BLUE SKY AHEAD: June 2013

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Saint Thomas Church, Manhattan, New York, New York

We went to church with Mike on Sunday and had a lovely Service.
Below are some pictures we took, as well as information on the Church.

Saint Thomas Church, located at the corner of 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue in the borough of Manhattan, New York, New York in the United States, is an Episcopal parish church of the Episcopal Diocese of New York.
http://www.saintthomaschurch.org/

Pipe Organ

Sunday, June 23, 2013

Little Italy, a cornucopia of pleasures

Click on any or all pictures to enlarge

Dinner in Little Italy

Streets were filled with good times

delicatessan full of "oh my's"

Trumph Towers - 5th Ave - looking down to the lobby from 2nd fl.

looking up - the place is amazing

another shot overlooking the floor below

On The Way Home....

On The Way Home...
Crosby Stills Nash & Young:
"Now I won't be back until later on
if I do come back at all
and to know me
(you know me)
and I miss you now ...."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smwlUbhBg3s

Click on any picture to enlarge:

Carnegie Hall

Below: The Flatiron Building was designed by Chicago's Daniel Burnham as a vertical Renaissance palazzo with Beaux-Arts styling.[14][15] Unlike New York's early skyscrapers, which took the form of towers arising from a lower, blockier mass, such as the contemporary Singer Building (1902–1908), the Flatiron Building epitomizes the Chicago school conception:[16] like a classical Greek column, its facade – limestone at the bottom changing to glazed terra-cotta from the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company in Tottenville, Staten Island as the floors rise[17][18] – is divided into a base, shaft and capital.

Flatiron Bldg

Friday, June 21, 2013

The High Line

We strolled the High Line today. Below are excerpts from the Wikipedia. The link to the full article in at the bottom of this post. I took all these pictures this afternoon.
Click on any or all of the pictures below to enlarge them.

The High Line is an elevated rail line, the successor to the street-level freight line original built through Chelsea in 1847, which was the cause of numerous fatal accidents. It was elevated in the early 1930s by the New York Central Railroad, but fell out of use. Originally slated to be torn down, it has now been converted into an elevated urban park.

You can make out the railroad rails in this picture

The High Line is a 1-mile (1.6 km)[1] New York City linear park built on a 1.45-mile (2.33 km)[2] section of the former elevated New York Central Railroad spur called the West Side Line, which runs along the lower west side of Manhattan; it has been redesigned and planted as an aerial greenway. A similar project in Paris (the nearly 3 mile Promenade plantée, completed in 1993) was the inspiration for this project. The High Line Park currently runs from Gansevoort Street, three blocks below West 14th Street, in the Meatpacking District, up to 30th Street, through the neighborhood of Chelsea to the West Side Yard, near the Javits Convention Center.

Original railroad rails

The recycling of the railway into an urban park has spurred real estate development in the neighborhoods which lie along the line.[3]

A lovely place, for all the locals

In 1847, the City of New York authorized street-level railroad tracks down Manhattan’s West Side. For safety, the railroads hired men – the "West Side Cowboys" – to ride horses and wave flags in front of the trains.[4] Yet so many accidents occurred between freight trains and other traffic that 10th Avenue became known as "Death Avenue".

Very well taken care of, and clean as a whistle

The High Line opened to trains in 1934. It originally ran from 34th Street to St. John's Park Terminal, at Spring Street. It was designed to go through the center of blocks, rather than over the avenue, to avoid the drawbacks of elevated trains. It connected directly to factories and warehouses, allowing trains to roll right inside buildings. Milk, meat, produce, and raw and manufactured goods could be transported and unloaded without disturbing traffic on the streets.[4] This also reduced pilferage for the Bell Laboratories Building, now the Westbeth Artists Community, and the Nabisco plant, now Chelsea Market, which were served from protected sidings within the structures.[5]

A Holly plant grown into an 8 foot tree

Wikipedia link to the High Line: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Line_%28New_York_City%29

The Architecture of Chelsea, N.Y.

We walked to meet Michael where he works today. I took pictures of the wonderful history of Chelsea. The architecture is just wonderful. Here's a snippet of Chelsea (from wikipedia):

Chelsea is a neighborhood on the West Side of the borough of Manhattan in New York City. The district's boundaries are roughly 14th Street to the south, 30th Street to the north, the western boundary of the Ladies' Mile Historic District – which lies between the Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue) and Seventh Avenue – to the east, and the Hudson River and West Street to the west.

Chelsea takes its name from the estate and Georgian-style house of retired British Major Thomas Clarke, who obtained the property when he bought the farm of Jacob Somerindyck on August 16, 1750. The land was bounded by what would become 21st and 24th Streets, from the Hudson River to Eighth Avenue.^[5] Clarke chose the name "Chelsea" after the manor of Chelsea, London, home to Sir Thomas More.

The picture below is from Wikipedia. I've posted excerpts throughout this post from Wikipedia, and the link to the article is at the bottom of this page.

Wikipedia:


The Cushman Row, 406-418 W. 20th St., dates from 1840

These are the pictures that I took today:

antique setting, crowded sidewalks

In the early 1940s, tons of uranium for the Manhattan Project were stored in the Baker & Williams Warehouse at 513-519 West 20th St. The uranium was removed and decontaminated only in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

This picture doesn't do the detail work justice. The tips on the left side are white

The industrialization of western Chelsea brought immigrant populations from many countries to work in the factories,^[8] including a large number of Irish immigrants, who dominated work on the Hudson River piers that lined the nearby waterfront and the truck terminals integrated with the freight railroad spur.^[9] As well as the piers, warehouses and factories, the industrial area west of Tenth Avenue also included lumberyards and breweries, and tenements built to house the workers.

row houses

The new neighborhood thrived for three decades, with many single family homes and rowhouses, in the process expanding past the original boundaries of Clarke's estate, but an industrial zone also began to develop along the Hudson.^[5] In 1847 the Hudson River Railroad laid its freight tracks up a right-of-way between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, separating Chelsea from the Hudson River waterfront. By the time of the Civil War, the area west of Ninth Avenue and below 20th Street was the location of numerous distilleries making turpentine and camphene, a lamp fuel. In addition, the huge Manhattan Gas Works complex, which converted bituminous coal into gas, was located at Ninth and 18th Street.^[7]

love the detail work

London Terrace was one of the world's largest apartment blocks when it opened in 1930, with a swimming pool, solarium, gymnasium, and doormen dressed as London bobbies. The complex takes up the full block between Ninth and Tenth Avenues and 23rd and 24th Streets.