I always have the feeling that the above building the "American Insurance Building" on B'way, and Wall is going to fall on me. It has that effect on everybody. Still I love the downtown skyline. It was all thrown up before the regulations about crowding out the sun light.
That reg is where all them layer cake designs for skyscrapers came from. Anyway on the old blocks one feels cozy, and hidden by what seems like mile high towers. The streets still narrow from the colonial layout, and huge buildings on either side...I loves it.
Granted it drives loads of folks nuts, but still.
I also really dig them "Bishop's Crook" lamp posts. They were first installed around town about 1910 or so. Imagine...giving light to clerks millionaires con-men hipsters cops, and cool babes for over 100 bleeping years!!
Lower Manhattan is the last place where they're still common.
I remember them in the Bronx, and Brooklyn when I was a little kid. However they were cleared out during the demented modernization madness in the 1960's.
Them, and the cobble stone streets bit the dust in that mayhem. Mind you if you 'look' you can still find a few side streets with cobbles from the mid-1800's here, and there in Queens, and the old wharf areas of lower Manhattan, and Brooklyn.
Fucked up as it is "I Love New York".
Stay Tuned.
Metaphorically speaking, American Insurance has already fallen on and crushed everyone. Just try finding a doctor's office where everybody, physicians included, is not a flunky and a tool of that grafting sticky-fingered domineering "industry" that produces nothing.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry to hear about the loss of the lampposts. Postwar modernization was a whole lotta dumb. And as for replacing cobblestone streets - they last a helluva lot longer than the modern macadamized ones. How many of the latter do you suppose will still be around and usable 150 years from now?
Z
In another 150 years those cobble streets would have still been fine, and doing it's job. Europe has plenty of streets roads of cobble that were laid down before we were a Republic.
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