Tourist bus at Empire State

Sunny and milder, great day for a tour bus ride on a quiet Sunday in Midtown

Sunday outdoor market

Outdoor market thrives on sunny Sunday with lots of fresh fruit and veg, and an array of pickles..

This is in yard of Murray Hill School

Hair Club

Never noticed this place before...This is in kind of a Yuppie neighborhood and a lot of young men are of course preocuppied with premature baldness.

33rd Street Lexington Avenue Subway ( "IRT")

A lot of the country is still digging out...

Life seems so listless in the cold rain today.

Cold Rain

Snow has been succeeded by cold rain, with freezing rain tonight...

Sort of grim day doesn't stop group of teenage boys from hanging out in the rain on 33rd Street.

Garbage in Shade and Snow

Wow, is it going to take a long time to get all this stacked up garbage picked up...

Good thing it is wintertime/freezing and no flies or smells particularly

More ice and snow on Saturday which will slow collections down even more

Hair salon- 34th Street

The inquisitive lens of Midtown blogger peeps into this upscale hair salon on 34th Street...

Guy & Gallard

Guy and Gallard is a local Starbucks-like place, except I think nicer than Starbuck's..

Have only seen them in this neighborhood! Will have to google them to see where else they are.

Very inviting place on a freezing if sunny winter day.

New Building- Shoehorning in

This small corner lot doesn't look big enough for the poster picture building to fit in there...

As I have noted, building keeps going on here all the time despite the down economy.

Astro- Weird

Astro Gems and Minerals has all types of displays, from the very traditional to the more far out, as you can see here....

New Building

New building is always going on in this area of Midtown, no matter how bad the economy is.

Manhattan was like that in the 1930's, too...while building ground to a halt in Chicago and San Francisco and many other places, they continued to build in New York, completing Radio City Music Hall and the Empire State Building in the middle of the depression.

Fire at Ameerican Academy of Dramatic Arts

Fire (without much smoke) draws lots of fire engines on Madison Avenue.

It is the American Academy of Dramatic Arts....in the Stanford White Building that used to be the swank women's Colony Club.

Other shots show how fast photographers are on scene and setting up.

Antique Shop

Have shown this shop in Murray Hill before...guess it is built in an old Firehouse...always looks so inviting

Servicemen's Club

This club for Servicemen ( official name is something like Aviators, Sailors and Soldiers Club) always makes me think of the USO around WW II....have known a Coast Guardsman who stayed there once....saw the interior, DOES look very 1940's (or I should say, used to...they may have rehabbed it)

Grand Central Plaza

Must have walked past this Murray Hill "Grand Central Plaza" many times without really being aware of it...

Snowbound, more or less

This is midtown Manhattan with all the cars snowed in, just think of the boroughs...

More snow due soon. Thanks to La Nina and the high stuck over Greenland....

Digging Out

Trapped driver has crew help dig him out

Clear Night over New York City

An older man I know was flying over NYC recently at about 12:30 a.m. and got this aerial view of the city at night..

That is Staten Island in the foreground, Jersey to the left,
Brooklyn and Manhattan in the background ( way back are Queens, and the Bronx coast).

Nice relief from pictures of nothing but snow.

East 35th Street- Snow

Ah, the Winter Wonderland!

More and more snow!

People are busy milling about despite all the snow and slush and water moats...walking in the street is sometimes the only option.

Kids are home from school today!

Courtyard

Snow again!

Backyard courtyard gets a new layer, with more to come...

Another 6 inches or more tonight...

Abandoned couch still in snow

After several weeks, this couch is still out on 35th Street, now with new snowfall on it and more to come...

Who is supposed to pick this up, anyway?

New Bistro

Tung Sing? Is that Chinese or Vietnamese or what?

Anyway, new place maybe worth trying out.

Inside Brother Jimmy's

Brother Jimmy's is a local Southern restaurant ( it features all sorts of items like collard greens and hush puppies etc.)

Very popular with youngish/college/yuppie types

Very few black people

Nice menu...

Is Obama a Pawn of Wall Street?

IN the last year, I have read and heard more and more commentary about the Wall Street bailout and that Obama is too subservient to Wall Street.

The real problem seems to be how expensive it is to run for office in the United States ( it is getting to be a problem in other countries too).

I am always glad when some candidate spends millions and millions of their own money and loses. The reason for this, however, may be just that they never bothered to build up a broad base of support for their own candidacy. Most of Obama's Presidential run contributors made relatively small donations.

But their is a lot of evidence that as a culture the U.S. has grown much greedier and there is more civic corruption in places like California than there used to be.
Places like Iowa I suspect have less corruption just because there is less money to be made ( and less drug money in particular).

Leave a comment if you disagree with me.