Yearly Archives: 2019
342. PASSAGES. Los Angeles. Venice Beach is LA’s Coney Island.
341. LONDON ON FOOT. Greenwich.
340. LONDON ON FOOT. Greenwich. If I were explaining it, I would call this neighborhood “that incongruous, hyper-modern district over by the funny-looking tennis stadium.”
339. PASSAGES. Georgetown. Washington DC. In terms of its feel for an outsider, DC is part Northeast, part Southeast, and part Confederate South. The one thing that you can say about DC is that it is East Coast, which, owing to history, has a distinct personality.
338. LONDON ON FOOT. Greenwich.
337. PASSAGES. Singapore.
336. LONDON ON FOOT. Greenwich. The ISO on this camera goes up to 25,000. Which is crazy.
335. LONDON ON FOOT. Deptford.
334. LONDON ON FOOT. Whitechapel. Like outer borough New York, London is generally a low rise city. One thinks of the so-called Five Story Rule of Paris: “buildings cannot be taller than the height residents and users are prepared to climb using stairs.” The terse New York vernacular for such a place is a “walkup”. High rises didn’t exist until the electric elevator was invented.
333. PASSAGES. New Haven, Connecticut. “Life is not about significant details, illuminated in a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.” -Susan Sontag
332. LONDON ON FOOT. Royal Borough of Greenwich.
331. LONDON ON FOOT. Croydon. I’ve an odd history with this small town in south London, but I can’t shake how its visual character reminds of Kubrick’s film, A Clockwork Orange.
330. LONDON ON FOOT. Spitalfields, Royal Borough of Tower Hamlets. Spitalfields takes its name from St. Mary’s Spittal, founded in 1197. A spittal is a place of refuge for the sick or the site of a hospital, but the word also refers to a shelter built along roads in 16th century Scotland to protect people from wolf attacks.
329. LONDON ON FOOT. Royal Borough of Greenwich. Canary Wharf in the BG. “Canary Wharf is the secondary central business district of London, and is a wider electoral ward of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, encompassing part of the neighbouring Isle of Dogs.“
328. LONDON ON FOOT. Royal Borough of Greenwich. The indubitable double-decker.
327. LONDON ON FOOT. City of Westminster.
326. LONDON ON FOOT. Bardsley Lane, Royal Borough of Greenwhich. If there is a more typical London corner (complete with a grey sky and drizzle), I’ve not seen it.
325. LONDON ON FOOT. A City of London banker friend warned me to avoid Deptford, or take my life in my hands. My jaunt in Deptford the next day proved again that such warnings are generally silly.
324. TRAVELS IN INDIA. Old Delhi Railway Station. 180,000 passengers a day.
323. NEW YORK ON FOOT. Riverdale, The Bronx. “New York City is primarily composed of sediments that were metamorphosed during the Taconica nd Acadian orogenies roughly 500 – 400 million years ago. Garnets can be found in the rocks of the Hartland Formation and Manhattan Schist. It is in these hard rocks that the city skyscrapers have their foundations.” -Wiki. An Engineer in Queens once told me that you can track the location of hard rock by looking at the Manhattan skyline.