Buddy & Bunny
The guy just told me to go lie between two pieces of bread...
It's not uncommon to see this guy and his teammates hanging around a Parks Department ballfield.
Two of the five rum bottles artfully arranged on this fence and its immediate surroundings
This house also had a big smiley face projected on its garage door.
Buried inside this open-roofed enclosure (known as the Ohel) in Queens's Montefiore Cemetery are the sixth and seventh rebbes of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, Yosef Yitzchok Schneerson and his son-in-law Menachem Mendel Scheerson (who was also the last rebbe, as he did not name a successor when he died in 1994).
Menachem Mendel (on the left, and often referred to simply as "the Rebbe") oversaw Chabad's worldwide expansion in the latter half of the 20th century. He was a particularly beloved figure in the movement, and some of his followers believed that he was (and some still believe that he is) the messiah.
All the pieces of paper you see lying in front of the gravestones are notes written to him, either by visitors or by people from around the world who have emailed or faxed their messages to the 24-hour visitors' center located at the edge of the cemetery in a house the Lubavitchers purchased after the Rebbe's death.
And what eventually happens to all the paper? "When the pile of shredded notes grows high, they are burned to make room for more; if you happen to come soon after, you’ll see embers of hand-scribbled petitions fluttering around at the foot of the Rebbe’s headstone."
When I stopped by today, there were several people praying in the Ohel, part of a steady stream of visitors throughout the year. On the anniversary of the Rebbe's death, however, thousands of people make a pilgrimage to his grave, and not always to the delight of the neighbors. Cambria Heights, which borders the cemetery, once had a sizable Jewish population, but it's now mostly populated by middle-class black residents, who were quite surprised to find throngs of Hasidic Jews suddenly pouring into their neighborhood to visit the Ohel after the Rebbe was buried in 1994.
Lying just outside the Ohel are the graves of the wives of the last three Lubavitcher rebbes.
Montefiore is, for the most part, a place of fairly humble graves. One of the few exceptions, ironically, is Stark.
is the name of my great-grandmother, who is buried here in Montefiore Cemetery. It is also the name of the woman whose gravestone is pictured above, second from left in the back row. I assumed they were one and the same (despite the fact that I didn't recognize any names on the other stones) until I got home and looked closely at the photo; this Clara died a few decades too early to be my great-grandmother.
Part of a strange little enclave of houses with mismatched peaked masonry entryways
This expansive 7,000-square-foot painting (the second NASA-sponsored Martian mural we've seen) covers multiple walls of the Bronx's PS 64. It was created for the Mars Millennium Project back in 2000 by students trying to imagine what life might be like on the Red Planet.
Here's a closer look.
His estate has mostly died down for the winter, but he's still hanging in there. His female companion was huffing up the hill right behind him as I snapped this shot.
