I had to head into Midtown to run a couple of errands today. I took this shot on the way to the subway in Astoria.

at Bloomingdale's. How do they decide which flags to fly? Here's an explanation from 1995.

Zoom in to see the mighty beasts "curl[ing] their trunks around the struts of the marquee, seemingly preventing it from falling on arriving guests." Actually, the elephants' trunks are no longer connected to the marquee, but you can see that they once were. Three of the elephants are currently holding up flagpoles, while the fourth has cast off all of its worldly burdens and is just lazing about.

Now a W Hotel, this Emery Roth-designed structure was originally the Montclair Hotel. The elephents aren't the building's only playful detail. Atop some of the lower-floor windows, hunched-over little men appear to be bearing the immense weight of the edifice on their seemingly undersized backs.

If you've got $1500 or so to blow, you can spend a night here at the former Hotel Lexington (closer look) in the Centerfield Suite, where Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio lived for some time during their brief marriage.

The Chrysler Building towers over a Lexington Avenue obscured by the steam from a Con Ed street "chimney".

If you look up above the Lexington Avenue entrance to the Graybar Passage (the pedestrian connection to Grand Central Terminal that cuts through the Graybar Building), you'll find a surprising sculptural sight on the cables supporting the canopy: rats! The unwanted little varmints are trying to sneak into the building by climbing up the cables, but they're unable to get around a set of conical baffles similar to the devices used to prevent rats from scurrying up hawsers (mooring lines) onto docked ships. But lest you think the humans have outsmarted the crafty rodents, take a closer look and you'll see many more rats already aboard the Graybar, clustered around the hawseholes where the canopy cables are attached to the building.