New York Photographs

View of Manhattan from Newtown Creek

All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
-W. B. Yeats, "Easter 1916" [full text off-site]

Who has not been affected by the events of September 11, 2001? Things have changed utterly. I still live in the New York area, but now I am outside of Manhattan. The photographs immediately above were shot either in July-August 2001 or on September 11. I took the Circle Line Boat around Manhattan during a vacation day. On September 11, I happened to carry my camera in my pocket. I was in Morningside Heights and Washington Heights, and most of my pictures didn't come out.

General Comments on New York

"It'll be a great place if they ever finish it." - O. Henry [Attributed by New-York Historical Society to Fanny Fern in a 1999 exhibition.]

I'm a hobbyist with a point and shoot camera. Until August 2001 I worked in midtown. I had lived in the southern part of Washington Heights until May 2001. All the photographs immediately above were shot between December 23 2000 and January 20, 2001, except for the tower of the George Washington Bridge. I apologize for all the views of the Empire State Building. While the Chrysler Building more perfectly weds modernism and industrial mass production with elegance (perhaps also with a brash my-skyscraper-is-bigger-than-yours), I worked a few blocks south of the ESB, so it appears in the majority of my shots. (Incidentally, if you have the chance to see Ric Burns's New York documentary, listen to the episode about the building of the ESB: it's amazing!)

Q: What is Count Dracula's favorite building?
A: The Vampire State Building.
- Children's joke [well, a joke I remember from my childhood. PWR]

Isn't it surprising that the 168th Street Armory (6th image above from left) can be a thing of beauty? I remember when Mayor Dinkens's homeless policy had more than 2,000 people warehoused here in the early 1990s. (I also remember in the early 1980s when any track runner dreaded slipping on the Armory's track: you'd look like a porcupine with all the splinters!) The Armory has seen a lot of improvements, but we're not likely to see hoity-toity antique shows in Washington Heights, like you see at the east side armory. The brickwork photo comes from the north side of the building, 169th Street. Always grim, the December 2000 blizzard lightened the façade. This is something that only That Greater Artist can show.

"What can New York --noisy, roaring, rumbling, tumbling, bustling, bustling, stormy, turbulent New York -- have to do with silence?" -Walt Whitman (quoted in Lockwood, Manhattan Moves Uptown, p. 129)

In our belief, the day for making pictures of New York has passed away, never to return. There is no alchemy in art sufficiently powerful to transmute into things of beauty towering piles of bricks and mammoth gas-holders. New York as an entirety, and under the garish light of day, has lost irrevocably the quality of picturesqueness it once possessed; but when night falls, and the great city sinks into a dimly outlined mass, overarched with the halo formed by its myriad lights, the scene changes as by magic into one of mystic beauty...." -- from Anonymous preface, but possibly by I.N. Phelps Stokes, A Catalogue of Plans and Views of New York City from 1651 to 1860, Exhibited at the Grolier Club. ([New York]: Grolier Club, 1897), p. 6.

"Hard-hearted ruthlessness is one of the keys to the city, and the wrecking ball deserves a place on the municipal seal." -Kenneth Auchinchloss, New York Revisited, p.2 (published by the bibliophilic Grolier Club in 2002).

"He [Robert Moses] liked to think big, and so does New York. He did not suffer fools, and neither does New York. He was not afraid to rip away the past to make way for the future, and New York justly prides itself on its powers of regeneration." - Ibid., p. 16.
(My stereocard collection documents a lot of that past for 1870-1915.)
(Quite a few of my photographs are now on my Flickr account.)

New York Light

I wonder about the quality of light in this city. New York's light is always duller than the desert-light of Los Angeles. The cloud ceiling in New York seems higher than in Detroit. Light changes with the movements of the sun and the seasons; the amount of cloud cover and the local architecture. The clouds that seem so much closer in the Midwest are higher in New York (we're closer to sea level)--do "ceilings" matter with light? I notice that, especially at the edges of Manhattan Island bordering the Hudson, light increases with reflection off the water. It's hard to describe and I suspect the light quality is different from what Cheever called "River Light" in the 1940s. Supposedly you don't see this river light anymore because the greater number of taller skyscrapers in midtown have cut the light. I don't know. August light in New York can be extraordinary, if you can stand the heat and humidity. The quality of light in the river parks and by the Hudson is noticeably different. (You also can find river light in many of the towns on the Hudson River, as you would find in many other river towns throughout the world. Is New York City all that different? Hard to say. Do the buildings and macadam and concrete change the light, and in what ways? I think they do, and not just creating canyons of shadow, like in the financial district. Feel free to leave a comment, or see the rest of the New York photos.)

Washington Heights

View of the George Washington Bridge from 165th Street and Fort Washington Avenue, NYC

Here's a view from my old neighborhood, shot from Fort Washington Avenue, several blocks below the George Washington Bridge (October 2000). It's amazing to think that the builders had originally planned to encase the towers in masonry but ran out of money, so the skeletal look was a money-saver. (See Robert A. M. Stern et al., New York, 1930, which has a few pages on the bridge. Unfortunately, we still have the architectural blights of the George Washington Bridge Bus Station and Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.)

I love this quotation from the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. I had been familiar with a shorter form of it, but seeing the entire paragraph, you can see why he loved the George Washington Bridge best. Some Americans might call his gallic enthusiasm 'exaggeration,' but no one can question Le Corbusier's passionate response:

East tower of the George Washington Bridge. Composite digital photograph by Paul Romaine.

"The George Washington Bridge over the Hudson is the most beautiful bridge in the world. Made of cables and steel beams, it gleams in the sky like a reversed arch. It is blessed. It is the only seat of grace in the disordered city. It is painted an aluminum color and, between water and sky, you see nothing but the bent cord supported by two steel towers. When your car moves up the ramp the two towers rise so high that it brings you happiness; their structure is so pure, so resolute, so regular that here, finally, steel architecture seems to laugh. The car reaches an unexpectedly wide apron; the second tower is very far away; innumerable vertical cables, gleaming against the sky, are suspended from the magisterial curve which swings down and then up. The rose-colored towers of New York appear, a vision whose harshness is mitigated by distance."
-Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret), When the Cathedrals were White, 1947. Quoted in Norval White and Elliot Willensky, AIA Guide to New York City, p. 527. (Emphasis added.)

Miscellaneous Photographs of New York

One of my first-ever photographs (number 26) with my then-new digital camera, looking east along 42nd Street from Sixth Avenue, towards the Chrysler building. Ask most New Yorkers to name their favorite skyscraper and it's usually the Chrysler. I find the Chrysler very difficult to shoot properly. The aluminum spire captures so much light from the sun and sky that it changes color throughout the day. When the morning sun strikes it, the spire flashes and that flash is lost by most cameras; when a thunderstorm looms, the spire reflects the gray. It mirrors many moods. (The building with curved profile is the W.R. Grace building--its twin resides on 57th between 5th and 6th Avenues.)

What is so frustrating about this digital panorama photograph, taken from the 155th Street Esplanade, is that the camera can't handle the sun's glare. On the other hand, who expects these 19th-century style lamp posts in this part of town?

Here's another frustrating photograph with a digital camera, taken May 2001 in Bryant Park, between 40th and 42nd Streets. The foreground is shadowed, while the background (the back of New York Public Library) is bathed in morning light. The person looking at the fountain adds an interesting element of serenity and contemplation. To the far right (dark brown stone with gray highlights) is the American Radiator Building, an early art deco skyscraper.

This was a lucky panorama of a tug boat on the Hudson River, from Cabrini Terrace in Washington Heights. Dusk was settling. The homeowners have very thoughtfully (and probably without permission of the City of New York) cut some trees below the terrace. One doesn't want to condone the tree-trimming, but such a view is lifting.

Looking up the Hudson River in Washington Heights. This view from Fort Tryon Park (the highest point on Manhattan), shows how much (Ed Koch's and Rudy Giuliani's) NYC Parks Commissioner Henry Stern had allowed the trees to grow. (I enjoyed Stern's policies and pranks, as well as his pro-tree policies, but I think he has to remember that humans also respond to the sublime. The Hudson is among the most sublime of America's Rivers. When I met Stern in 1999, he officially nicknamed me "Tacitus" for the Roman historian.)

Sledders in Fort Tryon Park on January 1, 2001. One of the results of the blizzard over New Years weekend. I like this photograph. It's unpretentious. (Some people have asked about the bright red on the right: there is a child in a red coat and another child carrying a red plastic sled of the same color.)

Another early morning view from Bryant Park, in early May 2001, around 7:54 a.m., looking south towards 40th Street, the American Radiator Building (center), and the Empire State Building. I like how the trees in the eastern end of the park framed the buildings. The problem with the digital camera's inability to differentiate shadows and sunlight actually worked to my advantage here.

"Ah the shame of being photographed on-the-sly!" (My old cat, Meow, being purr-sued by papparrazzi)

Leave a comment on this page or the photographs, or see all of the New York photos.

Other picture pages on my site include:

Table of NYC photos. Table of all of my NYC photographs on this site.
Photo galleries. Links to my pages of photographs with links on equipment, etc. (Also has music links, for lack of another place.)
The Martyrs Monument Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn (2000) (offsite at Rootsweb)
Ossining, N.Y. notes and pictures (offsite at Rootsweb)
Stereocards and Stereoviews. Links on stereocards with images, mostly from New York, 1860-1910.
Cape Breton Island (Nova Scotia) Photographs
Off-site: Skyscraper Museum of New York.
Off-site: New York Skyscrapers at NBCinteractive. (See the ESB section, which includes a diagram of the 18 different lighting patterns.) Has many good links.
Off-site: Pictorial Essay on the building of the Empire State Building, from the New York Public Library.

Other Pictures (non-narrative)

There are also a couple pictures from Ireland and Los Angeles inserted in the middle of this page: Notes on Databases on the Web, and an ashamed pointy-eared devil in my Web page accessibility and Usability page.

Leave a comment on this page or the photographs.

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	Miscellaneous Photographs of New York One of my first-ever photographs (number 26) with my then-new digital camera, looking east along 42nd Street from Sixth Avenue, towards the Chrysler building. Ask most New Yorkers to name their favorite skyscraper and it's usually the Chrysler. I find the Chrysler very difficult to shoot properly. The aluminum spire captures so much light from the sun and sky that it changes color throughout the day. When the morning sun strikes it, the spire flashes and that flash is lost by most cameras; when a thunderstorm looms, the spire reflects the gray. It mirrors many moods. (The building with curved profile is the W.R. Grace building--its twin resides on 57th between 5th and 6th Avenues.)
	What is so frustrating about this digital panorama photograph, taken from the 155th Street Esplanade, is that the camera can't handle the sun's glare. On the other hand, who expects these 19th-century style lamp posts in this part of town?

	Here's another frustrating photograph with a digital camera, taken May 2001 in Bryant Park, between 40th and 42nd Streets. The foreground is shadowed, while the background (the back of New York Public Library) is bathed in morning light. The person looking at the fountain adds an interesting element of serenity and contemplation. To the far right (dark brown stone with gray highlights) is the American Radiator Building, an early art deco skyscraper.
	This was a lucky panorama of a tug boat on the Hudson River, from Cabrini Terrace in Washington Heights. Dusk was settling. The homeowners have very thoughtfully (and probably without permission of the City of New York) cut some trees below the terrace. One doesn't want to condone the tree-trimming, but such a view is lifting.
	Looking up the Hudson River in Washington Heights. This view from Fort Tryon Park (the highest point on Manhattan), shows how much (Ed Koch's and Rudy Giuliani's) NYC Parks Commissioner Henry Stern had allowed the trees to grow. (I enjoyed Stern's policies and pranks, as well as his pro-tree policies, but I think he has to remember that humans also respond to the sublime. The Hudson is among the most sublime of America's Rivers. When I met Stern in 1999, he officially nicknamed me "Tacitus" for the Roman historian.)
	Sledders in Fort Tryon Park on January 1, 2001. One of the results of the blizzard over New Years weekend. I like this photograph. It's unpretentious. (Some people have asked about the bright red on the right: there is a child in a red coat and another child carrying a red plastic sled of the same color.)
	Another early morning view from Bryant Park, in early May 2001, around 7:54 a.m., looking south towards 40th Street, the American Radiator Building (center), and the Empire State Building. I like how the trees in the eastern end of the park framed the buildings. The problem with the digital camera's inability to differentiate shadows and sunlight actually worked to my advantage here.