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:

Spring Training

Now that I’m caught up with baseball outings from 2011, we can finally get ready for the regular season. In 2011 we saw the Diamondbacks vs. Giants at Chase Field in Phoenix, Arizona, the Phillies vs. Braves, Phillies vs. Rangers and Phillies vs. Cubs at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, and the Yankees vs. Red Sox at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.

It occurs to me that we saw some pretty good teams in 2011 — I definitely didn’t expect the D-Backs to be that good when we saw them back in April. We saw four playoff teams play. In fact, I challenge anyone to have seen teams with a better combined record than we saw in 2011 (minimum five games? can we create a variable to take into account how many total games one saw?). Let’s tease this out:

Arizona Diamondbacks: 94-68
San Francisco Giants: 86-76
Philadelphia Phillies: 102-60
Atlanta Braves: 89–73
Texas Rangers: 96-66
Chicago Cubs: 71-91 (you can always depend on the Cubs to screw up at least one thing a season)
New York Yankees: 97-65
Boston Red Sox: 90-72

Total win-loss record: 725-571 for a .559 winning percentage.

Well, did any of you do any better?

Mom and Dad were in town while the Red Sox were playing the Yankees and they had never been to see the new stadium, so we went early. I had never seen Monument Park, and neither had they, so we got to see that. Much has been said about the giant Steinbrenner plaque in the center of everything. Here it is:

We also had time to visit the Yankees Museum with all the hardware:

The collection of signed baseballs from everyone who ever played for the organization is actually very cool. Here’s Cory Lidle, who crashed the plane he was flying into an Upper East Side building in 2006:

And I searched out Ian Kennedy’s ball:

This was the first full season after Steinbrenner died, so there were a lot of tributes to him around the park (in addition to the oversized plaque in Monument Park:

Oh, and we had good seats, for once:

This was Jorge Posada’s last season, which we didn’t know at the time:

And “We Want Pie” is a shoutout to A.J. Burnett, if I’m not mistaken (yup, that’s it); that’s all behind us now as well:

The Red Sox won, by the way; A-Rod struck out to end the game:

But What Is It About Model Trains And Christmas?

The New York Botanical Garden’s Holiday Train Show is one of my favorite things about Christmas in New York. I mean, yes, there is that gigantic tree in Rockefeller Center and, sure, the Christmas windows all around Midtown are a sight to behold, but there’s nothing like taking in the collection of 140 New York City landmarks entirely constructed from plant material (!) in the Haupt Conservatory.

I mean, have you ever seen a montage of Midtown skyscrapers built from plant material?

Dr. Chi hipped me to it a while back shortly after I moved here and that was his point — there is this thing that happens each year where people make replicas of New York City landmarks entirely from plant material. He probably said something along the lines of, “The original Penn Station constructed from twigs — twigs!”:

The old version of the old Yankee Stadium:

Rockefeller Plaza’s sunken plaza:

And my new favorite, JFK’s Terminal 5:

Here’s the original:

Are the Barney’s windows fun? No question! But the heartfelt, homespun tradition at NYBG is really something special. It would be demeaning to call it “outsider art,” but the near-obsessive attention to detail evokes that spirit. And I suppose to a certain extent, the inclusion of model trains is a dog whistle of sorts for the like-minded among us who celebrate that spirit. So be it. Let the Lionel-Industrial Complex have its time of year. But really, a G-gauge Brooklyn Trolley is only gilding the lily. The train show runs between mid-November and mid-January at NYBG (details).