Absurd and hateful messages like these can often be found on display outside ATLAH World Missionary Church. The pastor, an ex-burglar named James David Manning, seems to truly believe the preposterous things he preaches (Oprah Winfrey is the Antichrist; Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Bill Clinton are going to deport all the black people in America to Haiti and Africa; Starbucks flavors its lattes with sodomites' semen; and so much more), but I continue to hold out a small sliver of hope that he's just Andy Kaufman in disguise.
BREAKING NEWS from Pastor Manning: "Sodomites sent me a bucket of poop. . . . Somebody pooped in a bucket, in a plastic bucket, and they put a plastic lid on it, and they put it in a box and mailed it to me."
It turns out that the main public conduit of Manning's bigotry, the sign outside the church, was illegally installed. Because the church is located in a historic district, modifying the exterior appearance of the building — e.g., erecting a big sign — requires permission from the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission, which the church never sought. While ATLAH has been issued violations by the LPC for making multiple unauthorized alterations to the building, and may be fined as a result of those violations, my understanding is that the city has no power to force the church to remove the illegal sign.
UPDATE (February 26, 2016): ATLAH has indeed been fined for its LPC violations, but that's the least of its financial problems. Having never paid its water and sewer bills, the church now owes more than a million dollars and is facing foreclosure. Two of the leading candidates to buy the building if the church gets booted out are an LGBT-friendly church and a homeless shelter for LGBT youth.
You can learn more about the situation in this Daily Show video. Defiant in the face of foreclosure, Manning proclaims that "Sodomites will carry babies in their testicles for nine months and then gestate them out of their assholes before this church is closed."
sits beside the waters of Central Park's Harlem Meer. But how did it get here?
This is an aquatic weed harvester, one of two such boats owned by the city. (The other does its harvesting in Prospect Park Lake.) Here at the Harlem Meer in Central Park, the harvester is operated twice a week during the warmer months. It was originally intended to clear algae from the water, but then, once the algae was under control, curly-leaf pondweed took over. The masses of vegetation skimmed from the water are used to make compost for the park.
The plaque reads:
THIS EMINENCE COMMANDING
McGOWN'S PASS
WAS OCCUPIED BY BRITISH TROOPS SEPT 15 1776
AND EVACUATED NOV 21 1783
HERE BEGINNING AUG 18 1814 THE CITIZENS OF NEW YORK
BUILT FORT CLINTON TO PROTECT THE CITY
IN THE SECOND WAR WITH GREAT BRITAIN
THIS TABLET IS ERECTED BY THE CHILDREN OF THE
CITY HISTORY CLUB OF NEW YORK A.D. 1906
Here's some information about the cannons from the NY Times:
They were originally thought to have been installed to protect the city from a British invasion launched from Long Island Sound during the War of 1812. But an authoritative account by Sara Cedar Miller, a historian for the [Central Park Conservancy], dates the big guns back more than 240 years to the 28-gun HMS Hussar commissioned in England in 1763. . . .While doing some restoration work in January 2013, park workers removed a concrete plug from the mouth of one of the cannons and discovered that the gun was still loaded! They called in the NYPD bomb squad, who extracted a cannonball, gunpowder, and wool wadding. The police determined that the gunpowder was still good could and that, all these years later, the cannon could have been fired.
Attached to the British fleet in New York, the Hussar ran aground in treacherous East River currents in 1780 and sank. Because it was believed to be carrying an army payroll made up of gold, for more than two centuries the ship has attracted salvage efforts, which retrieved no gold but, among other artifacts, the two cannons, which — after languishing in salt water for as long as 80 years — were anonymously donated to Central Park in 1865 while it was still under construction.
This is the Untermyer* Fountain in Central Park's Conservatory Garden. The sculpture was previously located at Greystone, Samuel Untermyer's former estate in Yonkers, 43 acres of which have been maintained, "somewhat haphazardly", by the City of Yonkers as Untermyer Park and Gardens, a part-spectacular, part-overgrown-and-dilapidated public park.
* We saw the Untermyer monument at Woodlawn Cemetery back in 2013.
This fountain in Central Park's Conservatory Garden honors the author Frances Hodgson Burnett. The two figures in the sculpture are based on the characters Mary and Dickon from Burnett’s The Secret Garden.
In 1972, a young man named Hank Prussing visited East Harlem to examine the area's public art for a class he was taking at the Pratt Institute. After a local pastor suggested that he create his own mural in the neighborhood, Prussing started working on The Spirit of East Harlem, about half of which you can see above, in 1973.
Manny Vega, a neighborhood kid, regularly walked by the building and saw Prussing up on a scaffold, painting. He became his apprentice after calling out to him one day: "Hey, white boy! Give me a job!" Vega later restored the faded artwork in 1998-99, adding some touches of his own. Parts of the mural disappeared a couple of years ago when some sections of the brick wall were replaced, but you can view an interactive photo of the whole thing before that happened here.
From the book On the Wall: Four Decades of Community Murals in New York City:
Until 1973, people portrayed in New York City murals were either historic and contemporary public figures or symbolic representations of neighborhood residents. The earliest portraits of actual members of the community are found in the murals of Hank Prussing and Lucy Mahler.
For his grand The Spirit of East Harlem (1973-78), artist/architect Hank Prussing spent several days and evenings taking random photographs around the mural's location, on East 104th Street at Lexington Avenue. The character, pride, and individuality of the area's Puerto Rican residents is beautifully and sensitively rendered in his life-sized and oversized portraits. The neighborhood itself is represented by a trompe l'oeil landscape of tenement buildings. Prussing sought "to celebrate the people of this particular community as they were in everyday life" rather than to create "a mural that celebrates a people's heritage and/or aspirations."
The East River Family Center, a homeless shelter, now occupies this old public school. In 1976, a teenager named Randall Dana removed some gargoyles from the dormer windows of the then-abandoned building, adding them to what was becoming a massive collection of salvaged architectural ornaments from around the city. He later sculpted his own versions of the original gargoyles (1, 2, 3, 4) and now offers them for sale along with other similar works.
by James De La Vega
This memorial is located on East 100th Street. I wonder if this Tony Lopez is the same one mentioned in this article as being the superintendent of nine buildings on East 100th Street.
Completed in 1927, the academy's building is home to, among other things, "one of the most significant historical libraries in medicine and public health in the world". The library, which was started back in 1847, now holds more than 550,000 volumes, including an extensive rare book collection that "contains 85 to 90 percent of the medical books printed in what is now the United States between the late 17th and early 19th centuries".
There are also many historical artifacts in the library's possession, such as the lower half of a set of George Washington's dentures, made from human teeth set in hippopotamus ivory and designed to fit around the president's last remaining tooth — which, by the way, the academy also owns!
You can view some samples of the library's holdings here (relatively tame) and here (relatively gruesome), and you can see a 360-degree panorama of the beautiful rare book reading room here. You can also go visit the library in person; it's been open to the public since 1878. Just make an appointment or show up for one of the monthly tours.
This "poetic postbox" (there's a mail slot in it) in Central Park "invites passersby to send missives to those with no earthly address via a sculptural globe that reflects the earth and sky. Postcards provided."
According to the Parks Department:
This bronze, life-sized sculpture is a self-portrait of the esteemed Danish sculptor [Bertel] Thorvaldsen (1770–1844), and was dedicated in Central Park in 1894. It is the only statue of an artist displayed in the parks of New York City*, and honors a titan in his field who had broad influence in sustaining the classical tradition in art. . . .* The only statue of an artist in an NYC park? Not even close. It may be the only statue of a visual fine artist, but there are plenty of statues of other types of artists (musicians, writers, an architect) located in city parks. Here in Central Park alone, we have Duke Ellington, Ludwig van Beethoven, Victor Herbert, William Shakespeare, Hans Christian Andersen, Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Fitz-Greene Halleck, Friedrich Schiller, and Richard Morris Hunt. At the Concert Grove in Prospect Park, you can find busts of Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Carl Maria von Weber, Edvard Grieg, Washington Irving, and Thomas Moore. There's a statue of William Cullen Bryant in Bryant Park and one of Antonin Dvorak in Stuyvesant Square. And there are probably others I've neglected to mention as well.
The original marble self-portrait, on which this posthumous bronze replica is based, was carved in 1839. . . . Though in his seventh decade of life when he created this work, Thorvaldsen represented himself as a younger, idealized man draped in a workman’s robe, with his hands holding the tools of his trade: mallet and chisel. His left arm rests on a small female figure, a copy of his figure of Hope, modeled in 1817.
Central Park, which hosted the first few New York City Marathons in the 1970s and is still home to the final stretch of the race, is a fitting place for a memorial to Fred Lebow, the marathon's founder. But when Mr. Lebow died in 1994, a moratorium on new monuments in the park prevented a permanent memorial from being erected. So a sneaky solution was worked out: his statue is allowed to stand here as a temporary installation — and what makes it technically temporary is that it's moved from its perch once per year, when it's set up to greet runners at the marathon's finish line.
This memorial is located on the eastern embankment of the Central Park Reservoir. The bust was sculpted by Adolph Weinman, and the granite stele was designed by Thomas Hastings and Donn Barber.
From a previous post about Mayor Mitchel:
Known as the "boy mayor", he was sworn in at the tender age of 34, making him the second-youngest mayor in the city's history, and the youngest to preside over the modern five-borough city.UPDATE: Mitchel is prominently featured in a song released by Joanna Newsom in August 2015, a meticulously crafted and densely allusive track called Sapokanikan. The first lines specifically pertaining to the boy mayor start at 2:53. If you read the NY Times's account of his death — specifically, the two paragraphs before and the four after the "Joked About City Politics" section heading — you'll find a number of phrases that have made their way into the song's lyrics.
An anti-Tammany reformer, Mitchel is widely considered to have been an effective and honest mayor. He was greatly admired by Fiorello La Guardia (the only NYC mayor to rank ahead of him in a "classic" 1960 study), whose mayoral speeches "rang with Mitchel's name". Teddy Roosevelt was also a big fan. Endorsing Mitchel's bid for re-election in 1917, Roosevelt wrote that Mitchel had "given us as nearly an ideal administration of the New York City government as I have seen in my lifetime, or as I have heard of since New York became a big city."
But despite his popularity among reform-minded, good-government types, Mitchel lost the 1917 race in a historic landslide. He may have been a good mayor, but he was a crummy politician — and he knew it. In fact, he had to be talked into running for a second term, as he believed, correctly as it turned out, that he would be unable to win. According to his secretary:He knew just enough about politics to know that, unless an officeholder strives to please groups and factions to the sacrifice of real efficiency, re-election is impossible. Many times, in going over stacks of invitations, which came to him daily, I would urge him to go to this or that function, which was uninteresting and dull, but at which his attendance would please some group or section of the city. . . . He would absolutely refuse to attend these affairs, and when I would insist out of consideration for the fact that he was making political friends, he invariably replied that he had no desire to gain ground politically, that he was through with political life after this term, and that he merely wished to do the immediate job that lay before him the best he could.Shortly after leaving office, at the age of 38 and with World War I raging, Mitchel joined the Army's aviation service. The former boy mayor thus became "America's oldest flying cadet". But just a few months later, during a training exercise in Louisiana in 1918, he fell out of his plane and plummeted 500 feet to the ground, dying on impact. He had not been wearing his safety belt.
across the Central Park Reservoir toward the twin towers of the Eldorado
The rim of this Central Park water fountain is inscribed with the name of the 72nd Street Marathoning and Pasta Club, "whose runners began competing around the world in the 1970s and have helped to conserve Central Park by planting trees and cleaning and restoring water fountains."
One of the club's seven original members is Jon Mendes, who's been saying he's going to retire from marathoning since at least 2003, when he finished the Marine Corps Marathon (with a time of 6:47:36) about a week before his 83rd birthday. But he has since completed the 2005 NYC Marathon (8:03:03) and, most recently, the 2011 Marine Corps Marathon (7:02:30). The day before he turned 94, he took part in the 2014 NYC Marathon with the goal of becoming the oldest finisher in the race's history, but he was unable to complete the course.
The man who currently holds the title of oldest NYC Marathoner, Josef Galia, was 91 when he completed the race in 1989 (6:43:29), and was the only one of that year's three nonagenarian competitors to finish. He had said he was going to retire after the race, but, like Mr. Mendes, he couldn't stay away. At 93, he entered and successfully completed the 1991 marathon (7:59:34), setting the record that stands today.
UPDATE: Mr. Mendes made it through more than 16 miles of the 2015 NYC Marathon, but had to drop out because of leg pain. If he's feeling well, he's going to try again in 2016, three days after turning 96.
This confusingly named stream flows through the Ravine in Central Park's North Woods. According to the Central Park Conservancy:
At 40 acres, the North Woods is the largest of the three woodlands in Central Park. The Ravine is a lowland landscape in the North Woods that features a small stream, dramatic cascades, and a variety of plants native to the northeastern United States. Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the Ravine and the North Woods were intended to give visitors a taste of the Adirondacks without leaving New York City. . . .
The Loch: This small stream winds through the Ravine before emptying into the Harlem Meer. In Scottish, "loch" means lake, and the Loch was originally designed as a long lake. Wildlife flock to the Loch’s muddy banks, shallow pools, and tumbling cascades.
The Loch flows over this little waterfall as it makes its way through the Ravine in Central Park's North Woods. The two vertical concrete slabs atop the falls are, I believe, part of a weir that has been temporarily installed to measure the stream's flow rate.
This well-illuminated apartment house was built in or around 1887, if the date on the facade is to be believed.
