks like night, the neon lights bouncing off the pavement.

Ah, the Old Days…

I remember it well.

Recognize most all of these spots. This one here (below) was on 49th street between Broadway and 7th Avenue. When I first worked as a messenger in the Brill Building, summer of ’88, you couldn’t walk a city block without running into a porno theater. I remember making runs from 49th and Broadway down to the Technicolor lab which was on 44th street between 8th and 9th, seeing the viles of crack cocaine scattered along the sidewalk, and being propositioned by the hookers with bruises on their legs and arms. I moved fast in those days.

This trip down memory lane has been brought to you by Mitch O’Connell. In six parts: one, two, three, four, five, and six.

Bernice Abbott (1954)

New York in the Sixties, by James Jowers.

Retronaut wins again (and so do we).

And So. We didn’t sleep well, ok.  And yeah, we’ve got all day to wait before greeting Mr. Burnett tonight. Fine. At least we’ve got a game to watch. And anything can happen.

[Photo Credit: Martin Fuchs and Joel Zimmer]

It was warm and humid in New York until yesterday evening after a rain. Then, the autumn was back in the air. And the coolness is still there today although it’s not cold. But it is playoff weather and for Yankee fans the change to fall means more baseball. This won’t last forever, the Yankees making the playoffs annually, but it has been a constant in New York life for a generation now and you have to be a selfish fool not to take a moment to breath it in and give thanks.

[Photo Credit: I Spy NYC]

From Glenn Stout: “Hangovers were instantaneous, severe and violent.”

I wondered about being hungover as I passed this guy today and felt the ground vibrate.

More from Stout:

Mike Torrez screamed “I’m off the hook!” Darrell Johnson was sprayed with champagne in the Met clubhouse. Bill Buckner danced a jig on his ranch in Idaho, while Carl Crawford, Jonathan Papelbon and a cast of thousands not named Jacoby Ellsbury pushed Pesky aside, their careers distilled into a single moment, the lead of their obituaries already written. The whole 2011 roster elbowed their way past Stanley and Schiraldi and Galehouse and Willoughby. Don Zimmer, Joe McCarthy, Joe Cronin, John McNamara and Grady Little welcomed Terry Francona to the brotherhood while Joe Maddon looked on in sympathy, Buck Showalter grinned and pushed the pin into the voodoo doll a little deeper and Theo Epstein felt the pain and tried to peel the target off his forehead. Robert Andino joined Aaron Boone and Mookie and Bucky as an improbable villain and regional epithet. The dark corner deep in the heart of all Red Sox fans everywhere, the one that appeared to have healed got ripped open and suddenly seemed a little darker, a lot more crowded, and a whole lot more unpleasant.

More than one Boston fan woke the next morning and either logged on or turned on the television or clicked on the radio to confirm that the ultimate nightmare had indeed taken place. It had.

In the elevator this morning with my neighbor, Bee. She’s a nurse and we sometimes meet on our way to work. She is a zaftig Puerto Rican with a big smile. Got an easy laugh. Bee’s also a huge movie fan so I mention the upcoming George Harrison documentary by Martin Scorsese.

“Oh, I love Rock n Roll,” Bee said. “I was one of the only Latina’s that did back then. You don’t believe me? Inagaddadavida, baby!”

I remember waiting for the subway once with my grandfather. 81st Street, Museum of Natural History stop.  He walked to the edge of the platform and leaned over to see if a train was coming. That image is frozen in my mind. He was not a physical man and I was convinced he would tip over and fall over, down to the tracks. He didn’t. When the train came, we got on and an older guy kept looking at me and I thought he was going to mug us.

Mug. That was a word that was always on my mind as a kid in New York. I don’t hear it so much anymore. Not “jack” or “rob.”  Mug. Whenever I was on the subway I’d try to guess who would mug me and how I could escape.

[Photo Credit: Bruce Davidson]

Ah, if only we had a time machine and could go back and sit in the Polo Grounds. Man, that’d be nice.

[Photo via The Mighty Flynn]

On my way to the subway this morning I see a bus trying to make a left turn on a narrow street. But a car going the other way is blocking it. They both stop and soon there are several cars behind the car. The bus driver folds her arms and waits.

The woman driving the car blinks first and does a u-turn to let the bus pass.

Take a New York Minute out to look at this great photo gallery of the disappearing face of our city. From Retronaut, where else? Oh, and dig the book, by James and Karla Murray.