The creator of this piece is painting a new mural in Dream Street Park.
A few years ago, while heading south on the FDR Drive, I spotted a handwritten sign bearing the name "Otis Houston Jr." along with instructions to "Goggle ME".
When Goggled, Mr. Houston reveals himself to be a fascinating character. Here are some excerpts from a 2003 NY Times article about his performance art:
The other day in Harlem, Otis Houston Jr. sat near the southbound lanes of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive with a white metal bird cage on his head, one hand gripping a plastic steering wheel, the other holding a Cuban cigar case. A ballpoint pen was perched in his lips like a cigarette. Morning commuters were rushing by. . . .The Times wrote him up again last year on the occasion of a short documentary about him being completed.
By dressing like an athletic firefighter or standing near the highway with a bunch of ripe bananas on his head, Mr. Houston has tried, in his own arcane way, to impart a lesson about good health to the city's commuters. . . .
He is now exploring the dangers of smoking -- thus the Cuban cigar and ballpoint pen. He also keeps a pair of exercise bicycles fetched up against the wall of a nearby overpass, and drivers are frequently treated to the sight of him with his head bowed and his legs pumping. . . .
This year alone, he says, he has walked around the island of Manhattan a half-dozen times. He plans to do it a half-dozen more. . . .
He is a spry, fit man with a habit of talking in unstoppable monologues and a laugh so hearty that he often has to walk in circles until it peters out and dies.
I've yet to meet the man in person, but I imagine the rotting watermelon above is his doing. He's typically out here by the Triborough Bridge interchange in the morning, so I'll make sure to drop by earlier in the day next time I'm in the area.
Sitting on the former site of the massive Washburn Wire factory in East Harlem, this strikingly out-of-place big-box shopping center is tucked away off Pleasant Avenue, once an infamous Mafia stronghold that was home to characters like Fat Tony, Alfred Ears, Gary High-Eye, Vinnie Head, Frankie Nose, Danny Legs, Angelo Cheesecake, Johnny Roast Beef, Charlie Cream Cheese, Freddy Eggs, Tommy Salami, Joe Olive, Mary Knish, Jimmy the Cat, Vito the Bat, Johnny Fox, and Gary the Lamb.
Welcome to the "Jim Runsdorf Overlook", a.k.a. the top of the enormous parking deck at East River Plaza. Given how few cars make their way up here (the garage was massively overbuilt), this would be a great spot for a picnic! The views of the Harlem River and the surrounding cityscape are gorgeous, and the noise from the truckless and busless FDR Drive is actually quite pleasant when you're several floors above the traffic — with your eyes closed, you can almost mistake it for the sound of flowing water.
Standing outside the East River Plaza parking garage, Hugh Hayden looks on as Mike Tobey scrapes paint off the windshield of Hugh's cornrowed American Hero #4, beginning the car's transition back to life as a regular old Ford Mustang.
This apartment building was erected in 1898, according to that plaque on the wall.
Brownstones occupy a unique place in the New York City psyche, as one of the city's most prototypical signposts, like yellow cabs and fast walkers, yet are able to stir aching desire and teeth-baring jealousy. Everybody wants one.
Thousands of these structures are crammed into the five boroughs, like sideways stacks of very expensive pancakes. As it turns out, most of them are not only cast from the same mold, but were also made from the same stone, a brown sandstone quarried in Portland, Conn.
After being mined on and off for centuries, the Portland Brownstone Quarries, the very last of a kind, closed down this year, and by the end of this month, the quarry's final scraps of inventory should be gone. . . .
Not everyone, however, is sad to say goodbye to this particular building block. That's because the stone, the object of so many New Yorkers' obsessions, is considered to be rather mediocre.
"I remember some quote saying it was the worst stone ever quarried," said Timothy Lynch, the executive director of the Buildings Department’s forensic unit. "It's like New York City is covered in cold chocolate."
That old-time brownstone hater was likely to be Edith Wharton, who called it the "most hideous" stone ever quarried.
After the Archdiocese of New York closed this Catholic church (which is much more spacious than it looks from the outside) in early 2007, a number of parishioners decided to continue holding services here every Sunday, out on the sidewalk. What started as a protest developed into a genuine religious community. According to the most recent report I can find, the group was still meeting regularly at the end of last year, when they held a funeral for one of their leaders right here in front of the church.
I think I just learned the correct name for what I've been doing for the past year and a half.
This church (as seen from the Rodale Pleasant Park Community Garden) is one of the last reminders* of the almost vanished community of Italian Harlem. While the number of Italian worshipers at the church has dwindled considerably, and the annual feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel is now "dominated by Haitians who chant to the Madonna in French Creole", many of the old-timers do return to the neighborhood once a year for the Dance of the Giglio, in which a massive platform supporting an 82-foot-tall tower and more than a dozen musicians is lifted up by a mob of participants and paraded down the street to the church.
* Another holdover from the Italian days is Claudio the Barber: "You go to him not just for the haircut, but for the world seen through one deeply experienced man's eyes, a man who has you imprisoned in a chair for about 15 minutes and knows there's not much else for you to do but listen." After 60 years of cutting hair in the same location, Claudio was almost put out of business by a rent increase at the end of 2011, but he found a new landlord just down the block willing to offer him a more affordable deal.
Beneath the tracks of the Harlem-125th Street Metro-North station
From an NY Times blog post last February:
It's possible that the old Mount Morris Bank Building at Park Avenue and 125th Street has never looked sorrier. And that's saying a lot, since the abandoned building — an official city landmark — has been in a downward spiral for four decades, including the demolition of its upper floors in 2009 before they collapsed on their own.You can see photos of the 1883 structure in its better days here.
But it's also possible that its decline has ended. At least, that's what officials of the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Economic Development Corporation hope, as plans are prepared under which Artimus, a development and construction concern, is to build a new six-floor structure that would rise from the existing monumental base — as impressive a ruin as New York can conjure — which would be preserved and rehabilitated.
The bank was acquired by the Corn Exchange Bank in 1913, and later played an important role in the capture of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who was subsequently convicted and executed for the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh's baby. A $10 gold certificate used to pay the ransom was discovered by a teller here on September 18, 1934. Hundreds of ransom bills had already been passed and identified without any solid leads emerging, but this one contained an extra bit of information. The gas station attendant who received it as payment, suspecting it might be counterfeit, scribbled onto its margin the customer's license plate number. The certificate was genuine, of course, but the license number led the authorities directly to Hauptmann.
Marcus Garvey Park's deteriorating fire watchtower, built in the 1850s
The only references to this place (or at least to a slightly fictionalized version with "the words 'Shakespeare Flats' engraved in reddish brown marble over the doorway" and located a block farther south, on 122nd Street) I can find on the internet are from a book entitled Mister Satan's Apprentice: A Blues Memoir. A favorite excerpt:
Later, back in Harlem, we sat in my car in front of Shakespeare Flats and finished off the pint of Romanoff vodka we'd poured into three clear plastic cups. We looked like victims of genital elephantiasis, front pockets bulging with bankrolls and change. Giddy is putting it mildly.
"In 1867 Andrew Haswell Green, Commissioner and Comptroller of Central Park, recommended that a park be located in Morningside Heights. He argued that it would be 'very expensive' and 'very inconvenient' to extend the Manhattan street grid over the area's severe topography."
Looks like a wise decision from up here.
(The duo descending the stairs just graduated from high school today. The ceremony must have been held nearby, as there were several other fresh-faced, white-robed youths strolling through the park.)
Off in the distance, dominating the Harlem skyline, is the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building, with the Hotel Theresa directly in front of it.
at St. John the Unfinished, one of the largest churches in the world. Photos!
They're growing like crazy on the slopes of Morningside Park. Many are still red or pink or even green, but there are plenty of ripe ones as well. I ate approximately 142 of them today.
I saw several turtles swimming around today, but apparently there are dozens living in the pond here in Morningside Park, a population consisting largely of former pets and their descendants.
I had always assumed that this pond had been around at least as long as the park, but it turns out it didn't exist until 1989 or so, when it was constructed out of a two-decade-old excavation crater that resulted from neighboring Columbia University's failed plan to erect a gym in the park. The gym would have had separate facilities for the student body and the public (consisting of the mostly black residents of Harlem); it was thus dubbed "Gym Crow" by some of the protesters who eventually succeeded in preventing it from being built. The anti-gym movement was one of the major components of the 1968 student protests at Columbia.
As the Wildman says: "It looks so good when you pick it, but has absolutely no flavor when you eat it, causing you to die of disappointment!"
A beautiful little church — you can get a better view here.
This exceedingly lengthy history (or "extended chronology") of the garden reveals the extraordinary dedication and commitment required to maintain a vacant lot turned community garden in New York City, especially during the bulldozing days of the Giuliani administration.
These initials can be found on a gate at the southern edge of Marcus Garvey Park. But what do they stand for? There are at least a few people who claim that, as strange as it sounds, this gate originally stood outside Bellevue Hospital and was moved here sometime in the 1950s.
This sculpture by Nnamdi Okonkwo has stirred up a bit of controversy, mostly as a result of its location in front of a new luxury condo building.
by Jorge Rodríguez. This is the centerpiece (and onlypiece) of Harlem Art Park.
This grand Romanesque Revival structure (with "romantic Victorian Gothic overtones") opened in 1893 and, after falling out of use for some decades, is now home to the Harlem Community Justice Center. You can barely see the building in this photo, obscured as it is by the trees lining fittingly named Sylvan Place (a block-long remnant of a 17th-century roadway — more info halfway down this page), but you can get a better look on the pages linked above, the first of which also features an interior shot of the vaulted third-floor courtroom.
More than 100 years ago, the NY Times suggested Sylvan Court as a spot to visit "if one is interested in seeing a quaint bit of old Harlem . . . there are several old-fashioned brick houses on both sides of the court and the entire atmosphere of the locality reminds one of some of the half-forgotten spots occasionally found in the Greenwich Village district." That description still rings true to some degree, though less so than a couple of years ago when the street was still unpaved. You can see some 2009 shots of the houses and the yet-to-be-fancily-paved roadway about halfway down this page.
This "Romanesque treasure", designed in 1911, was originally Our Saviour Norwegian Lutheran Church.
Perhaps you recall when we first saw a sign for this playground, about nine miles away in Brooklyn at the entrance to the similarly named Dr. Ronald E. McNair Park. The sign above, with updated text written last fall, mentions an analemmatic sundial as "perhaps the most exceptional part of the [playground's] design". I had never heard of such a sundial before and was excited to see one in action, but I couldn't find the damn thing! Maybe it actually exists in the park in Brooklyn.
