Ghostbusters Firehouse

There are many, many places in NYC that are recognizable to movie lovers, but for me none of them were as exciting to see as the Firehouse they used in Ghostbusters. Its a 3 story free standing building on N. Moore and Hudson.

It is still a working a working firehouse and known as Ladder 8. They are fully aware of their distinction among site-seers and have a large Ghostbusters sign hanging inside...they also have a wall-of-fame for melted telephones but that has nothing to do with the movie.

The old #8 has existed since 1865 but didn't move to this location until 1912. It's not a very heavily travelled tourist spot, but walking past it always makes me smile. I haven't seen the movie in about 10 years, but it was never really about the movie, it was about seeing your city on the big screen.

It wasn't a very long outing, but i had to go and snap a photo of it before I leave.

A stroll through TriBeCa

I have worked in or near TriBeCa for over 10 years. I never get tired of being down there or taking a walk through the neighborhood. Before anyone gets semantic about the neighborhood only being the small triangle south of canal by Lispenard street, lets get our maps out. Since names of neighborhoods are only useful for real estate agencies and descriptives for its citizens, and since they are mostly innocuous and random, TriBeCa is the Lower West Side between the Highway and Broadway, and south of Canal as far down as Park.

Before the name was given to this area by the Lispenard Block Association it was either called the Lower West Side or Washington Market after the fruit market in the hood. You can find some evidence of the name in the same-named park next to BMCC or in a sign for the Eureka Fruit Packing sign of the Hope Fruit Co. on Harrison (I think it is harrsion). picture

No other area of Manhattan has changed more over the last 15 years and probably no other is such a paradox.

• Old "boring" looking plain red brick warehouses now hold multi million dollar luxury lofts.
• Dirty dive bars next to champagne lounges.
• Pot hole filled streets being land-marked because of the cobblestones.
• One of the richest public high schools in the country (Stuyvesant) connected by footbridge to a community college (BMCC).
• 1$ dirty water hot dog stand outside of a 5 star restaurant.

It makes sense to me, although sad and worried about the future of the human race, that TriBeCa is become so expensive to live (12th richest zip code in the U.S.). It is walking distance to the financial district. It is also, for those of you who care about such things, one of the whitest neighborhoods in NYC (82.34%).

During my walk yesterday, where i walked every street in the hood, i was interested mostly in the architecture. Little intricacies are everywhere: Old building freezes, address cornerstones (like above) industrial stars, an old bridge connecting 2 buildings in a former hospital over Staple street alley, a compass in the sidewalk, a subway map in the sidewalk. There are all glass building like the ones overlooking the Hudson and there are eerie skyscrapers with no windows at all (the telephone building). There are sidewalks like those on Worth that actually glitter and there are rooftop gardens that cost more than a Mansion on a New England Beach.

Taking a walk through TriBeCa is like walking through old New York, especially at night with the old lampposts lighting the street yellow. If you are in the right mood and the air is a bit foggy, you feel like you are in an old movie...and you might be if you accidentally walk through a movie set shooting with one of the local celebrities as its star.

Take a look soon, before long all the roughness of the neighborhood will be swept clean, the graffiti washed off the wall and gates put up to protect its citizens from people like me.

That's Garbage!

This is going to be a short post, but I had to share this you you.

I wrote yesterday about my trip to Staten Island and mentioned briefly about the giant Fresh Kills Landfill. As I normally do these days, i was reading some of the history today of the great dump and I came across this stat:

In 2001, the last year of operation, the Fresh Kills Landfill was taller than the Statue Of Liberty!!!

That's one big heap of garbage. If it was to be opened for its expected lifespan, it would have become the tallest spot on the EAST COAST, larger in mass than the Great Wall Of China and the final sign of the apocalypse. Its amazing to me that it took so long for it to be shut down.

In the hey-day of dumping in Fresh Kills, almost 13,000 tons of garbage was dumped there a day. New York is still throwing away garbage at an alarming rate...almost half of it is paper product. Maybe its about time we all start recycling, huh? If over 75% of our daily garbage can be easily recycled, how come there aren't more recycling bins on the streets than garbage cans. It saves money, good for business and is absolutely integral for us to save this planet.

Change is slow and politicians are lazy...but that's one man's opinion.

sidenote: the landfill is set to be turned into a park 3 times the size of central park. There will be nature trails, kayaking, ball fields a 9/11 memorial and room for 7 wind turbines expecting to produce enough energy to power 5,000 housholds.

Staten Island is Cool...and Dirty!

I spent all day yesterday ankle deep in black industrial sludge and broken oyster shells. Sound like fun?

The northwest neighborhoods along the shore of Staten Island are nothing like anywhere else in the 5 boroughs. I went out to see what I can of a rumored boat graveyard in the Rossville Area, and ended up walking about 5 miles along the Arthur Kill Road narrowly avoiding getting hit by one trucker after another. (They really ought to put in a roadside pathway).

I took the bus all the way out to Rossville Road and immediately saw a glimpse of a rusted out tanker in the sludge out in the creek. There wasn't that great of a view and there were a few houses that warned of massive bodily injury if you were caught trespassing. I assume that was in reaction to many urban explorers like myself trying to get out to the boats. I thought about crawling down the small cliff side and head through the weeds, but it looked like the marsh was rather deep. Normally that wouldn't deter me very long, but this particular marsh was literally in the shadow of the largest garbage dump in the world.

The Fresh Kills Landfill has been closed down for a few years (Thanks in no small part to NYPIRG) but remains a monument to human excess and is one of the absolutely worst things we could have done to the future health of the borough. I wouldn't be confident about looking for any clean ground water on the island for some time. So there was absolutely no way I was going to wade into a marsh that has been in the dumps runoff for the last half century.

While i was snapping photos from the ledge and trying to find a creative way to get a better angle I hear behind me:

"Hey...what are you doing?"

"Just snapping some photos."

"Cool, you want to see a better spot?"

This guy was a local crab fisherman (yes he catches and sells shell fish from the Arthur Kill...yummy). He also is a local nautical history buff and gave me some good spots to go and see some of the boats. Great timing, I was about to call it quits and bus away with a few good shots of just a 3 or 4 wrecks. Instead i got 3 more hours of things to see.

You never know exactly how big something is until you have to walk it. I have been using my handy hagstroms map for 3 months now. You think i would understand the basic concepts of scale by now...you would think. Its not that walking 3 miles is hard to do...even in 35 degree windy weather, but walking 3 miles on an industrial highway without a sidewalk or anything resembling a shoulder is just outright unpleasant.

On one side of me was a great protected parkland called "Clay Pit Ponds State Park Preserve." On the other was a series of interesting points of interest. Along Arthur kill road which is a 300 year old roadway from Richmond Town to Tottenville I passed by The Arthur Kill Prison, a giant paint ball field, a 200 year old cemetery holding the remains of the Sleight family an enormous Mobile Oil Plant and several auto body shops (this is important for what i find later).

I tried to walk down a road to the shore (my new friend told me it was open to the public) but a big asshole of a man stopped me by skidding his truck in front of the gate to ward me off. Not being susceptible to reasonable conversation or even any conversation for that matter since he didn't open his window or stop spinning his big wheels churning up dust, i flipped him off and walked away.

After walking some more down to the Charleston area i found a better entrance at the end of a small dead end road. There was a old run down auto body shop with a broken down pickup that had "Shut Down" painted on it. I climbed the fence and found a small opening in a field of reeds. I don't know if anyone out there has even walked through reeds before but its downright eerie. The reeds were about 12 feet high and too thick to see 3 feet away. So for about 10 minutes I tried to follow other footprints through the marshy field hoping that there was an opening soon and that i didn't accidental run into some big fellas dumping a body in the muck.

Finally i came to a small "beach" and i use that term very loosely. There it was, a huge field of rusted burnt out ships and nautical wrecks. Forget for a second how dirty this whole thing is and how shameful it is for industry to ruin what once was a stunning landscape. Just for a second. The dirty, curious kid in me loves this stuff. It was amazing to see it all.

The first bout yard i saw up on Rossville road is from the Witte Marine Equipment Company and has many old NYC fire boats and abandoned tugs. Some of them were used in trying unsuccessfully to help the General Slocum Tragedy that took 1,000 lives in a fire. This second group of boats are mostly old ferries. The one above says New York and Astoria on the hull.

I walked through the reeds a little more to get closer and came across a car...that's right a car stuck right there in the middle of nowhere with no possible way to get it there by road. Then another, and another and then an opening with dozens of old rusty stripped cars. Some of them half buried in the muck that are probably covered by water most of the year, and others that are up on the rocks that still have visible char marks from fires. My first thought was...uh-oh this is where they hide the cars after burying the bodies. I guess i have seen one too many mob movies...and if you have seen the most recent "We Own The Night" there is a crazy chase in the reeds out in Floyd Bennet Field that look a lot like this. But in a guess more based in reality the cars are probably from illegal dumping from the auto body shops in the neighborhood.

I spent about an hour walking around the wrecks trying to get as close as I could. At times my foot sank to an uncomfortable level and I almost lost my shoes a few times. The colors for photographs were perfect but the weather was absolutely freezing. I wish i had a little row boat so i could get closer to some of the ships further out. The big metal ships were fun but i wanted to see the old wood ones that were left as nothing more than old skeletons.

A good day of urban exploring ended with a hour and a half bus ride, a 20 minute ferry ride, and a two subway trains home. If I wanted to document the New York City Transit system, this would have been a good start.

check out the pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/82369865@N00/

My Thanksgiving Wish!

OK...before you say anything, I know the picture above is not a Turkey or anything representative of Thanksgiving, but i don't have a picture of a turkey and I like my picture of this Blue Peacock from the "Garden Of Eden" botanical gardens on the road to Hana in Maui...so there it is.

And speaking of turkeys representing thanksgiving here why I am writing this blog entry. For the last 4 days, there has been a line hundreds of people long in a local avant-garde soul-food place in my hood called Jive Turkey. Normally, the JT has at most 2 people in it at rush hour. From what I hear its good food but seeing as I don't eat turkey, i never went in. Today there are no less than 3 hundred people waiting to buy their gourmet thanksgiving turkey meals.

I have never been a very preachy type of vegetarian, but listen: Just because some version of history says that the traditional thanksgiving meal is turkey doesn't mean that you HAVE to eat turkey. It also doesn't mean you have to buy the biggest turkey in the store...or that just because you bought something called "free-range" that somehow you are acting better than other consumers duped into buying more food than you need.

Its just another day. If having dinner with family and friends make you happy, great...that is indeed an occasion to celebrate and enjoy. It shouldn't however mean finding all sorts of useless gifts to buy and food to over-purchase or use more gallons of gas to hurry to dinner.

True that environmental destruction and community upheaval may very well be the true legacy of thanksgiving, but that doesn't mean that we have to oblige.

Castle Clinton

Throughout my tour, I have been avoiding most of the obvious tourist magnets and bigger monuments (with a few exceptions of course) but I always found this one interesting.

Castle Clinton, later renamed Castle Garden is that old round building down near the battery that is now unfortunately used now only as a big ticket window for the Ellis island ferry. It was built in preparation of the war of 1812 as a NY city lower Hudson guard. At that time the Castle was surrounded by water and the area resembled nothing of the modern day park. Over the years, the southern tip of Manhattan was enlarged by landfill and eventually engulfed the building.

It was used starting in the 1820 as a cultural and performance center, opera house, promenade, used by PT Barnum and even as a beer garden. During this period the structure had added floors and was roofed over. It was used mostly in this hodgepodge manner until it was transformed into an immigrant process center. Over 8.5 million immigrants went through the castle before the center on Ellis island was created soon after the civil war.

Its most famous use was that of the Aquarium starting in 1896. As is the unfortunate fate of many of New York's landmarks, the aquarium was shut down and the structure almost entirely destroyed by a behemoth bridge plan proposed by Robert Moses. The aquarium was moved to Coney Island and the original castle saved and landmarked. Its not very exciting to see now, since its used as a f#@king ticket booth...but i do find its history fun and worthy of note.

BAM and my Bar!

On Sunday, I spent the night in a very fun interconnected stoty between Brooklyn's Premier music center, BAM and one of my all time favorite bars, Mooney's Pub.

I went to go see the movies with one of my great movie buddy's and we saw "Before the Devil Knows Your Dead". It was one of the most depressing movies I have seen. Beautifully acted and directed and actually had one of the most real moments of any movie i have ever seen. However, it was one of those movies where all the characters are on the brink of absolute collapse and nervous breakdown. I don't like movies where i wish everyone would just go ahead and kill themselves...but that's just me.

Anyway, back to the fun. In the movie, their local hangout was a bar named Mooney's. We looked at each other and kind of acknowledged the coincidence that we were about to go to a bar name Mooney's. After the movie and a very cold bike ride up flatbush avenue, we got to the bar and had this interchange with my buddy Scot who was bartending:

"We just saw the most depressing movie ever"

"Was it 'Before the Devil Knows Your Dead'?"

"Yeah"

"Was there a bar in it called Mooney's"

"Yeah...how'd you guess?"

Apparently the writer of the movie drank at this Mooney's for years and wrote the bar into his story. At the last minute, they changed the location to a bar in LA but kept the name. Scot then showed me a letter they just got from the writer thanking them for the use of the name and a framed prop Mooney's drink coaster that they used in the movie.

Then to make the coincidence even tighter, Scot showed me the Sunday Times article that came out that day that featured Mooney's. (The bar is being shut down later this year to raise the rent...more on that when it happens). Both Scot and the movie are mentioned in the article.

Funny. Who knew that the movie and the bar we had planned on going to Sunday night was going to be so closely connected. Gotta love it.