In this version of the classic St. Michael statue, the part of Satan is played by what looks like a dog-headed serpent.
of Paerdegat Basin. You can see One World Trade Center way off in the distance at right.
Things are looking a little tidier than they did when we passed by on the opposite shoreline.
Across Jamaica Bay from JFK Airport, this weird little structure can be found on the trails of the Jamaica Bay Riding Academy in Gateway National Recreation Area.
On the frozen-over trails of the Jamaica Bay Riding Academy (whose owner is named Tony Danza), this proved to be the easiest way to get around.
I found this bottle of Haitian Barbancourt rum on the shore of Jamaica Bay. Inside were two waterlogged pieces of paper (one of them bearing the logo of NYU Langone Medical Center) with largely illegible traces of writing, three long feathers, a pink flower, some little black (beans?) and yellow (candy?) things, and a coating of thick purplish syrup.
is the old inert storage building (take a look inside) at Floyd Bennett Field.
The self-proclaimed "world's most famous tree" features an ever-expanding arboreal constellation of stuffed animals arranged and maintained by Eugene Fellner, a retired city worker who traces the genesis of his collection back to July 2007:
It just kind of happened one day when a neighbor called me and said there was a stuffed tiger [the thing wearing sunglasses near the bottom of the photo (zoom in), in the middle of the trunk] around the corner . . . I picked it up right there, brought it home, and placed it in the tree. It was a long time before the second animal went up. People would walk by and admire the tiger. Sometimes it would scare them, and they would jump if it caught them off guard.Check out this awful video to see an interview with Mr. Fellner.
Heading back from Brooklyn on the subway after my walk, I passed by Masstransiscope, Bill Brand's spectacular, zoetrope-inspired work of art installed in 1980 on the remaining platform of the Fourth Avenue Line's abandoned Myrtle Avenue station. The series of 228 hand-painted images was most recently restored in 2013 after graffiti writers vandalized it while the subway system was shut down for Hurricane Sandy. You can view Masstransiscope from Manhattan-bound B and Q (and late-night D) trains; after your train leaves the DeKalb Avenue station, just gaze out a window on the right side and wait for the show to begin. It's rare to see the whole thing without the train slowing down and stopping in the tunnel approaching the Manhattan Bridge, but, as Mr. Brand says, that's part of the experience:
When I designed Masstransiscope . . . the trains even then always slowed down and stopped as they still do today. So, I designed that feature into the piece. I actually like that the illusion breaks down and you can see the slits and the static paintings behind them.
In other words, DON'T SIT HERE.
(Spotted in NoHo on the way to the Staten Island Ferry.)
A memorial to the life of Army Staff Sergeant Michael H. Ollis
On 9/11, Stephen Siller, an off-duty firefighter, ran through the gridlocked Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel with some 60 pounds of gear on his back to reach ground zero, where he was killed. His namesake foundation organizes many fundraising events, including an annual 5k run through the tunnel to the World Trade Center.
Troy Restaurant: "How many excuse do you need to eat great food? Correct: none."
On the pole at right is one of NYC's relatively new speed cameras.
Here at the home of this grassroots relief organization, there's some familiar-looking container-top signage on display, including the Hurricane Sandy memorial at left. (And speaking of container tops, check out the scene here back in 2013.)
Standing outside St. Margaret Mary Roman Catholic Church in Midland Beach, this monument commemorates the seven neighborhood residents who lost their lives on 9/11. The memorial also includes a cross made from World Trade Center steel and another stone dedicated to neighborhood rescue and recovery workers who died from 9/11-related causes. The only person currently listed on that stone is Firefighter Lawrence Sullivan.
A 2014 winner of the Preservation League of Staten Island's Appreciation and Stewardship award
Padre Pio the stigmatic at St. Christopher's Roman Catholic Church
The patron saint of travelers at St. Christopher's Roman Catholic Church
Seriously! From the 1679 journal of two Dutch travelers who were visiting Staten Island:
We went on to the little creek to sit down and rest ourselves there, and to cool our feet, and then proceeded to the houses which constituted the Oude Dorp [Old Village]. . . . There were seven houses, but only three in which any body lived. The others were abandoned, and their owners had gone to live on better places on the island, because the ground around this village was worn out and barren, and also too limited for their use. We went into the first house which was inhabited by English, and there rested ourselves and ate, and inquired further after the road. The woman was cross, and her husband not much better. We had to pay here for what we ate, which we had not done before. We paid three guilders in zeewan, although we only drank water. We proceeded by a tolerably good road to the Nieuwe Dorp [New Village] . . . We saw a house at a distance to which we directed ourselves across the bushes. It was the first house of the Nieuwe Dorp. We found there an Englishman who could speak Dutch, and who received us very cordially into his house, where we had as good as he and his wife had. She was a Dutch woman from the Manhatans, who was glad to have us in her house.
While each of the other four boroughs is endowed with a vast profusion of numbered roadways, Staten Island can boast of only eleven such thoroughfares by my count (although there were once several more): 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th Streets here in New Dorp, and 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Courts in Annadale.
(If you look at a map of Staten Island, you may notice some numbered streets and avenues in the gated-off former tank farm area of Bloomfield [map] and on the old campus of the Willowbrook State School [map]. I'm not counting these roadways because they're not public streets and, as far as I know, they have no street signs indicating their names. You can also find a 19th Street in Annadale on Google Maps, but this block-long roadway is called Blue Heron Drive on its street sign and on the official city map as well.)
It seems unnecessarily confusing to give almost identical names to two consecutive parallel streets. Here's a similar situation we saw in the Bronx.
The intersection of Husson Street and Jefferson Avenue was named Patricia A. Kuras 9/11 Memorial Way in honor of Ms. Kuras, who was killed on 9/11. There are many streets and intersections that have been named for 9/11 heroes and victims; for the purposes of enumerating 9/11 memorials, I'm considering them all to be part of a single citywide memorial. But the plaque above, mounted on a house a few blocks away from the aforementioned intersection, seems to be someone's individual creation, and so I'll count it as a separate memorial.
This plaque on a boulder in Last Chance Pond Park reads:
This site is preserved
in memory of
Florence Rand
who came to Staten Island
as a young teacher
and never forgot
the unique history
and beauty she discovered.
After taking the Staten Island Ferry back to Manhattan, I entered the South Ferry subway station and passed by this reconstructed portion of an 18th-century stone wall that was discovered nearby in Battery Park, along with two other such walls, during the construction of the current South Ferry station in 2005-06.
Was this license plate designed specifically to confuse the cops?
over the Clearview Expressway in Cunningham Park. Here's an aerial view.
