15. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Greenpoint, Brooklyn. East River and Manhattan in the background, the smokestacks are the East River Generating Station in Alphabet City.
14. NEW YORK ON ON FOOT. Randall’s Island. Underneath the Triboro Bridge. If a concrete structure can be eerie, this might be it.
13. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Woodside, Queens. An elevated train platform. I am not sure a sculptor could do better.
12. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Staten Island. Looking east from Staten Island onto a body of water called The Narrows (Brooklyn is in the background). The Narrows is a tidal strait that links Lower and Upper New York Bay.
11. NEW YORK ON FOOT. South Manhattan. Looking downtown (Manhattanese for south) from the observation deck at the Rockefeller Center. You can see the East River to the left, the Hudson River and Upper New York Bay to the right.
10. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Riverdale, The Bronx. Yes, this is the Bronx. Riverdale Park, on the shore of the Hudson River. Another of the city’s treasures that requires a bit of finding.
9. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Lower Manhattan. A visual contrast between old and new, but the image also pushes light and color contrast to photographic limits and displays the classic distortion of a wide-angle lens. Looking north at dusk from just above Battery Park.
8. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Brooklyn Bridge. The Manhattan skyline taken from the Brooklyn Bridge. The Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the Trump World Tower (black, to the right) are the reference points. Although it has since been repainted, the rivets and rusty steel of the bridge in the foreground evoke the industrial muscle of the late 19th Century.
7. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Central Park, Harlem. Central Park is one of the treasures of North America, and many favor the less-visited northern end of the park. This idyllic scene was taken just below 110th street in Harlem, and shows what the park’s architects intended: that every viewpoint be an evocative visual composition.
6. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Sunnyside, Queens. After decades of seeing photographs and films that glamorize New York and make it look like its all glass and skycrapers, it still regularly surprises me what New York City actually looks like.
5. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Upper East Side, Manhattan. The East River under the bridge that is variously called the 59th Street Bridge, the Queens Bridge, the 60th Street Bridge, the Queensboro Bridge and its official title, the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge. There is still a lot of commercial traffic on the East River, tugs, barges, and even the occasional deep draft ship.
4. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Astoria, Queens. An improvised parking lot on the street under an elevated subway train line (known fondly as “The El”). There was at one time several elevated train lines in Manhattan as well, but they survive only in the outer boroughs.
3. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Mott Haven, The Bronx. The fabled South Bronx, considered a dangerous area of New York City to this day. Even for native New Yorkers The Bronx remains mysterious—oft mentioned, rarely visited. A teen recently interviewed on the local news said that when as a kid he moved from The Bronx to Harlem, it was like moving from a small town to the big city.