Lady and the bridge

One of my favorite views in the city is looking out the mouth of the Hudson River at the harbor, bookended by the Statue of Liberty and the Verrazzano Bridge. We almost had an apartment with this view, but in the time it took us to decide, someone else signed the lease. (I know all these look the same, but they're each a little different and I couldn't decide, so what the heck, I put 'em all up.)





This one doesn't have the bridge, but does have both the inbound and outbound Staten Island ferries.

Sprayed K

Wheel

I walk past this every day and for some reason I'm alwasy impressed by the mechanical-ness of it. Maybe it's the way the chain is draped.

View north

Seaportland

They are building so many apartments at once on Front Street, it's like they're constructing some kind of Gangs of New York theme park.

Sex Dog!

There can be no question that this is in fact sex dog. I don't know why I'm always so delighted to see him. There's just something honestly funny about a little dog with no leash who wanders around and lives in a sex shop.

Downstream

If you toggle between these two (pardoning the awkward color difference) you can get a feel for what all that moving ice looks like.

Drift

World Financial Center marina courtyard

Above/Below

I love this view of the grimey subway below and polished marble lobby hallway above. Making it harder was that there's nothing at the curb at that point, no parked cars, no street sign, no newspaper boxes to set the camera on to take the picture more steadily. So it's a free hand flashless shot in the dark. These are the best two out of more than ten. I may go back another time.

This vehicle makes wide turns

The biggest loser of the morning award goes to this guy who thought he could sneak on the inside of a turning bus. Smoosh. This is right in front of the Hoboken train station where the traffic has only one way to go and this big now-disabled bus is blocking it.

Where does the snow go?

On Liberty Street there are huge mountains of snow, a few big orange front loaders, and this weird looking orange dumpster looking thing. If I'm not mistaken, this is a snow melter. The big orange tube in the middle is a pipe that goes into a manhole cover. They dump the snow in, it's blasted with heat, and the water goes into the sewer.

There is the end of the huge pile of snow. Unfortunately the shift was just ending as I got there and they were cleaning the melter so I didn't get to see what it looks like in operation. Is there a lot of steam? Maybe tomorrow I'll see them in action.

And this is me about to be squashed by a huge orange truck.

Where does the snow go?

Ice floes

I have a lot of ice photos. I'm trying to figure out how to group them in some order.

This is in the shadows of the ferry terminal where the ice is trapped and not moving with the current of the river so it's holding nice and still for a better focused shot.


The best part of this stage of freezing on the river is the sound. If you're able to get over to the Hudson, try to get to a spot that juts out, like the ferry terminal, or in the case of the bottom two, the noreast corner of Battery Park City. Some of the ice gets stuck and the rest slides by, make the most remarkable sound -a mix of broken glass and wind chimes.

What I'd actually hoped to show in the bottom two photos is that half is moving pretty quickly with the current and the other half is still. I don't have an f stop to make that happen, but you can still see that on the right the trapezoid is in both shots, but the left side has changed. It's really something to see.

Comparison

Albany @ Esplanade

Scaffolding is for wussies

You never know what you're going to see when you look out the window in New York City.





I have no idea what these guys are doing. It's not a stunt, they're real workers. One guy was clearly working on the building's face. Another guy was doing something that required he push against the building. It was the third guy's job to push on him to keep him from drifting away from the building. I don't know if the window washer things are out of style now or what. They were out there for a good long time.

Locked in

Sorry man, boating season is officially over.
(Hmmm, somehow this picture went from being kinda blue to being kinda purple. Obviously I'm having a bit of a struggle with the new snowy winter colors.)

More snow street scenes

Grapes for eyes, lime wedge for a mouth, clearly more culinary than your average snowman. I wish I could juice the contrast a bit more to make him stand out better.

Today's snow photo

Since I posted so many yesterday and since Blogger is being really slow to upload (probably because everyone in the entire northeast U.S. is uploading their snow photos) and because I'm starting to go a little cross eyed looking at how the digital camera interprets colors in white snow and also because this is probably my favorite snow photo so far... this is today's snow photo.

All the news that's fit to blog

What's this? A zillion firetrucks on Chambes Street? I should check it out.

But it's also cold as heck out, so first, a quick stop into Taylor's bakery for some outstanding warm cider, pumkin courant cake and a black-bottomed cheesecake muffin.

Wow, this might actually be real news, there's a CBS reporter.

(Foreshadowing... she's reporting from in front of a Subway subshop.)

We could smell it a block away. I kept looking up thinking it was an apartment on fire. Then we saw the thick plume of smoke from the subway grate.

We didn't go into the station, but it's a fair bet the whole thing was full of smoke. We could smell it all the way to Broadway and around Barclay. (This is Chambers and Church by the way.)

Naturally every bystander had a camera. This woman said she lived on the street and had been there from the start taking pictures. We'll have to keep an eye out for them.

The local news just ran a tease for the 11 o'clock broadcast coming up. One of the headlines was that today was one of the deadliest days for the FDNY since 9/11. Obviously, if anyone died in this fire I'll delete this jerky post. I want to make it clear that in being silly here I'm making fun of how bloggers and New Yorkers in general take a casual approach to dire situations. I do not in any way intend to belittle the effort of the firefighters who are out there freezing their butts off, breathing unimaginable toxicity and risking their lives while I sip cider and snap photos of piles of snow. Here's to them.

Whole lotta snow

And a whole lotta snow photos.