From our pal Diane Firstman comes This Technology Has Been Disconnected:

Saul Leiter: “I started out as a fashion photographer. One cannot say that I was successful but there was enough work to keep me busy. I collaborated with Harper’s Bazaar and other magazines. I had work and I made a living. At the same time, I took my own photographs.

“I spent a great deal of my life being ignored. I was always very happy that way. Being ignored is a great privilege. That is how I think I learnt to see what others do not see and to react to situations differently. I simply looked at the world, not really prepared for anything.”

A Leiter gallery over at On-Line Browsing.

Questions: Taken literally, what’s incorrect in the final scene of Annie Hall (shot from inside O’Neal’s Balloon)?

After that it got pretty late, and, we both had to go, but it was great seeing Annie again. I realized what a terrific person she was and how much fun it was just knowing her, and I thought of that old joke. You know, this guy goes to his psychiatrist and says, “Doc, my brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.” And the doctor says, “Well why don’t you turn him in?” The guy says, “I would, but I need the eggs.” Well, I guess that’s pretty much now how I feel about relationships– you know, they’re totally irrational and crazy and absurd, but, I guess we keep going through it because most of us need the eggs.

Answer: It wasn’t late at all. If you notice the light, it’s coming from the east, which means this scene was shot early in the morning.

Not that it makes any difference…unless you are an anal New Yorker.

“That’s a polite word for what you are.”

Celebrating 125 years. 

[Photo Credit: David Handschuh, N.Y. Daily News]

Oh, man, the St. Mark’s Playhouse. Cue: Memories.

Over at Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York check out this interview with East Village photographer, Ann Sanfedele.

Museumuseum gives us a huge treat:

Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th street

by Todd Webb (April 23, 1948)

Playing around. Picture by Leonard Freed, 1978.

A moment in time, captured by Gordon Parks (1952).

New York stories…from these two pictures by one of my favorite photographers: Elliott Erwitt.

Here’s our pal Mark Lamster on the Seagram building:

Though it now seems an implacable and timeless monument, a bronzed monolith standing resolutely behind its well-proportioned plaza, the tower’s existence was by no means ordained. In June 1953 Ms. Lambert was a 26-year-old recently divorced sculptor living in Paris, a self-imposed exile from her native Montreal and from her domineering father.

It was then that she reeled off a missive to her father, a response to his own letter outlining plans for a New York skyscraper. She was not impressed with the undistinguished modern box his architects proposed and let him know: “This letter starts with one word repeated very emphatically,” she wrote, “NO NO NO NO NO.”

Seven more pages followed, in which Ms. Lambert alternately scolded, cajoled and lectured her father on architectural history and civic responsibility. There was “nothing whatsoever commendable” in the proposed design, she wrote. “You must put up a building which expresses the best of the society in which you live, and at the same time your hopes for the betterment of this society.”

[Photo Credit: IPhoneography]

Street Photography by Matt Weber.

A real New York story by Corey Kilgannon in the Times:

Eli Miller, 79, New York City’s senior seltzer man, hoisted crate after crate of seltzer — weighing 70 pounds apiece — into his van and then draped himself over them.

“I’m running on fumes — the reason I work is, I just can’t stay home,” said Mr. Miller, who has been delivering seltzer in Brooklyn for more than a half-century.

He can afford to retire, but that would mean his customers, many of whom have been with him for decades, might have to resort to store-bought seltzer.

“I don’t want them to have to drink that dreck you buy in the supermarket,” he said, using the Yiddish term for dirt. “So I guess I’ll retire when Gabriel blows his horn.”

Gothamist salutes the Woolworth Building.

I love this. I wonder how much spaghetti you got for a quarter? A bowl, a plate? And how much for seconds?

[Photograph by Ida Wyman]

I went couch shopping with The Wife a few weeks ago and came away with this–I would never want to be a furniture salesman. Especially the guys up on the ninth floor at Macy’s. Man, it was depressing. But I’d sell couches any day before washing windows high in the sky. Now, there’s a tough job.

[Photo Via: Inge Morath  and Eye Heart New York]

Stupefaction celebrates the end of an era as Bleecker Bob’s closes for good.

The freaks come out at night.

[Picture by Ed Vebell via This Isn't Happiness]

An oral history of New York Food.

Oh, baby.

I want to be a part of it.