New York City Flashback: Views While Strolling and Shopping

From Dave Brigham:

Recently this thought struck me like a runaway freight train: I visited New York City three times between 2010 and 2016 and I didn't post anything about my trips!!!

Granted, it's only in more recent years that I've become obsessed with chronicling places in Greater Boston and cities that I visit on vacation (Seattle, Chicago, Panama City). As well, I've gotten much better at editing my photos in that time. What that means is a) there aren't as many photos in this post as you might expect and b) those photos aren't always as good as I'd like them to be.

Anyway, I dug through my archives, found a bunch of useable photos, and decided to post whatever the blog equivalent of latergrams is. This is the second of four posts.

The photos in this post were taken while strolling the city with my wife and kids, and show restaurants, bars, skating rinks, the subway, Central Park and much more. Let's take a look.

I've done my best to figure out where most of these places are located. Using Google Maps, my wife's recollection and Facebook crowd-sourcing, I nailed down most of them. But not this first one.

The consenus seems to be that this is in Hell's Kitchen, the West Side neighborhood between 34th Street to the south, 59th Street to the north, Eighth Avenue to the east, and the Hudson River to the west. The blue boards covering a few windows, the fire escapes, the grime clinging to the building just all spoke to me. I wish I'd taken the time to get a better shot and mark its location. Through my detective work and that of others, my best guess is that this place was located at 301 West 46th Street (DVD Palace, the sign for which you can see in the lower left of the photo, is mentioned in this article). By all indications, this eyesore (which could have been cleaned up, for sure) has been torn down.

DVD Palace was a three-minute walk from Smith's Bar, the photogenic and well-known eatery established in 1954 at the corner of 8th Avenue and 44th Street.

We patronized this place, as we were staying not too far away, in Times Square, and were looking for a good place to hang out with my sister, who joined us on this trip; and my brother, his then-wife and their two kids, who were in town for a day or two. We all had a blast here, especially the kids, who took over the stage and were dancing to the bar's early-afternoon soundtrack. The food and beer was great, too. Smith's closed in 2014, but was reopened the next year by Skip Panettiere, a retired NYC firefighter and father of actress Hayden Panettiere ("Heroes," "Nashville"). Although there is no web site or current Facebook page for the bar, I believe it's still open.

Perhaps on our way to or from Smith's Bar, we passed the Times Square location of Carmine's, "the original NYC family style Italian restaurant," according to the chain's web site.

I don't recall why I took this photo. Perhaps to my small-town mind, Carmine's seemed like a big deal. I'm sure the food is good, but it's known as a tourist trap, I think.

On our first family vacation in the Big Apple, we went to the Times Square Toys 'R' Us and rode on the indoor Ferris wheel.

This is a terrible shot of the Scooby-Doo car on the wheel. We had a lot of fun there, as you can imagine. The store closed in 2015 (replaced by Gap and Old Navy stores, and a McDonald's franchise), but the cars and characters from the wheel found new lives in the Winter Wonderland parade at the Give Kids the World Village in Orlando, Florida.

Because my son, Owen, loves subways, naturally we rode underground through New York whenever possible. Below is a shot from some random station.

For more about the city's subways, see the first post in this series, "New York City Flashback: The Transit Museum," from January 29, 2022.

We traveled by Amtrak Acela to New York City three times: 2010, 2011 and 2016. I believe it was the first year that my daughter, Amelia, and I checked out the American Museum of Natural History, because Owen wasn't feeling well. He stayed at the hotel with my wife. Amelia and I also played at the Diana Ross Playground, which is located in Central Park. The famous singer funded construction of the playground following her 1983 concert on the park's Great Lawn.

(Funny slide.)

Central Park is great, as you may have heard from, well, just about anyone who's ever stepped foot in the city. Around 2010/2011, my kids were pretty into watching "The Penguins of Madagascar," the TV show spun off from the movie "Madagascar." So it was cool to go to the Central Park Zoo, where the show takes place, and see the Delacorte Clock, an animated version of which is featured in the show.

Sculpted by Spanish artist and designer Fernando Texidor and American architect Edward Coe Embury, the clock was installed in 1965. It was the gift of publisher and philanthropist George Delacorte, founder of Dell Publishing.

For me, the coolest feature of Central Park is Belvedere Castle.

"Designed by Central Park co-designer Calvert Vaux and architect Jacob Wrey Mould, the structure and adjacent terraces and pavilions were all called 'the Belvedere,' which means 'beautiful view' in Italian," according to the Central Park web site. "The entire complex, completed in 1872, was designed as a place from which to enjoy views of the surrounding landscape; the building originally had no windows or doors, as it was intended as an open-air lookout tower."

Naturally we hit other touristy spots on our trips, including Rockefeller Center, and its iconic skating rink.

"The Rink, or 'skating pond' as it was first known, officially opened on Christmas Day 1936. Originally planned as a temporary exhibit, The Rink was so popular it became a permanent addition, with the Prometheus Statue and the Christmas Tree providing one of the most familiar backdrops in the world," per the rink's official web site. The Prometheus statue was sculpted by Paul Manship.

While in Rockefeller Plaza, we shopped in one of the buildings that overlooked this bizarre architectural mishmash (there's an even weirder one below).

Located at 28 W 48th St. (which I figured out by plugging the phone number into Google), part of this street scene has changed significantly in the intervening years. Below the psychic shop now is a Starbucks (natch). The brownstone in the middle with the red "PSYCHIC" sign has been torn down, unfortunately, as you can see below.

In addition to funky architectural juxtaposition, New York is known for its water towers.

I don't remember where I shot this, but I think it was near our hotel on the Upper West Side in 2016. Across from our hotel, the Hotel Beacon, was The Ansonia.

The Ansonia "was originally built as a residential hotel by William Earle Dodge Stokes, the Phelps-Dodge copper heir and shareholder in the Ansonia Clock Company, and it was named after his grandfather, the industrialist Anson Greene Phelps," according to Wikipedia. "In 1897, Stokes commissioned French architect Paul Emile Duboy to design the grandest hotel in Manhattan." I wish I had a better shot of this magnificent building.

While we were staying at the Hotel Beacon, as part of the Tribeca Film Festival, the 40th anniversary screening of "Taxi Driver" was showing in the Beacon Theatre next door.

We hung around the red carpet a bit, but didn't see any celebrities.

As promised above, an even stranger amalgam of buildings.

Located at 14 E 58th St. (which my wife figured out by looking up All About Food on Google), this scene has also changed quite a bit since we were there a decade ago. All About Food is still there, and the brownstone behind it has been buffed up a bit, but the POP store (restaurant?) that looks like it was located in a gigantic Connect Four game is gone. A restaurant may be there by now.

These buildings are around the corner from the Apple store on Fifth Avenue, which we checked out. I have a great picture of Amelia eating a giant pink cupcake while wearing a pink coat, seated on the plaza in front of the store.

Last, but certainly not least, is the legendary Hotel Chelsea

Located on West 23rd Street, a few blocks from High Line, the hotel was built between 1883 and 1885, per Wikipedia. The Chelsea has long been a haven and hangout for poets, musicians, artists and other creative types. "Arthur C. Clarke wrote '2001: A Space Odyssey' while staying at the Chelsea, and poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso chose it as a place for philosophical and artistic exchange," Wikipedia reports. "It is also known as the place where the writer Dylan Thomas was staying in room 205 when he became ill and died several days later, in a local hospital, of pneumonia on November 9, 1953, and where Nancy Spungen, girlfriend of Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, was found stabbed to death on October 12, 1978."

The Chelsea combines residences with a hotel. My wife and I stayed at the hotel with friends many years ago. Our rooms were fantastic, with bold colors on the walls, oversized, artsy light fixtures and plenty of room to spread out. While chilling in the lobby, surrounded by cool works of art hanging on the walls, I spied someone who, as I said to my wife and friends, "looks like she's somebody."

All these years later, I don't remember how we discovered who she was. Perhaps there was something about her hanging on the walls of the lobby. Anyway, she was Stormé DeLarverie, "whose scuffle with police was, according to Stormé and many eyewitnesses, the spark that ignited the Stonewall riots, spurring the crowd to action," per Wikipedia. "She was born in New Orleans, to an African American mother and a white father. She is remembered as a gay civil rights icon and entertainer, who performed and hosted at the Apollo Theater and Radio City Music Hall. She worked for much of her life as an MC, singer, bouncer, bodyguard, and volunteer street patrol worker, the 'guardian of lesbians in the Village.' She is known as 'the Rosa Parks of the gay community.'"

DeLarverie died in 2014 at the age of 93.

Hope you enjoyed this tour! Make sure to check back for photos from and on the High Line, as well as some shots taken from a double-decker tour bus.

Make sure to check out the first post in this series, "New York City Flashback: The Transit Museum."

Having a Bear of a Time at the Zoo

From Dave Brigham:

What's the smartest animal in the zoo? An elephant, with its great memory? A bear, which is considered as smart as some higher primates? Apes, with their tool manipulation skills and sharp sense of fashion?

(Stolen from the Casual Debris web site.)

I don't know, but the answer to "Who is the most dumbest?" is: me.

There was a time several years ago when my kids, who are five years apart, were at the right age for zoo visits. I took them once to the Stone Zoo in Stoneham, and a handful of times to the Franklin Park Zoo, which straddles Boston's Jamaica Plain and Roxbury neighborhoods. After one of our visits, which included checking out an amazing playground, as well as lots of cool animals ranging from lions and zebras, to kangaroos, baboons and camels, I dragged the kids along outside the zoo proper to look for something I'd heard about for years: the bear dens.

I first became aware of the bear dens after seeing the 2003 movie "Mystic River." You can catch a glimpse of them at the 43-second mark in the trailer below:

After launching this blog in March 2010, I began following similarly minded web sites and, eventually, Instagram accounts, and I saw photos and write-ups of the bear dens. So what are/were the dens? Here's what Wikipedia says....

Once the focus of the zoo, the Bear Dens were designed and built in 1912, and were planned to have a small collection of domestic animals. The original grounds featured a grand staircase leading to a large courtyard, framed by several large iron bear cages. One of these cages featured a detailed stone sculpture of bears and the crest of the City of Boston. Plans of expanding the Long Crouch Woods section of the zoo never came to fruition. As the grounds deteriorated, and as the Parks Department neglected many of the landscape's most basic management needs, the Bear Dens became too expensive to maintain. The exhibit area was officially closed in 1954. It was later lopped off of the zoo property permanently in 1958, when the Metropolitan District Commission took over management of the zoo.

So during that visit to the zoo with my kids -- which I believe was the last time we were there -- I decided that they should be part of what was sure to be a magnificent occasion: my exploration of the bear dens after dreaming of this mission for years! So, having really no idea of where to look, or precisely what we were looking for, we headed out the exit to Pierpont Road, and then curved eastward along a path between the zoo and Seaver Street. Below is some of what we saw.

(Some benches and tables in the woods.)

(A small building that I know nothing about.)

We saw a few other things behind the fences, but nothing that I took to be bear dens. After 10-15 minutes, we headed back to the car. I was dejected and really wishing I'd done a bit more research ahead of time, but I stuck the idea of returning to the zoo into the back of my mind. Any time I would ask my kids about going to the zoo, they poo-poohed it. I put "Franklin Park bear dens" on both of my "some day I'll explore" lists for this blog.

And years went by.

Then, this past summer, on a day when my son and I were hanging around with nothing to do, I told him we were going on an adventure.

"Where?" he asked. At age 17, he's more willing to jump in the car with me for random explorations than he was when he was 14 or 15.

"I'll tell you when we get there," I said. In the intervening years, after seeing more Instagram posts about the bear dens and Long Crouch Woods, and actually looking at Google Maps, I knew exactly where to go in Franklin Park.

We parked near the zoo, walked past a cricket match in a nearby field and then strolled down Playstead Road, past a baseball field and a few dozen picnickers. I noticed a wide gravel path leading up a short hill into the woods, heading toward Seaver Street. I sensed this was the route.

After about two minutes, I was vindicated.

After so many years, I'd finally made it to the old bear dens. Look at that relief work. The sculptor portrays a real sense of majesty and fear in those bears, don'tcha think? And they still look strong and dangerous after more than 100 years!

The funny thing about exploring the backside of America is that when I stumble across a dusty, old, small-town factory or a rusted car in the woods or a ghost sign in the middle of the city, I have the sense that I've discovered it, that nobody has ever seen it before. And so it was with the bear dens. I felt a great sense of accomplishment that I'd found this place that has such great history to it, even though countless folks had been there before me.

I looked at the walls and thought, "Hmm. Couldn't a bear climb out of that enclosure?" Well, then I walked up closer to those walls.

Ouch.

More ouch.

I have no idea what this little structure was for.

That little doorway led to the bears' sleeping quarters, I reckon.

This is the back of the sleeping quarters.

The last three pictures show the same part of the complex, possibly another sleeping area for the bears. Or perhaps where they ate or were trained or tended to medically. I'm not sure.

So what's to become of these ruins, which have sat in the woods decaying for well more than half a century?

"The Parks Department issued 'General Plans' for Franklin Park in 1980 and 1990 that included ideas for an interpretive area, a stop on a nature trail, a playground or a snack bar for the Bear Dens," per this 2014 Jamaica Plain Gazette article. "But, according to City Parks and Recreation spokesperson Jacquelyn Goddard, the City has never had an active plan to renovate or maintain the Bear Dens."

I'm not sure whether that's still the case five years later.