Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

Upper West Side, Manhattan.

Upper East Side, Manhattan.

The swamps of Jersey, from the Turnpike.
I've been curious about that sad little "WMCA 570" building. Of course there's a ridiculously detailed site about it.

The Skyway.

Heiferman: The gingerbread man.

Spotted in a bookstore: September 12th: We Knew Everything Would Be All Right, by the first grade students of H. Byron Masterson Elementary in Kennett, Missouri. I read the whole book, hoping to find the secret to the authors' confidence. There were some things about the sun coming out, and the president. None of it was very reassuring.

Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

Did you get an e-mail yesterday with the subject line "Jewish real estate entrepreneurs swindle Holocaust survivors" (or any other unsolicited mail) from reporternotebook@aol.com? Are you reading this after Googling for info on this intriguing message? If so I want to hear from you. See e-mail link at right. (There's a potential story in this. Stay tuned.)

Update: See 1.14.2003 for a follow-up.

Overkill, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Park Slope, Brooklyn.

14th Street transfer tunnel, Manhattan.

Old maps of the subway system from nycsubway.org.

Mac-fanatic dad forces daughter to star in Apple infomercial disguised as a personal home page. Just wait until she hits her rebel years and goes Windows.

Abandoned platform in the Chambers St. JMZ station, Manhattan.

Mind-boggling reader e-mail.

From: "Ray Gould" <...@concentric.net>
Subject: St. Francisville
Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2002 22:20:24 -0600

Dear David,

I stumbled upon your website and found your pictures from your travels through West Feliciana Parish and St. Francisville [Louisiana]. I grew up in St. Francisville during the 1960's and your pictures brought back fond memories.

In particular, when you took that wrong turn and ended up at the bridge with water flowing over it,  you found a place that really brings back memories.

My parents owned approximately 60 acres located about 30 minutes drive from that bridge. While I was growing up in the '60's, my mother would take me and my four brothers down to that bridge to play in the sand. It was the closest thing to a beach that we could reach via a short drive. (Yeah, that bridge has been here since at least the mid '60's.)

Back then (and probably still now), the bridge was referred to as "The Low Water Bridge." I do not know the origin of that moniker, but I suspect it originated from the fact that the creek could not be forded unless the water was low.

The sunken truck has been there for years. I've never heard a definitive (nor reliable) story about how it came to be there, but many legends have been spun about that event. Suffice it to say that the truth is probably far more boring than the fiction that has been inspired by the water flowing through its ruined windshield....

Regards,

Ray Gould
Metairie, Louisiana

More subways.

Roy Lichtenstein's relatively new mural in a weird, not-very-visible spot in the Times Square station.

Fifty-year-old anti-littering notice in Park Slope.

Sorry, no Wi-Fi.

Gawker went live today. It's another of Nick Denton's efforts to turn weblogs into profitable media outlets. This one is highly Manhattan-centric and kinda fun. I like that they've paid attention to the visuals, using a healthy dose of images and a clean design by Jason.

Did you know that the legendary Strand Book Store sells books by the foot? For when you just want to look well-read.

Subways.

Ice booming in Minnesota (1.3MB MP3). A one-minute vacation courtesy of Quiet American. Via Heiferman.

Remarkably, this is not an Onion story.

Subways. Keep 'em rolling, please.

The photos on this site are licensed under a
Creative Commons License.


Creative Commons and its new licenses are a great idea. They're all about the notion that an overdose of copyright restrictions is no good for anyone, including creative people. Some examples of how the licenses might work.

The photos of the Irish Hunger Monument inspired a bunch of mail. See below or here for some interesting feedback.

I'm the 'reader' who inspired this NYT correction. Glenn complained about the paper's long-ago abuse of his name at the Yale blog conference last month, so in the interest of truth and accuracy I sent them a note about it. Hey, it's only eight years late. (Note mysterious lack of gratitude.)

Irish Hunger Memorial, Battery Park City, Manhattan.
The monument consists of a meadow...

...and crumbling cottage, transplanted from Ireland and dropped onto a giant sloping platform.

It commemorates the famine of the late 1840s, which killed more than a million people and was made much worse by repressive British policies.

Reviews of the monument: pro and con.

Update: A reporter for an Irish-American newspaper wrote in with some dirt on the memorial:

Certain things were thrown into the memorial mix that the artist Brian Tolle disliked... because they make the memorial that much closer to theme-parky-ness.

The negative review you linked to mentioned the Celtic cross, and I recall interviewing the artist who was shuddering in horror at the arrival of the same cross from some Ancient Order of Hibernians group -- also, each county in Ireland sent stones carved with the county names, another addition that he fought to have excluded, in vain. Monaghan was especially unhelpful because they sent a neatly carved cube, such as one would never find in an Irish field.

I like the memorial myself, but I do find it a little kitschy...

I like it too. It's a little confused, and it looks positively menacing from the river walk, but at least it's not a statue on a pedestal.

A great mirror shot.

From Battery Park City, Manhattan.

Financial District, Manhattan.

So sad and true: Technical Difficulties.

Hunkabutta.com: Walking billboard Santa, Shibuya, Tokyo.

(I just realized it's quite easy to hack Mike's captions. But that's not very nice.)

Around the World Trade Center site.

I wrote two things for today's NYT business section. The first is the "New Economy" column: Sites Become Dependent on Google. It's a look at how some commercial sites are coming to rely on Google referrals for traffic and sales.

Also a little dig at the user-unfriendly e-mail policies of MP3.com: Enter Maze, and Find the Opt-Out Cheese. If you want to listen to music on the site, you have to provide an e-mail address, which is immediately signed up for six mailing lists. Getting removed from them can be tricky.

Upper West Side, Manhattan.

Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Good Experience interviews Ze Frank, who dances well and has a great site. I never get tired of stories about sudden Web fame.

I went out to dinner, and when I came back, I was getting an e-mail every three or four minutes from people I didn't know, saying, "I love this, who are you?" So that was strange.

Park Slope, Brooklyn.

From a NYT article on the history of the Queensboro Bridge, which opened in 1909:

There were 235 applications from people who sought to be the first to jump from the bridge -- 168 from professional bridge jumpers, 34 from inventors with devices to test, 9 would-be suicides and 24 unemployed men who thought the gesture would improve their chances of work.

A year ago: Milan, etc.

Upper West Side, Manhattan.

A friend in South Africa writes:

Attached is a rather pixellated image of the Solar Eclipse that occurred over Southern Africa between 07:30 and 09:30 this morning, taken with a 4x digital zoom through 3 layers of reflective light filter, otherwise know as the silver packaging hastily ripped from a punnet of Tanganda Teabags.

Central Park, Manhattan.

John Hiler of Microcontent News and Xanga fame just launched Cityblogs New York, with info and comments on upcoming films, talks, readings etc. He's looking for bloggers who want to cover various beats for the site. The plan is to have it make money someday.

Last weekend at my hometown's indie record store I came across the Philadelphia Independent, a broadsheet newspaper that's kind of a cross between McSweeney's and the Observer, although it's less derivative and more fun than that makes it sound. The paper doesn't have a Web site (?!) but you can read about it here and here (scroll down).

Astoria, Queens.
In a huge breakthrough, the world's music companies have created a low-cost mix-CD service with access to every song ever recorded. During this soft-launch period the service is only available through a guy in Queens who hand-stencils his ads.

Ruavista has loads of photos for the street- and sign-obsessed, including thorough coverage of advertising on the trees of Buenos Aires. Via New Things, which is always coming up with new things.