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."
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