Monthly Archives: January 2017
149. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Taken at the northern tip of Brooklyn, looking across Newtown Creek into Queens. The image has that unique sunlight effect of some coastal cities–I have seen it in New York, Vancouver, Galway, Los Angeles and various places around the Mediterranean, but never in the tropics. Maybe its a Northern Hemisphere thing.
148. PASSAGES. Valley Stream, Long Island. Taken six weeks after Hurricane Sandy 25 miles from Manhattan. This quiet suburban street didn’t make the news because it was nothing compared to what happened in Gerritsen Beach or Breezy Point. New York is difficult enough without superstorms.
147. PASSAGES. Montreal. I have long believed that islands make the most interesting cultures. Something about isolation, and without the ability to sprawl island cultures tend to concentrate rather than dissipate. An analogy is Peter O’toole telling Charlie Rose that it is better to deepen rather than broaden for an actor to achieve more powerful effects. Quebec is an island of eight million Francophones in Anglo North America. It is both Europe and North America, yet something else completely. In the art of living it is certainly a step above.
146. PASSAGES. The Berkshires, Massachusetts. This wooded, mountainous region is revered by Northeasterners. Even the names around here have a Northeastern sound: the Taconic Mountains, the “marble valleys of the Hoosic River”, the Hudson Highlands, and all of it bordered by “Metacomet Ridge geology”. The Berkshire mountain ranges were formed 500 million years ago when Africa collided with North America. Imagine that.
145. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Central Park. 843 acres of parkland in the midst of some of the most condensed, populated, competitive, expensive real estate on the planet? The fact that Central Park even exists is hard to believe. Forget the Statue of Liberty, Central Park is my vote as the symbol of the American Dream. “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” –Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural.