Shootings at Empire State Building

Sunfilled late August Day
Looming Dark Tower
Screams and sirens
Not just another shooting
Oh, that I can say "just another"

Families on vacation
Bullets have pierced the Heart of Gotham
And all we can do is Pray
In our own Ways

I am not much of a poet but I cannot say all that I feel right now about the Empire State shootings....some will say it was inevitable--how awful that we can feel ourselves nodding in unwilling agreement to that

New Pedestrian Safety Campaign

City has started new safety campaign aimed at pedestrians, I see...
If they want to do something for pedestrians, they can start by doing something about reckless
bicycle riders...

Elderly lady was run over recently by cyclist on footpath of Queensboro Bridge. She lay there for hours before anyone called for help. Reminds me of the bad old days of the Kitty Genovese case (she was a Queens women who screamed for help for ages one night while being assaulted on street near her home and none of many people who heard her cries ever called police or anything.

Cyclist shown here went whizzing past me much faster than you would think from this photo, missing me by inches. This has happened to me a number of times in the last year. The new "dedicated bike lanes" makes this situation worse, not better. Cyclists ride in the wrong direction in them and are ever MORE oblivious to other traffic laws (such as red lights and pedestrians).

Tourist shops near Empire State Building

Tourist shops abound in the shadow of the famous New York landmark, the Empire State Building...just about every kind of knick-knack and souvenir item (tons of Empire State and Statue of Liberty replicas, smaller ones maybe serving as paperweights --does anyone have paperweights in this electronic age anymore?-- and the inevitable touristy postcards ( if you want more artistic cards of NYC, try a Hallmark card store).
This display was right around Fourth of July....I assumed they meant to keep the storefront this way all year round, but I would not know now because I have not been on this block since I took the picture...

Kips Bay Plaza Street Market

Kips Bay Plaza Street Market has been going on during weekends most of the summer....all sorts of stands selling a variety of wares, from junk jewelry to food to art photos.
Delicious looking smoothies now frowned upon by Food Police, because of SUGAR--the new forbidden food item...but they look SO good on a hot day...
Polish food is among food stalls ( also fresh fruit and Mexican food not so far away on the street)...
Polish food staples like kielbasy sausage and pickles are eaten by people of all different kinds of ethinic background in New York...once new an Irish-American cop from Queens who loved to cook it up with onions ( cannot remember exactly how this conversation came up)... 

Old Hotels in Midtown --with Their Varied Lives

Old Midtown Hotels, as I have noted before, are now renovated after having had different "lives" in the different eras since they were built.

Shown here are two old Midtown Hotels that are renovated now... don't remember the name of the top one here but it was once a "Welfare Hotel" as so many of the old hotels were in the 1980's, where the City paid enormous amounts of money to house homeless families in usually wretched conditions.
(Roach and rodent infested places).

The bottom picture is of the Hotel Wolcott, which was built in 1904...now renovated into what is considered an "affordable" place ( by Manhattan standards). You can find more at this link

http://www.wolcott.com/historymain.html

Hands

Hands have fascinated artists as a subject at least since Michelangelo...woman's hand used in ad for salon hand treatment looks bizarre at first glance, doesn't it? It is some treatment probably meant to make hands look younger and increase collagen....noticed that skin on my hands has become thinner as I become older and in fact though this is normal I may ask my doctor if there is something safe I can take to help that ( been reading on internet about all sorts of foods which supposedly help your skin and what creams and lotions work the best.. when it comes to the lotion stuff, they are all geared, however, to women's care of their faces mostly and thus of little interest to me.) ( I just want to protect my face against UV exposure and pollution etc. especially since I have already have had Mohs surgery once --but dermatologist tells me cause of that comes from over exposure to sun in childhood really, too late to do anything about that).

How Verizon does Repairs: SHODDY

This is how Verizon repairs landline cables that were old and damaged during some recent severe thunderstorms. Yeah, all those once exposed wires once encased in a metal part are now just wrapped in black plastic bag and held in place with a string...

Verizon apparently no longer cares about landline customers, and lets them know it.

Is it cooler up there?

90 degrees in the shade today and very, very humid....wonder if was any cooler or if there was a breeze up on the open 86th floor observation deck of the Empire State. Of course, would not want to be there when next batch of thunderstorms comes through ( weather reporting is more and more chancy these days about whether they will hit Manhattan or not--you never know. One direct hit by a series of violent storms in one night knocked out the telephone landline service to my building and it took Verizon six days to fix it. They did a rather shabby job, too-- wires from building are now up in the air in back courtyard with a part that was defective holding some part of the wires now replaced with some plastic garbage bags wrapped around them...when I saw the repair crew doing this, I asked the woman in charge how long this would hold up and would it make it through the next round of thunderstorms...she just laughed nervously.

Daredevil Skateboarders

Young daredevils love to skateboard in the heaviest Midtown traffic and on the sidewalks...
this one is another odd tale.. minutes after I took this pic I was down the block and this same guy came running up to a parked car (in the front seat a young couple was laughing) and hopped into the back seat with his board-- he was laughing too. Again, who knows what this was about.

Value Zone store-- strange hsitory

This Value Zone home goods store was doing a thriving business about seven years ago, and I remember walking down there one day meaning to get a new comforter for my bed...to my surprise, the place had been shut down overnight.

It has remained that way all this time, and now there are signs in the window about somebody owing $90,000 in back rent ( no more information than that).

Have the feeling several people have considered this site and maybe started moves to acquire it but the rent was too high. Who knows.

Sign still has some automatic turn on device that lights up 3 of the remaining letters of the store name...no one has ever bothered to just shut that off entirely. Weird.

There are so many strange stories in the Big Apple, and this will just remain one of them.

Dark Knight Rises After Shooting- A Hit in NYC

The Dark Knight Rises got off to a shaky start after all the concern following the shootings in Colorado, but within a couple of days the lines for the Imax showing at the local Loews Cineplex
at Kips Bay Plaza were enormous...

I have no desire to see the movie, having tired of superheroes long ago...I am not the right age group, that's for sure. Most of the people in this line, were, in fact, pretty young...