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NYC Photos April and May 2018: Trump’s in town, U Thant Island, Gantry Park, Long Island City Queens

I got some good photos walking around the other day in New York (Wednesday, May 23). I gathered in the morning with my pastor-friend Ben to do some work in the Flatiron district at 26th street and then later walked North and East to 38th street as far East as the East River, and then back West to 38th and 2nd where I had a small group meeting. That is, a meeting with a small group of Christians I gather with on a semi-regular basis to eat and study scripture.

I love taking photos. I use an Honor 8 phone, a midrange-priced cell phone (made by Huawei, a company which the US intelligence community says not to use ) that happens to have a really good camera (The phone is fragile though and the screen shatters easily. I have been through 2 screens already. I probably need to find a new go-to phone but I’m used to this one). I edit the photos I take with the Google Photo app’s built-in editor and then maybe put an instagram filter on there too. Sometimes people say nice things about my photos on instagram and I feel like saying I cheated, because the Google app can can and does make regular old photos look a lot more stunning. It’s a little creepy too, how Google will randomly choose photos from the cloud to gussy up and present to me.

You see all kinds of things in NY. Trump was in town on this day so there was an increased police presence, a generalized air of expectation, and then later on in the evening interminable traffic delays. I engaged one of the traffic cops in conversation (you can see him in the photo) and asked him if the President was in town. “Trump’s in town,” he affirmed. I asked him what for. “Oh you know, some political things, or maybe some business things, you know, with the tower.” It was pretty clear the guy had no idea but just wanted to talk, which was fine cause I did too.

By the river I saw a police boat engage with a jet-ski in the East river. It looked like maybe the jet-ski got too close to a little tiny island [*Edit. I did a little (very little. I typed “tiny island East River” in my search bar) research and found out more about this tiny island, which is called U Thant island. Please watch this video for some fascinating and entertaining history.]

If you watched the video then you know that no one is allowed on the island. (“U Thant” touch this). Accordingly, the police boat shooed the jetski away. I have to wonder if the police boat is a constant presence near U Thant Island, or whether it was part of the beefed-up Presidential visit security.

Behind U Thant Island is Gantry park, in Long Island City, Queens, which offers stunning views of the NYC skyline. You might ask why it’s called Long Island City if it’s not in Long Island. The answer is that technically Queens (and Brooklyn) are part of Long Island. They comprise the Western Part of Long Island. But when people use the term “Long Island” they usually mean the eastern part. That is, the suburbs. By the way, Long Island is the 11th largest island in the US and larger than Rhode Island, which technically has the longest State name of all 50 US States (State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations)!

I hope you like these photos of Manhattan, the East River, and Long Island City, Queens (The Queens photos are from April 24).

Pictured: Friendly Traffic Cop.

 

I turned the red filter way up.  Can you tell?

I’m not sure what was causing the sun to dapple that building on the right but I liked it.

NYPD Police boat shooing away jet-ski from U Thant Island.  If you didn’t watch the video about U Thant you really should.

Pepsi Cola Sign by Night. Gantry Park.

View of Manhattan Skyline from Gantry Park. (Panoramic view which got kinda bent). On this night, the Empire State building (over to the far left) was not lit, in honor of the victims of the terrorist van attack in Toronto the day before.

View of Manhattan skyline framed by one of the eponymous gantries.

Link

2017.

2017. It’s here.  “I can’t believe it’s 2017,” I’ve said to .. pretty much everyone, and almost everyone has concurred. No one has said, “It seems right and good that it’s 2017. Here it is, right on time.” 2017 seems pretty close to being a year in a Sci-Fi film in which something momentous and possibly devastating occurs. The older I get, the busier I get, and the faster the years fly by.  I guess that’s something an old person would say. I should watch that, ’cause I’m not old yet, though sometimes I feel like it.

Anyway, Happy New Year.  For last New Year’s Eve — that is, one year ago,  I went to the Hamptons with a group of people, most of whom I did not know. They were friends of my friend Sean’s new girlfriend Rachel (new at the time; they’re married now), and Sean invited me along so that he’d know somebody besides his girlfriend. It was a fun time. We ate a lot, played games, journalled (we were all Christians; Christians like to journal) and did the polar plunge — that is, we jumped into the freezing cold Atlantic with a couple of hundred locals. After we got home and warmed up we had a dance party and then watched the ball drop on Ryan Seacrest’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. That was the weekend I developed an appreciation for Taylor Swift.

Usually I do want to see friends on New Years, and I want to stay up past midnight to make noise and celebrate. But this year, for the first time in a long time, I felt no inclination to be with people on New Year’s Eve, or to stay awake until midnight. I felt like spending a quiet evening alone and that’s what I did.   I was in the mood for some good old cheesy-but-not-terrible Sci-Fi  and searched this list of top 100 Sci-Fi films until I found  the 1956 classic “Forbidden Planet,” which fit the bill perfectly. It features a deadly serious Leslie Nielsen before he realized his true calling as the straight man in a dozen or so 80’s spy and cop spoofs. (I’ve also seen a more earnest Nielsen in a Columbo or two).

I haven’t posted here in the past two years, and I’m hoping to post more this year. I’ve written before about and marveled at how Seth Godin blogs every day.  How does he have the time?  How does he resist the urge to edit everything to death?  Well, I recently read an interview where he said something like, “If you have time to watch TV every day, then you have time to blog every day.”  And while I don’t watch TV every day, I take his point.  I certainly can take the time to post *something* each day, even if it’s not perfect or even that coherent.

So I’m going to try to post one thing each day in January, even if it’s just a photo (I take a picture of something almost every day).

(not sure why these photos are so small.  I’ll try to fix that tomorrow).

Here’s a picture I took yesterday just about dusk, of a lamp post emerging from a nest of London Plane tree roots.

According to this article, 15% of all NYC street trees are London Planes. I wouldn’t be surprised if the percentage is higher in Brooklyn. My neighborhood (Ditmas Park, sometimes called West Flatbush or Midwood) is full of them.

There are London Planes in this pic of my street from the first big snow we had in January of last year.

The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation logo features a London Plane tree leaf. Here’s a good example from sign at Coney Island. I think they were repairing the boardwalk.

Well, that’s all for tonight. If you’re reading this, thanks, and See you soon, I hope.