where all those glass shards came from.

as seen from the picnic tables of the wonderfully named Howard & Minerva Munch YMCA. If you look closely, you can see that there are, in addition to the main suspension cables, four stay cables running at an angle from the top of each tower to the deck (i.e., the roadway surface) of the bridge (here is a clearer view of the cables). The stay cables were installed, as were some since-removed stiffening trusses, after the similarly designed Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed spectacularly into Puget Sound amid a steady 40-mile-per-hour wind in 1940, the year after the Whitestone opened.

Either that, or it's some kind of alien spacecraft landing beacon. Or maybe a prestigious athletic trophy won at the YMCA across the street?

and cheap divorce

This is the kids-only entrance to PS 36.

Standing here at the corner of Watson and Castle Hill Avenues in the Bronx, I was surprised to look up and see two totally different street names inscribed on the sides of PS 36, as if the school had been uprooted from Alphabet City in a tornado and dropped back to earth on this spot, ten miles away. It turns out, however, that back in the latter half of the 19th century, before the Bronx existed as a borough, this intersection did indeed bear the names of 9th Street and Avenue C, when it stood amidst the street grid of the old village of Unionport.

To some, it's a paradise; to others, it's a bastion of "malcontents that can't fit anywhere else in society." Check out this aerial view to get a better sense of the place.

(The claim about the Ferris wheel in the second link is untrue.)

It's not quite the abundance I found along the Columbia River, but I'll take what I can get. This bramble is growing in the Ferris Family Burying Ground, a tiny patch of greenery brightening up an otherwise grim stretch of Commerce Avenue in the Bronx.

This storied community art/culture space will soon be demolishing its current dilapidated building and replacing it with a much more modern facility, part of the deal under which it was able to acquire this property from the city for one dollar.

The Manhattan Bridge, framed by the elevated FDR Drive