June 2011

If you stare deeply enough into your drink, messages appear:

Custom House in Lower Manhattan:

Even though we missed the scheduled tour, one of the park ranger people let us into the ornate Collector’s Reception Room:

Back in June, the Freedom Tower was still short enough to fit into the camera frame:

I already talked about visiting Yankee Stadium.

The awesome Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens:

I could watch the exhibit showing how they produce a live baseball game for for hours:

The 36th Avenue Subway Station in Astoria.

Block Drugs on Second Avenue:

The remnants of Mars Bar also on Second Avenue:

We already talked about seeing the Phillies play the Cubs.

There’s a lot of stuff behind fences in the East Village. Albert’s Garden:

And the New York Marble Cemetery:

They were even using St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery for some sort of film shoot.

Prince Street in Lower Manhattan:

(Funny detail: The Google Street View up right now is from right around when I went walking around there — theirs is from July 2011 — so all the billboards look the same . . .)

There’s a great view of Union Square from the Whole Foods cafe on the second floor. They also have a bathroom you can use:

Astoria Park at dusk on the longest day of the year; this is at 8:40 in the evening (I knew there was a reason I took this but it took a while to remember):

Staring out the front door at Coppelia on 14th Street:

There’s nothing more depressing than an emergency room entrance at an abandoned hospital:

Well, OK, maybe some things are less depressing . . .

I honestly don’t remember what interested me about 60 Spring Street:

Was it because it was a blue jean store or something? Who knows . . .

The Astoria Market at the Beer Garden:

It took me two years to get two pictures of the San Antonio Abate Festival on Ditmars Boulevard in Astoria. Maybe in another year I’ll put a link up to the page:

A Bunch Of Random Updates (Read: Catching Up)

First part of 2011 . . . I’m caught up to about May now . . .

We saw the Supermoon on March 19, 2011 from the Westfield New Jersey Transit station:

Hard to believe how little snow there was this year, especially compared to last year:

One thing I’ll miss/won’t miss about our old neighborhood is how many film shoots there were there:

There’s a sort of park/playground in the old neighborhood that was created from a sliver of land leftover from the Queens-Midtown Tunnel called Old Hickory Park, which the Parks Department seems to have disowned, at least judging by the fact that it’s somehow disappeared from their website. The name is a goof on Jackson Avenue, “Old Hickory” being Andrew Jackson’s nickname. Stupidly esoteric:

Robert Moses did a lot of neat things in the New York City area. He also oversaw a bunch of ridiculous orphan roads. The Prospect Expressway, for example:

Blockbuster closed and some guys eventually took away the sign:

Back when we lived in Astoria we called this passage to the municipal parking lot “Deuce Alley” because it smelled like people took shits back there. Now it’s gussied up all fancy and such:

I love the fact that there are public restrooms at the end of the subway lines. This is graffiti from the Ditmars Boulevard Station on the N/Q line in Queens. The idea of having sex in one of these restrooms boggles my mind; I can’t think of a worse place to do it:

On the other end of the spectrum, Michael Bolton graffiti at Sweet Afton, which is where we celebrated Kawama:

When Theaters Become Duane Reades . . . And Chase Banks And New York Sports Clubs

This Times article about the Millennium Theater in Brighton Beach was interesting — so many theaters have been shuttered over the years that it’s cool to see a theater being used for something approximating what it was meant for — i.e., some performance of some sort.

It’s cool because so many theaters are now Duane Reades or whatnot, to which @RICANROLL tweeted like the theater on 30th Avenue and Steinway is now a Duane Reade. Yup, that’s exactly which one I was thinking. We walked by it yesterday:

In this case, the Astoria Sixplex (which I actually went to once or twice before it closed in 2002) actually became a Duane Reade, a Chase bank and a New York Sports Club.

I’m not even upset that @RICANROLL fucked me by spoiling a Walking Dead plot point.