James H. Hare snapped this picture from a balloon of Manhattan in 1906. Some corners of the Internet believe that this may be the first aerial photo of downtown Manhattan.
Viewing entries in
NYC
The Magic School Bus field trip goes horribly, horribly 
Kottke spotted this commentary on New York City's bike share program. I suspect that this is the work of Poster Boy.
Neat scene in Williamsburg snapped by Dan Nguyen.
I wish Penn Station still looked like this instead of the utter eye sore that it is today. Adding Port Authority and the monstrous towering vomit that is the Verizon building to this eye sore list.
The New York Times "recruited historians and museum curators to identify 50 objects that could embody the narrative of New York."
The elevated 9th Avenue subway line in Manhattan seen above at the intersection of 14th Street. Today it looks something like this.
Photos of my life over the past couple weeks should you care to look. If you do, you will see a pooping dog made out of paper mache.
So I can check this off my bucket list. I had terrific seats earlier this week for the Knicks game versus the Sacramento Kings at MSG. We were seated 13 rows away from the court and I came prepared with a sign which happened to be photographed by a Getty Images photographer. Friends told me they saw it on Sports Center the morning after the game.
Here I am on ESPN's website and CBS New York's website.
It takes a lot to stand out in Times Square... See this and other random photos from my jaunts around NYC 
I went to the opening of Ai Weiwei's sunflower seed installation at Mary Boone Gallery. Other pictures from my weekend jaunt here.
Lonely bicycle photographed by Dan Nguyen.
Erich Hartmann, 1990.
Richard Kalvar, 1976
Richard Kalvar, 1976
This bullet point "essay" by Ned Hepburn is kind of brilliant.
- Dating in New York is extremely difficult.
- Dating in New York is extremely difficult because women get hit on all of the time, in every way imaginable.
- Men are inherently lonely people because our defaults are either fucking or fighting related (not counting sleep; eating, obviously), and the New York City default is all about ‘survival’.
- Combine the two previous bullet points and you have a recipe for disaster; a city full of angry dudes at half staff trying harder and harder at a game that women become increasingly bitter at ever being involved in it in the first place.
- I don’t know what it must be like to be a woman in New York. It must be really difficult / freeing / one or the other, but not both.
- Last night I was outside of a bar, and this woman dropped something from her purse and kept walking. It was one of those “buy 9 get the 10th free” things and I figured she’d want it back so I tapped her on the arm and tried to hand it back to her. “You dropped this”, I said, and she gave me a look as if I had just vomited shit out of my eyes. She didn’t take the damn card. This was in front of five people.
- Her friend saw it and whispered “Don’t worry, I’ll take that”, but holy shit, how bitter can someone be when they drop something and someone tries to hand it back to them?
- Perhaps its got to do more with the human condition.
- Perhaps we are all just very, very lonely and defensive. We are all just monkeys still with money and guns.
- That’s what I initially thought.
- But then I saw a guy fingerbang his girlfriend over her skirt while at the bar, and it made me think.
- Perhaps there are two types of men in this world:
- 1. Guys that fingerbang people at bars, and
- 2. Guys that don’t.
- I looked around the bar and saw everyone else just stand around, waiting and wanting to be looked at. Men, women, everyone.
- Perhaps we’re just looking for a hole to fill. I mean that metaphorically.
- Or I guess the other way, too.
- The human heart doesn’t want to be bitter. The brain does not want to be angry. These are not our default settings. These are switches and dials in our heads that have taken years, sometimes decades to change that way. It’s easier not to remember those original settings. It’s a lot easier to become what the world wants you to be, instead of making the world become what you want it to, which takes years, years, years.
- Positivity is a marathon, not a sprint.
- It’s just that these people have made many smaller decisions, split second ones, hundreds of them, to ignore that and turn the other way.
- It’s a lot easier to focus on your own problems and project them.
- Which is why I think she didn’t want to take her card back, because she thought I was trying some sort of maneuver.
- Which is worrying in and of itself, because it’s just a card, lady. It’s not a proposal nor am I trying to fuck you.
- Which, I guess, made me feel kinda sad for her
- And people like her
- Who look at an exchange like that and their take home is “Stacey, this guy outside the club tried to hand me something!” “Oh my god!” “I knooooow!”
- And they don’t look at it any other way and chalk it up to their “Well I Never!” category in their head
- And that whole cycle just breeds loneliness.
- And you see people walking down the street hand in hand, and you wonder how they did it.
- I guess through just ignoring everything I’ve just said, right?
- It’s like that Bret Easton Ellis line “People are afraid to merge”, except he was talking about people on the freeway, really.
- And I’m just talking about a lady dropping something on the sidewalk.
People sat in Times Square to watch a free show from the Metropolitan Opera. The real show for me was this cool cigar smoking customer walking in front.
Dan Nguyen snapped these great pictures of low riders cruising down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Filed under SWAG.
It reads like a scene out of How I Met Your Mother, but here's an amusing tale of one New Yorker asking out a New Yorkette on the L train via his smartphone app...
That’s when I decided I had to ask her out, but how to do it without being publicly embarrassed on a packed train? So I took out my phone and wrote “how about a cup of coffee sometime?” on my evernote app.
Find out what happened here.
At the opening of Richard Serra's two new installations on display at the Gagosian, I had my second sighting of 2011 of my art crush, Chuck Close who was so warm and kind enough to pose for a photo. After I snapped this picture, an old couple ran up to me. The wife asked, "Excuse me. Who is that?" I replied "Chuck Close!" "See!" she snapped at her husband. "I told you it was him!"
Why am I so obsessed with him? My answer is here.
Photo by Vincent Laforet of two workers fixing the antenna atop the Empire State Building in 2001.