These massive* winter melons are being held in place by an odd assortment of household items: an old onion sack, what looks to be a dish drying rack, and the front half of a desk fan cage.
* Massive? Pshhh. Compare these puny specimens to ones from Vietnam!
One nice feature that's hard to see in this photo: the sliding bathroom door lock on the trunk.
This hunk of junk is apparently at least somewhat mobile. According to a Street View image from October, it managed to move about one car length up the block since my visit.
The rooftop Eiffel Tower is a Long Island Expressway landmark, but the real star of the show is the hotel's amazingly ostentatious lobby, which you can now explore in Street View! (Perhaps you recall early on in this walk, when I was startled by the talking fish tank at right.)
The Queens Museum in Flushing Meadows Park was originally the New York City Building at the 1939-40 World's Fair. From 1946 to 1950, before the United Nations moved to its current headquarters in Manhattan, the U.N. General Assembly met here. The building reprised its World's Fair role in 1964-65, featuring an amazing exhibit that's still on view today: the Panorama of the City of New York, a 9,335-square-foot three-dimensional scale model of the five boroughs that includes some 895,000 individual buildings — "the world’s largest architectural model of a city". (The Panorama is supposedly up-to-date as of 1992, but at least one building was missing when I last visited in 2011: the Bronx's circa-1963 Executive Towers.)
At left is the old New York State Pavilion from the 1964-65 World's Fair. You can see the observation towers as well as part of the Tent of Tomorrow. Just out of frame is the third part of the pavilion: the Theaterama, which is now the Queens Theatre. (As we learned a couple of years ago, the Theaterama was the site of Andy Warhol's Thirteen Most Wanted Men, an ultimately nixed artwork with a fascinating story.)
Before the World's Fairs, Flushing Meadows wasn't a park at all, but rather a vast ash dump run by a Tammany crony named Fishhooks McCarthy. This befouled landscape was immortalized in the pages of The Great Gatsby:
About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally, a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.Realizing that a tremendous amount of money would be required to convert the old dump into parkland, Robert Moses seized on the idea of holding a World's Fair here in 1939, using the financial resources available for the fair to level the ash mounds, dig out lakes, and lay down topsoil, turning what Moses described as "a cloud of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night" into one of the largest parks in New York City.
On July 4, 1940, as Britain battled Nazi Germany overseas, a ticking canvas bag was found in the British Pavilion at the New York World's Fair. Detectives Joseph Lynch and Ferdinand Socha of the NYPD bomb squad were called in to examine it; shortly after they determined it was a real bomb, it exploded and killed them. The identity and motivation of the bomber(s) remain a mystery to this day. (Here's a closer look at the plaque.)
This formerly kinetic sculpture was created by Jose de Rivera for the 1964-65 World’s Fair here in Flushing Meadows Park. It originally rotated about its pedestal, providing viewers with an ever-changing perspective on the piece. According to the Parks Department, its motor was replaced in 1992-93, but I don't know when it was last operational.
Two time capsules, one from each World's Fair held here in Flushing Meadows, are buried deep beneath this marker, to be opened after 5,000 years. 5,000 years! That's like two and a half Jesuses from now. How on earth is anyone at that time going to know where these things are and that they're due for an opening? According to a brochure from the 1964-65 fair:
Some day 5000 years hence in a monastery in Tibet, or perhaps in a library in Manhattan, a book will provide the key. The "Book of Record," printed on permanent paper with special ink, describes in exact terms the latitude and longitude of the burying place of the capsules. Some 3,000 copies of the "Book of Record" are in libraries, museums, monasteries and other safe repositories around the world. . . .Here's a great booklet about the first capsule from the 1939-40 fair. Here (1939-40 fair) and here (1964-65 fair) are lists of the capsules' contents.
In a message to posterity, the book requests that its contents be translated into new languages as they supersede the old. Instructions for making and using instruments to locate the capsules electromagnetically are included in the "Book of Record." It also contains an ingenious key to the English language to aid archeologists of the future should knowledge of our present language be lost. . . .
No matter to what great heights we ascend or to what great depths we descend, we of the Twentieth Century bequeath to the Seventieth Century proof that man not only endures, but he also prevails.
The first time I saw Shido, he was standing on this bench. When I passed by him a couple of minutes later, he was still standing on the bench. His owner, who was killing time on his smartphone in what seemed like a daily ritual, said Shido just loves standing on benches.
You're looking at four of the 20 buildings (each named after a city/country/island) that make up the residential core of LeFrak City, a massive mixed-use development that was built in the 1960s as the largest privately financed apartment complex in the US. Its population is often said to be around 25,000, but 2010 census figures put it at about half that.
The man behind LeFrak City was the late Sam LeFrak, one of New York's most prolific real estate developers and a bombastic, hyperbolic character who must have been a lot of fun to interview:
Q. What is the significance of that (a bronze plaque of Romulus and Remus, the mythological wolf cubs who built Rome, nursing from their mother)?
A. Everybody is feeding off me. I am feeding Romulus and Remus.
Q. You don't see yourself as either Romulus or Remus?
A. No, I am the guy who brings jobs to people. I am the guy who brings housing, affordable housing. I am the guy who does the impossible and makes it possible. I am the guy that invented new math - one plus one equals three - and says nothing is impossible. This (the bronze) is something I bought many years ago in Italy right after the war. And this represents my contractors, my tenants and the people I do business with, and I am the guy that is bringing this to the world. And the buildings I have built.
Q. What kind of influence and relationship do you have with people in government?
A. It's the respect that they have. Look, I have title. (Mr. LeFrak was knighted by the King of Norway.) I also am a doctor. (He has received a number of honorary degrees.) And I'm also a guy who has done some very exciting things in my life, and life isn't over at 65. I will give you a perfect example. I am getting a Social Security check. It's ridiculous. I give it away to charity. My life, the great stuff is coming. I have some great plans. Read some of the things I have written. I have a school, the Lefrak Brick and Mortar College, and if you go to Oxford University St. Cross College (in England), you will see a big plaque at a library I donated there. I am a person that is very well known. That is why I am being invited to talk before the Parliament in Finland. I am asked to come to China to build cities. In Egypt they call me Ramses III. The point is, don't compare me to these little builders. Not that I have any criticism - you know a long march starts with the first step - but I have been up to the top of the mountain. I have tremendous years of experience. Do you know what is sitting in the memory bank of my computer? Do you realize the work that I have done? Do you realize how many impossible things I made possible?
Masjid Nur Allah, one of three houses of worship in LeFrak City, was established in a converted apartment in 1993, at a time when "an unlikely combination of newcomers [had] helped bring new life to Lefrak City: Jewish refugees from the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and Muslim immigrants from Africa."
This neighborhood institution, open even in winter, was run for decades by the late Pete Benfaremo, who passed down his secret water ice recipe to the current owners. Check out the list of flavors, most of which feature little chunks of the main ingredient mixed in with the ice.
