NEW YORK IN PLAIN SIGHT

"Done done ... ?"

2010-10-09T07:46:00.014-04:00

I am not one of those people who, having just left the apartment, feels compelled to go back and make sure that the stove is turned off or that the windows are indeed shut or that the door is really, truly, locked for sure.

Nevertheless, after the prior post, "Done ..." (see below), I had a more than nagging feeling that I wasn't done, that there was a significant bunch of corners that I'd left out.

As indeed there was: a couple up on Tenth Avenue at 186th Street, a whole bunch on the south side of Trump City/Place (some of which were actually new, brand spanking new corners, not there when I did the main round of photographing in 2006), and some odds and ends on Eleventh Avenue, Sutton Place, and Beekman Place.

So now those are done and up on the website also (see "Further miscellaneous corners" on New York in Plain Sight.

Twenty-five years and several lives ago I was managing software projects for a boss who, whenever somebody said, "it's done," would immediately respond by asking, "but is it done done?" — I'm not going to claim, this time, that New York in Plain Sight is "done done" but how much more can there be?

Well, no doubt I'll find out.

Incidentally, the current count is 11,487, which means, more realistically, that it's fair to say that there are about 11,500 street corners on the island of Manhattan, plus or minus some small number (probably less than ten or a dozen either way, depending on how and what you're counting).

Not that it matters, but exact numbers are more fun than round numbers, even if their exactitude is misleading.

By the way, before I forget, I discovered while doing this last shoot that there are two Bond Streets in Manhattan: the one downtown which is, in effect, 2nd street between Bowery and Broadway, and another one in Trump City/Place, which runs (for now) from 62nd Street west of Eleventh Avenue up to 64th Street.

So what's next?

Well, definitely not Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island. Possibly the off-island corners of the Borough of Manhattan (Marble Hill, Roosevelt Island, etc.). But possibly not, either.

The main thing is to go back and have a fresh look at all the files, looking for all the nits — mislabelled corners, images that could be cropped better or that need straightening, corners that really should be reshot, and, yes, missing corners — and combing them out.

And integrating the "errors & omissions" into the main galleries. And possibly reorganizing the main galleries so that they are all organized by streets, this time possible by east-west street as well as north-south, e.g., a gallery for 38th Street itself as well as for all the avenues that cross it, though this would result in hundreds of additional galleries (which may be too many to be useful).

I asked my friend Brandon Bowersox at OJC to prepare a quote on what it would cost to take the project the rest of the way to where I'd like it to be — his description is better than mine: check it out here. (I wouldn't necessarily do everything he suggests, but it's a fair description of what could be done, nonetheless.)

Unfortunately, it's more work than I can afford out of my own pocket, so another effort to pick up again is to try to get some funding into the project to support getting this work done.

Sometime I'd like to begin printing at least one complete set of the photographs. But probably not right away.

I'm very much undecided about whether to resume work on "Tenth Avenue Then and Now" — just don't quite know what to do with it. If something occurs to me, I suppose I'll start up on it again.

What else? Oh yes, probably the most important thing: get away from it for a while, give it a rest for a few months, if not more.

And having said that, I think I'm going to write up, at long last, a memoir of the project — I've been putting this off out of a sense of "so what, who cares" for too long. I'll begin posting this on the blog fairly soon.

Meanwhile, it's nice day, I think I'll go into Manhattan and photograph — anything but street corners!

"Done" ….

2010-10-06T11:48:00.010-04:00

After a several month hiatus — illness, the hottest New York summer ever, time out to make a little money doing something else — I got back to work on the New York in Plain Sight clean-up a couple of weeks ago — shooting corners I'd missed the first time around (and sometimes even the second), reshooting a few that just weren't good enough, reshooting some that I'm sure I'd already shot but for one reason or another can't find the files now, and redoing some complicated intersections just for the sake of validating the IDs and insuring that I had really got them all, and so on.

There weren't that many left to do, but it seemed like an enormous job — somehow the project has seemed to grow in size, or at least in the effort required to finish it, as I've gotten closer and closer to the end, so that even 100 photos seemed more daunting yesterday than 1,000 did at the outset four years and seven months ago.

(But not more daunting than 11,485, which is, I think, as good a count as I'm going to get for how many street corners there are on the island of Manhattan, at least according to my definition of a street corner — see some of the earlier posts on this blog for discussion.)

Anyway, yesterday afternoon, 3:59 PM, Tuesday, October 5, 2010, I shot what I believe to be the last of them.

Of course, if this project has taught me anything, it is that there are always a few more corners lurking somewhere that I haven't caught: an obscure alleyway, a stretch of "Marginal Street" (the default name for any roadway following along the shoreline), even a few that I've somehow still missed, despite endless list making, checking, and rechecking.

But it simply can't be many, at this point. A dozen? Not even (though this may be wishful thinking on my part).

So yesterday evening I began the processing and cataloging, still in progress this morning. I hope to finish up and get them all posted on the website — there are 179 of them, though a number of them do repeat corners already posted long ago — by the end of the day today or, if exhaustion sets in (I'm expecting it to show up anytime now), by sometime tomorrow.

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I suppose that this should be a cause for celebration on a grand scale, but what I actually feel is some combination of simple relief (finishing up the shooting has been hanging over my head for nearly four years now), let down (what do I do now that I don't have that hanging over my head?), and a vague sense of dread at realizing how much remains to be done, even with the photography finished, in order to bring the project to the eventual form that I sketched out for it nearly five years ago, before I even started shooting.

But let's not be too Eyoric about it: it is satisfying, despite all the problems, delays, frustrations, etc., to have gotten this far, however long it took.

... sh'hechianu, v'kimanu, v'higianu, laz'man hazeh.

Beethoven, iPad, HTML, Avery Library ....

2010-07-26T16:55:00.013-04:00

Sometimes only music will do, and then sometimes only Beethoven. After a month-long — well, month-and-a-half long — funk, a daily regimen of listening to the Beethoven symphonies, starting last week, accompanied — or is it vice-versa? — by reading the Bärenreiter Urtext edition of the scores, seems to have done the trick, and I'm feeling considerably refreshed from the experience. Next: the string quartets, followed, I think, by the piano sonatas — that should carry me through to September.

Pinehurst Avenue & 181st Street, Southwest Corner

About the same time as the "Beethoven therapy" started, my friend Alan got an iPad. He had been a real scoffer but said he changed his mind after about one minute of actually using the device. And so I — an equally vehement scoffer — was pretty curious when he offered to show it to me over lunch at our favorite midtown diner, or one of them — the Palace, on 57th Street, between Park and Lexington.

I was convinced in less than a minute myself, though I'll probably wait for version two to get one, but in the meantime I must say, it's the greatest display for photographs I've ever seen, save only the big — and very expensive — Eizo displays.

By the time lunch was over I'd decided that I simply had to convert all the Flash galleries on New York in Plain Sight to HTML gallery format so that the site would be accessible to iPad users (as well as to anyone using any other non-Flash enabled, i.e., Apple, mobile device).

So I did, and that's done now. Go have a look.
(www.newyorkinplainsight.com).

There are advantages (iPad etc. accessibility, better thumbnail overviews) and disadvantages (no slide show capability, no background loading of entire gallery, no automatic resizing of the images to the window size). But with the iPad selling upwards of a million units a month, I'm convinced that the iPad advantage far outweighs the disadvantages.

Of course, I could have kept both versions on-line, but there's a limit to how much I want to burden my nephew Ben Benedetti's generosity in hosting the site for me.

And then, just as I was finishing up the conversions, I got an email from Columbia University's Avery Architecture and Fine Arts Library requesting permission to create — and maintain! — an archival copy of New York in Plain Sight under their new (2009) Andrew W. Mellon Foundation sponsored Web Resources Collection Program. This is great news for New York in Plain Sight, and I am very grateful to have the project receive this kind of institutional care and attention.

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So I'm back to blogging, though as long as this endless heatwave continues unabated the posting may be rather intermittent (where I live, the average daily high so far this July has been just a tad under 93º).

Still "on vacation"

2010-07-15T08:38:00.000-04:00

Still "on vacation," at least from the blog. May be back in another few weeks, let's just wait and see how it goes.

Reality intrudes (deleted from 100627) & comment

2010-06-29T11:14:00.001-04:00

One of my intentions with this blog has been to document straightforwardly the process of making something out of New York in Plain Sight, including documenting the process of figuring out what that something might be, though with the understanding that it was going to be aimed at something more akin to sociology than to art or photography per se.

And without wanting to conduct the blog in a truly confessional mode, I'd resolved to go ahead and post the ups and downs of the project along with its twists and turns.

Well, now I'm not so sure about that, about documenting the ups and downs, that is, especially the downs. Sunday I posted the following,under the heading "Reality intrudes":

Reality intrudes, and rather decisively at that ….

Since its inception (now over five years ago), New York in Plain Sight / The Manhattan Street Corners has been a self-financed undertaking, i.e., for all practical purposes nobody has been paying for it except me.

Not that I am ungrateful to the people who have purchased prints along the way, but sales of prints have covered altogether no more than at most a few percent of the expense of the project.

My searches for funders or patrons have come to nought and the reality is that I can no longer afford to go on with it myself.

So, pending some marvelously unforeseen positive cash flow, this is the last blog post for the foreseeable future. I'll leave the posts up — do feel free to browse, of course.

I'm also suspending any and all plans to continue with cleaning up — to say nothing of extending — New York in Plain Sight itself.

By my count there are still just under 200 corners to photograph or rephotograph in order to complete the set. They'll just have to wait. And at some point I'd still love to work up an entirely new site for it with a wide range of search and display options. For the time being though, it has to be put on hold — and I rather imagine that will be a rather lengthy and indefinite hold.

So — well, that's it for now. Thanks for dropping in now and then, it's been fun.

What can I say? Tired, feeling sorry for myself, and, especially, fed up with rich clients who seem to think it's their privilege not to have to pay their bills in a timely fashion.

Then I began to have doubts — doubts about the post, that is. I mean, it's not news to anyone that projects like this one have their ups and downs, and, more to the point, that artists, photographers, authors, whatever, have their ups and downs, especially since, for that matter, everyone does, absolutely everyone, apparently without exception. Self-pity just isn't on, even if it's become fashionable in some circles, and even a money-maker. (But a friend used to say to me, "go ahead and feel sorry for yourself, after all, no one else is going to.")

So this morning I deleted that post.

And then immediately I had second thoughts about that too. I mean, if I'm going to document this process in the way I set out to, don't I really have to go ahead with such things? I mean, it would be one thing not to write such a post, or to write it and not post it, and there have indeed been several that have been written but not posted (not all of them whiny, either).

A quandary of sorts, which, as you can see, I've resolved, sort of, for the moment at least, via this meta-post.

And this morning I'm not feeling as defeated by, well, everything, as I was on Sunday, so maybe this meta-post will serve me as a stimulus to get back in harness and get on with blog proper, to stir the pot some more around all the questions about neighborhoods and their signs of change.

More soon, though maybe not right away.

Taking a break

2010-06-24T08:46:00.000-04:00

Taking a break, back later — not sure how much later.

The invisible structure of a neighborhood

2010-06-21T09:41:00.000-04:00

Lest you think I didn't know, or had forgotten, or didn't think it relevant to the purposes of either New York in Plain Sight or even the "Tenth Avenue then & now" sub-project ….

Invisibly but utterly pervasively, penetrating every aspect the visible face of city, from the newest buildings in the oldest neighborhoods and from the grandest prospects to the litter on the sidewalks, there is another infrastructure, one of a purely social kind, the set of interlocking social facts which comprises the relationships of property and rents (incomes derived from real property).

So any serious answer to the question of what makes a neighborhood must at some point at least acknowledge the role that property and rent have to play in the ongoing neighborhood-constitutive process and, with it, the on-going processes of change in the visible aspects of a neighborhood.

And it would be fair to assert, though very difficult, I think, to demonstrate, that the visible changes, possibly all of them, are, among other things, signs of change in the relationships of property values to one another in the block, the neighborhood, the borough, the city, even the country and the world, and the interaction between property values and rents, and the flows of owners, renters, businesses, people — through those properties.

The tenants that can afford to move in and stay for some greater or lesser span of time and the tenants who can afford to leave voluntarily for something "better" or who for whatever reason can no longer afford to stay and so must, involuntarily, go somewhere else (or possibly, in the case of businesses, simply go out of business — which I suppose also happens to human tenants from time to time too, despair at having to move surely motivating, at least in part, some of the city's suicides as well some of its deaths due to malnutrition, disease, heat, cold, etc., that may in part, in some instances, result from preferring the otherwise unaffordable home to an adequate diet, health care, a livable range of temperatures, electricity, a telephone, etc.).

So ultimately the question would be: what do the visible signs of change tell us, however indirectly, about the invisible changes in the structure of property values in the city (and of course, by extension, the legal framework surrounding and supporting those property values), and their consequences for the "demographics" (in the broadest sense) of the flow people and their enterprises through these properties?

A tall order, that question, and with it the possibility that the distances between the signs of change and the underlying changes in property values are, for the most part, too great, too heavily mediated by, well, everything, for the visible world of the street to reflect much else but the largest scale changes over relatively long stretches of time.

Or maybe not, maybe one just has to learn how to read them.

My guess is that we have learned to read them, just by living long enough in the city, without exactly, necessarily, even knowing that we've done so, so that "learning to read" the signs of change is more a matter of making more explicit some of what we already know implicitly than it is a matter of learning something entirely new.

And what of it? What if we knew? What if we could read those signs? What then?

Kant famously introduced the concluding sections of his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of pure Reason) with the three questions: What can I know? What ought I do? What may I hope? These questions, Kant says, represent the three principal interests that motivate the different kinds of knowledge that are available to us.

And so we may ask: What can we know about the dynamics of the city? What ought we do about them? What may we hope for them — and for us?

If I knew, I'd tell you. So I think I'll leave it at that for now. But John Logan and Harvey Molotch's Urban Fortunes is a good place to start.

Original shoreline below West 23rd Street revisited

2010-06-20T14:00:00.001-04:00

A little while ago (June 12) I posted a look at Tenth Avenue below 26th Street, as seen overlaid on the Commissioners' map of 1807 and the Vielé map of 1865:

Tenth Avenue below 26th Street with shorelines
(green= island in 1807, brown = 1865, heavy black line = 2010)

This morning, for another project, I was browsing in the marvelous maps available at nyc OASIS and found an overlay of the 1609 Manhattan shoreline from the fabulous Manahatta Project which differs substantially from the shoreline drawn by the Commissioners on their 1807 map.

On the Commissioners' map, Tenth Avenue ends at 23rd Street, below which the 1807 shoreline is shown to be east of what a southward continuation of the avenue would be (see above map).

On the Manahatta Project map, the projected 1609 shoreline is west of Tenth Avenue all the way down to 13th Street:

Tenth Avenue below 26th Street with 1609 shoreline
(OASIS map with Manahatta overlay)

Is one right and the other wrong? A simple bias towards current technology inclines me to believe that the Manahatta Project shoreline is correct, and that the Commissioners map shoreline is in error.

But the Manahatta Project shoreline is based on the 1782 British Headquarters map, adjusted to identifiable contemporary features with as estimated error of 40 meters or about half a block, which is about the size of the discrepancy between the two shorelines. (This isn't to fault the Manahatta Project in any way: for Manahatta Project's incredible purposes an error factor of only 40 meters is as good as perfect — the error, if indeed there is one, is only relevant to the very modest aims my Tenth Avenue "then & now" project on this blog and even so, it's only the very close proximity of this stretch of Tenth Avenue to the original shoreline — wherever, exactly, it may have been — that makes this of any interest).

And did the Commissioners undertake a whole new survey of the island, or did they rely, or how much did they rely, on previous cartographers' efforts, e.g., the 1872 map or derivatives of it?

And similarly with Vielé's map — although it represents a new survey of the island, its showing of the original shoreline, pre-landfills, must be derived from earlier, namely pre-landfill sources.

One might say, in favor the Commissioners, that it is unlikely that they would have stopped Tenth Avenue at 23rd Street if the actual shoreline would have permitted its extension down to 13th Street or even lower.

It's possible of course that the Commissioners' shoreline was wrong and that, therefore, their plan for Tenth Avenue was wrong also, insofar as in that case it could have, even then, been extended below 23rd Street. But how likely is this? Even without sophisticated high tech measuring devices, the distance from a known point to the shore could be established to within an inch or so even in 1807.

This argument seems compelling to me, though I'm no expert. So I'll give the nod to the Commissioners 1807 shoreline (as shown on my first map mash-up), while keeping in mind the possibility of error that arises from the British Headquarters / Manhatta shoreline (second map).

Individual's neighborhoods

2010-06-19T16:03:00.002-04:00

In the middle of muddling through the immediately preceding post (see below) I got a phone call from my photographer friend Becket Logan and we ended up talking at some length about the subject of what makes a neighborhood. He's bright guy, and I think a few of his observations are worth putting on the table, that is, are worth posting on the blog, so here goes.

Tenth Avenue & 103rd Street, Northwest Corner
(2006 above, 2010 below)

In line with what I had to say about neighborhoods and neighbors, he said that for him, for his neighborhood, what it amounted to were his neighbors in the sense of the people he saw again and again and recognized and said hello or waived to on the street near him or in the nearby shops where he made his "daily rounds" — the corner grocery, the hardware store, the drugstore, the bank, and so on.

The same people he'd been seeing again and again for years on end, in some cases for decades.

And each of those people had a similar set of relationships that constituted their immediate, individual neighborhood, in turn, some of them also shared with Becket, and some not.

And each of those in turn another set of individual neighborhoods.

Plus the individual neighborhoods of all the people who live or work in close proximity to Becket's individual neighborhood but who aren't recognizably, explicitly, so to speak, by him, as a part of his.

And their individual neighborhoods again, in turn.

And so on.

Very much, I think, on a close, a micro scale, Simmel's Kreisung sozialer Kreise — "intersecting social circles" — but at the same time, much looser than what I remember of Simmel's concept.

And yet woven closely enough together to be recognizable as a kind of higher level entity, a cluster with some however ill-defined and permeable boundaries, that seen or felt to be distinct from another such cluster that may be centered even only a few blocks further away.

For instance, what the cluster in what Becket calls his "campus" up by his studio on 20th Street, a few blocks to the west (but no further than Sixth Avenue), to the north (but 22nd Street is almost the limit), and south (but not below 18th Street), the area where the professional services are concentrated — the "photography district" — and of course the coffee shops, delis, Fedex's, copy shops, and whatnot that go along with any such area.

But not to the east, where Park Avenue represents a very big divide, a strong boundary: once you cross Park, you're in a different world, the world that culminates in Gramercy Park and environments, and then dissipates again east of, say, Second Avenue. And north of 22nd or 23rd Street (north of 23rd for sure, I'd say).

So two neighborhoods, individual neighborhoods for him: the residential one and the professional one (the "campus"). But very similar in the way in which there's a clustering of relationships, though the "campus" is rather more explicit in this regard, owing to its professional focus.

It's like "six degrees of separation," only it's only two or three degrees — or how many is it, actually? (And that's too crude a measure, but it gets the idea across, I think.)

Could we map those? Have people done this already? I don't know. But surely they have.

And again, what are the visible signs of these clusters? Or, somewhat more radically, epistemologically speaking, are the signs visible or not only to the extent that one lives or works within a cluster for which they are meaningful?

Since starting the Tenth Avenue "then & now" sub-project, it's occurred to me more than once, and keeps on re-occurring to me with ever greater frequency, that we — I don't think it's just me — don't really know much, explicitly, about how people live together, how they generate "collective actions," how, for instance, a phenomenon like "neighborhoods" actually works.

That we may not even be at the butterfly collection stage yet, that even the simplest — but there's no such thing — ethnographies are too few and too far between to provide anything much more than an occasional random strobe flash of light on what's happening in society at any level but especially the closest in levels: the street corner, the block, the neighborhood.

Not that there aren't great studies, by brilliantly insightful researchers, but that the phenomenon is so vast and so complex and, well, daunting ….

Well, it is — as my business friends are wont to say — what it is. But I gotta tell ya, it's humbling.

Neighbors ….

2010-06-19T15:02:00.001-04:00

Though I would love to get somewhere analytically with the New York in Plain Sight photographs by working in the best (if romantically and unrealistically misunderstood) sense of 19th century induction — all those trays of butterflies neatly pinned and labelled! — it's probably no more possible now than it was then, and who knows what those gentleman naturalists of 150± years ago thought they were doing anyway?

So let's try working the other direction for a bit, and see what that turns up.

Earlier (May 30 and June 2) I posted a couple of pieces on the question, "what makes a neighborhood?" in which I rehearsed at some length a variety of by no means mutually exclusive answers, a very crude summary of which might be simply: "neighbors."

"Neighbors," of course, not just in the sense of physical proximity, but "neighbors" in the sense of people who share to one degree or another a mutual and reciprocal sense of neighborliness and whatever goes along with that.

I think this means, this "neighborliness," above all: trust, or degrees of trust — we're "neighborly"in a positive sense to the extent that we trust one another.

And along with that, that we recognize one another, that we have some interests in common, that we're willing to help one another out, within some limits or other (and even if we keep score about it).

And the basis for this trust? Some combination of kinship, ethnicity, race, language, etc., friendship and acquaintanceship — Logan and Molotch's "daily rounds" — together with some homogeneity of socio-economic status (income, life style, professions, trades, occupations).

The connections that constitute "human capital" as communitarians use this word.

And over, under, above, below, beyond, and prior even to these dimensions of commonality, the shared experience of living together in some real proximity, relatively unproblematically.

The sum of all of which, as represented on the street by the local businesses and other institutions and organizations that principally serve the neighborhood, and by the appearance of the residents themselves, and even, to some extent, by the architecture and the traffic, is something we vaguely sense as the "character" of the neighborhood.

Which means that a neighborhood in this sense has to be predominantly a residential area, otherwise it's just a "district," commercial or industrial, with no indigenous life at the end of the day or on the weekends.

Like the financial district (though that seems to be changing a bit), or parts of mid-town, or, to pick an example close to this blog, Tenth Avenue below 14th Street.

So when we sense that the character of a neighborhood is changing, what we must mean, I think, is that the neighbors themselves and their relationships are changing, and changing more rapidly than whatever our sense is of the normal turnover rate that doesn't really change the character of the neighborhood at all, or, if it does, does so slowly enough to be effectively imperceptible, unless you're really on the look-out for it, and possibly not even then.

It's not, I think, just "demographics," not just skin colors or ethnicities or ages. It's also a matter of tenure in the neighborhood: what proportion of the residents have lived there for how long? A neighborhood with a lot of relative newcomers has to have a different sense of itself than a neighborhood that has maintained the same large core group of residents for twenty or thirty years or more.

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I'm definitely groping around in the semi-dark here, if not in total darkness altogether, so let me break off at this point and just say that the question lurking somewhere in the midst of these observations is this:

If the neighborhood-constitutive affective relationships change as a result of a changing profile of the residents resulting from the in- and out-flows of residents (but not necessarily only residents), then to what extent, and how, do these changes leave their mark visibly? What changes in what we see are signs of these changes? What can we infer about the trajectory of a neighborhood as affective network from the visible signs of change on its streets?

More soon on this one — it is perhaps the only real topic of interest in this line of work.

What changes?

2010-06-17T07:44:00.002-04:00

I've been wrestling with this post for several days, undecided about whether to post it or not. And not being able to get on to anything else until I'd decided, one way or t'other. This morning I decided to go ahead with it, if only to get it behind me — I wasn't going to delete the content, so by not posting it, I was leaving the nagging question open … so let's post it and be done with it.

It's really just a list, a rather simple list — albeit with Burtonian overtones (I've had a melancholy few days here) — and surely an incomplete one as well. You can skip it if it's just too dumb — but then you can do that with any of these posts, can't you?

OK, enough apologies. Here goes: What changes?

Tenth Avenue & 14th Street, Southeast Corner
(2006 above, 2010 below)

WHAT CHANGES?

The island itself

The shoreline, which gets extended by landfills and piers and jetties (though the latter are less often thought of as shoreline extensions and, technically, possibly even legally, I suppose they are not) and sometimes gets pulled back, when piers or jetties are dismantled or even, sometimes, when landfill is (re)excavated. — All of these different kinds of shoreline changes seem to have happened to one extent or another west of Tenth Avenue below 23rd Street since the street plan was first proposed 200+ years ago, and have certainly happened, extensively, elsewhere on the island, especially downtown, of course.

The terrain gets levelled, hills cut down, valleys filled. — This too has happened along the lower stretch of Tenth Avenue, and the upper stretches too, and throughout the island as well.

The street plan and the streets themselves

New streets are laid out, for instance in Battery Park City and Trump Place in recent years, and existing streets are sometimes closed, particularly to create the "superblocks" that were, and are, characteristic of the big "urban renewal" housing projects; streets are also sometimes just partially closed, e.g., closed to regular traffic, but open to service and emergency vehicles, bicycles, and pedestrians. (I'm not going to include temporary closings for repairs or in connection with construction projects.) — Tenth Avenue below 23rd Street, as already mentioned, and of course the streets west of it, are a prime examples of street plan changes in the area we've been looking at.

Other transportation infrastructure

Bridges and tunnels are built, along with their entrances and exits, and sometimes closed too. Bus depots — just below 42nd Street, Tenth Avenue catches a number of the ramps leading to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. And railroads and their stations: elevated, at street level, subways. And also railroad yards and maintenance facilities. — Both in evidence on Tenth Avenue: the old New York Central yards west of the avenue between 30th Street and 33rd Street; the subway yards and maintenance depot east of the avenue way uptown in Inwood.

Oh yes: heliports and ferry terminals.

Sidewalks, curbs, wheelchair ramps, paving materials for both streets and sidewalks, the delineation of crosswalks and vehicle lanes (both in general as well as special lanes for buses), parking. And designations of traffic as one way or two way.

Traffic

And not to forget all the different, and changing, kinds of traffic itself: pedestrian, vehicular; cars, trucks, buses, emergency vehicles, but earlier in the city's history trolleys, horses, carriages …. (And yes, I did almost forget: this paragraph is a late insert, in the middle of proofreading the others.)

And also not to forget traffic signage: street name signs, one way and two way traffic signs, other traffic management signs (stop, do not enter, no commercial vehicles, no parking, no standing); traffic lights, informational and directional signs (West Side Highway this way); bus stop markers, bus schedules and routes, subway signs, line and entrance markers.

Other infrastructure, n.e.c. ("not elsewhere classified")

And a whole host of other infrastructure visible on the street, or having visible access from the street: manholes and their covers, sewer grates, fire hydrants, sub-sidewalk ventilation grids, street lights, trash cans, surveillance cameras.

To say nothing of trees, planters, gardens, mini-parks, little bits of lawn, "weeds."

And the odd bits of street furniture: those colorful plastic boxes for the free newspapers, ads, and so on. And at the other extreme of size: billboards and their support structures (not counting the more recent large scale ads on canvas hung from the sides of buildings that are made possible by the technology of inkjet printing on wide-carriage printers).

Major parks

Or does this category belong under changes to the island itself? Well, somewhere in between, perhaps. In any event, trees, lawns, gardens, plantings, roads, walks, paths, ponds, streams, pools, special facilities like toilets, snack bars, restaurants, zoos, outdoor theaters, boat sheds ….

Buildings

Which get built, demolished, renovated, get facelifts, new paint, tuckpointing and other clean-ups, new window frames, awnings, canopies, doors, window treatments.

Tenants

Businesses, residents, new or not to the neighborhood, the city, time (no cellphone stores opening in the 1870s). Storefronts are vacated, new tenants move in, the same business or a different business, new owners, same owners, new or different management.

And the related property signage: ID signs for businesses, but also for sale, for rent, property owner or manager.

And all the stuff of construction: fencing, plywood or chain link, scaffolding, safety netting, cranes both tower and portable, temporary elevators, concrete, plumbing, electrical, glass, and other supplies and related installation equipment.

Trash

Worthy of a whole study in itself (I mean a sociological study) — surely someone has done it? Trash cans, litter, paper trash including bundled magazines, newspapers, books; also recyclables, but also discarded furnishings, rugs, chairs, sofas, chests of drawers, beds, mattresses, tables, lamps, appliances, decorations (posters, prints, paintings, photos — I once bought one of my own paintings from a street vendor who had retrieved it from the trash where I thought it belonged — paid too much for it too), clothing of all kinds, bedding, pots and pans, dishes, cutlery, mirrors, garbage in the sense of discarded food, bottles — the list seems endless.

People

But this is a whole post unto itself, and no doubt more than one, many more than one.

Time

As is this one, the changes in what one sees depending on time of day: it's a very different city early in the morning, in the AM rush hour, at midday, in the PM rush hour, in the evening, the late evening, the wee hours.

Weather

To say nothing of the seasons — and the weather: rain, sun, snow, hot, cold: you don't see them, but you see their signs: overcoats, shorts, steamy breath, umbrellas ….

——————————

— OK, yes, trivial, everybody knows this, whether they know it or not. But — and this is the impossible assertion — all this and more is constitutive of the visual experience of the city, and in many ways, directly and indirectly, all these things, which are things that, like all things, either change or don't, or, to be more precise, change at different rates and at different times, with different degrees of consequence for everything else (also changing …).

Sometimes, for me at least, lists like this are helpful, not as "checklists" per se — is everything really covered? no, of course not, why else all those "and not to forget's?" — but on the one hand to begin to take the measure of a problem, and on the other to jostle the mind just by bringing so much to the foreground or surface, if only for a moment, in a simple list.

Signs of change — for whom?

2010-06-14T07:28:00.001-04:00

I prefaced yesterday’s post on “Tenth Avenue: signs of change below 14th Street” with a brief potted history of this part of the street — actually “potted history” is too generous a term: “crude mash-up of mostly Wikipedia entries” would be more like it, though I’d like to believe that the entries I drew from are reasonably accurate (but I can’t say that I know that they are).

I did this out of the belief that the historical context is meaningful for understanding the changes I’m looking at — or, for that matter, for understanding any changes anywhere.

But aside from the questions of whether my sources are as reliable as I’d like them to be, and whether my reading of them hasn’t introduced errors of its own, there is another question, perhaps more relevant to the enterprise of reading and understanding the signs of change from a sociological perspective (however informally).

Tenth Avenue & 14th Street, Southeast Corner
(2006 above, 2010 below)

That is the question of how much of this history, or even more of it, would be known to someone — anyone — who might happen to walk these few blocks south from 14th Street intending, say, to cross over West Street into the new Hudson River Park at West 11th Street?

Of course that’s an impossible question to answer without getting more specific about who, about what sort of someone, that person walking those blocks might be.

A quite elderly woman, a lifelong resident of the area, who remembers the excitement she felt as a young child watching the elevated highway and then the High Line go up, the one to the west, the other to the east of this part of Tenth Avenue? And who remembers when that section of the elevated highway collapsed in 1973? And who remembers when Manhattan was still a thriving seaport and the piers a hive of activity day and night?

Or a gay man nearing sixty who remembers, ruefully or wistfully, some good times and even some harrowing ones in the piers a little further to the south on West Street, long since abandoned even in the 1970s?

Or the woman in her forties who moved into the Westbeth complex for artists twenty-some years ago and remembers the failure of the Westway plans (which she opposed) and the beginnings of the reconstruction of West Street and the Hudson River Park and, what seems in retrospect to have happened so suddenly, the influx of all the galleries from SoHo to Chelsea, no more than a mile to north?

Or the young couple in their early thirties who just moved into the renovated apartment building at the corner of West 12th Street, which they took with fond memories of having met in a bar in the newly hip scene centered around Washington Street a scant ten years ago?

Or the couple from Omaha who just moved into the same building last year after they both contrived to get transfers to New York and whose knowledge of the city and its history is mostly their memories of watching the Ric Burns’ documentary not long after 9/11 and who don’t find it at all astonishing that their building — in this neighborhood! — has a uniformed doorman standing under the canopy over the sidewalk?

Or the very young Mexican working as a dishwasher in one of the area's trendy new restaurants?

Of course, some of the signs of change anyone might recognize, even a first time visitor.

A vacant lot with a new plywood construction fence around it, newly painted blue and stuck all over with building permits and ads for the new “luxury” condos.

A tower crane set up to the side of the street, or scaffolding in front of an older building.

Freshly tuckpointed brickwork, new metal sash windows, and a new front door with just one doorbell in a midblock townhouse on Jane Street while its neighbors still have a slightly tatty look about them, with eight or ten separate doorbells screwed right onto the door frame over its peeling paint.

But after even only a year, or less, a newcomer to the area, even from out of town, would notice that that restaurant on the corner has closed, that somebody is remodelling the storefront next door, that the “for rent” signs in the second floor windows are gone, that a high-end realtor has a "for sale" sign up again on that renovated townhouse on Jane Street already, that there seem to be more, or fewer, young couples pushing MacLaren double strollers down the sidewalk now than there were even last fall.

How long does it take for a newcomer to become a New Yorker? Five years? Ten? Twenty? — Twenty seems like a good number to me, perhaps because that’s about how long I’ve been here myself (even though I was born here, I spent nearly 40 years away from the city). And twenty also, again with a “perhaps,” as being long enough to develop some intuitive sense of the way things change in Manhattan, and especially what the signs of change are — the ones that matter, that is.

But let’s be generous and say ten years — what does such a person see, recognize, as “signs of change” after living here for ten years?

For instance, walking north this time, starting at the corner of West Street and West 12th Street, my “zero” level “Tenth Avenue” corner in the preceding post: anyone will recognize the scaffolding on the southeast corner as a sign of change, if only of a building facelift or renovation, while anyone who has walked past the northeast corner with any frequency over the past few years surely couldn’t help noticing that the building on the corner has been torn down and that whatever is going to replace it hasn’t gone up yet.

And a block north, at Jane Street, they might note with interest the appearance of the porta-potty on the southeast corner and wonder what that implies for the future of the parking lot there. They wouldn’t necessarily see the barrier posts as indicative of a time when the street still connected to West Street here (though they might make the inference). They surely wouldn’t miss the Riverview Hotel facelift on the northeast corner.

Another block to the north they would have noted that the scaffolding came down on the building on the southeast corner, the facelift or renovation now complete, while the building on the northeast corner looks the same as ever. And again (though they might make the inference), they wouldn’t automatically read the barrier posts as a sign that the street once went through here too.

They wouldn’t see any change on either corner at Gansevoort Street, though anyone would recognize the construction visible down the block towards Washington Street and Greenwich Street as a sign of change, though of what significance might not be obvious. And it would be impossible to miss the new building, taller than most in the area, that is visible to north, up on West 13th Street.

They might note that the Gansevoort Meat Center on the southeast corner of Little West 12th Street has been cleaned up some, along with the High Line behind it too.

And they’d surely notice that the building long under construction — well, it seemed long — on the south side of West 13th Street is finished, even if the rather derelict building on the northeast corner is about the same as always — yes, the overhead conveyor structure was dismantled, in part, a while ago, but that’s about as far as that one's progressed.

Arriving at last at 14th Street, they’d see that the vacant lot is still vacant, but the plywood construction fence has been repainted, the overhead conveyor structure is gone here too, and a chic not to say very “designy” new elevator is in place to carry visitors up to the new High Line Park. And when, exactly, did Sabrett start sending hot dog vendors to this formerly godforsaken corner? (A first time visitor wouldn't notice that.)

If they were very observant, they might notice some new traffic signs here and there as well (a first time visitor of course wouldn't notice these either). But not much else — mostly because there isn’t much else to notice: in this area, this part of Tenth Avenue, one doesn’t see the more finely grained, relatively ephemeral signs of change — new signage, awnings, paint jobs, portable street furniture — that are so densely visible, say, a couple of miles to north, in the forties.

Possibly, probably even, this is because Tenth Avenue down here isn’t a residential street, nor even, really a commercial street, at least not retail commercial. Which means that whatever changes are taking place, they’re relatively large scale, and only large scale.

Which leads me to a sort of obvious conjecture: small scale changes are apparent at street level in the city only where residential and retail pedestrian traffic is relatively dense — conversely, when small scale signs of change begin to appear for the first time (or for the first time in a long while), it’s an indication that the area is changing in the direction of increasing residential and retail density.

Is this always a move upscale? If such small scale signs of change begin to disappear, does this mean the neighborhood is going downhill?

And what about the appearance (or disappearance) of hot dog vendors? Surely that tells us something about what’s happening in a neighborhood.

One last remark: the above recitation of changes is very nearly the same as the one in yesterday’s post — is that because I fit, if not the ten year, then the twenty profile I sketched out above? Or is it more objective, at least in the sense of more intersubjective, shared, than that? Might have to go out and actually ask people about that in order to get an answer.

Something to think about as we go on up Tenth Avenue, starting at Fourteenth Street.

Tenth Avenue: signs of change below 14th Street

2010-06-13T09:58:00.010-04:00

Tenth Avenue begins, or, from the point of view of vehicular traffic flow, ends (owing to its being one-way southbound below 14th Street) with the entrances to West Street, more or less level with Horatio Street, about a quarter of a mile below 14th Street. (It is one-way northbound above 14th Street on up to 110th Street, above which it is two-way all the way up to its northern end at Broadway/218th Street.)

Earlier in its history, Tenth Avenue ended where it flowed directly into West Street in a sort of "dog's leg" between Gansevoort Street and what is now Little West 12th Street — my large scale Manhattan land-use map, which still shows the Miller Elevated Highway (see below) suggests that this was so on up to the reconstruction of West Street.

For a pedestrian, the barrier to vehicular traffic continuing on into loop connecting Horatio Street with Jane Street a block further south is scarcely noticeable, and the footed eye should be forgiven for seeing this as a continuation of Tenth Avenue, and even — perhaps — for imagining that the avenue continues, as a wide sidewalk apron (but closed to traffic), for yet another block south, to West 12th Street, below which all sense, real or imagined, of Tenth Avenue or its ghosts lies to the walker’s back.

"Tenth Avenue" (actually Jane/Horatio loop) & Jane Street, Southwest Corner (2010)

This stretch of Tenth Avenue below 14th Street is all on land-fill, dating back before the Civil War, and indeed, the same can be said of Tenth Avenue even from 23rd Street, where it ended at the Hudson River shoreline when it was first drawn the Commissioners’ map in 1807.

The area south of 16th Street, mostly between 14th Street and Gansevoort Street, was Manhattan’s meatpacking district for over a century, home at its peak to as many as 250 slaughterhouses, of which perhaps 35 remain. In 2003, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) established the Gansevoort Market Historic District, and since 2007, the entire district has been listed on the New York State and National Registers of Historical Places.

Tenth Avenue was the route of the street-level tracks of the Hudson River Railroad, completed in 1851, and continuing down West Street below what is now Little West 12th Street. These tracks — which led to Tenth Avenue’s being dubbed “Death Avenue” — were replaced by the “High Line” elevated railroad in 1934, running just west of Tenth Avenue from 34th Street down to around 17th Street and just east of Tenth Avenue below 16th Street. The High Line was closed around 1980 and after decades of neglect was reopened as a city park from 20th Street down to Gansevoort Street in 2009.

From 1931 to 1989 Tenth Avenue in this stretch below 14th Street was also hemmed in on the west by the Miller elevated highway above West Street, which opened (after two years of construction) in January, 1933, and closed nearly 41 years later, following the collapse of the section between Little West 12th Street and Gansevoort Street in December, 1973, though demolition of the derelict structure was not completed until 1989.

Beyond West Street, the Hudson River piers, abandoned starting in the 1950s with the move to container shipping, are remembered fondly or notoriously as cruising places for anonymous gay sex in the pre-AIDS era. These piers have since either been demolished or rebuilt as adjuncts of the Hudson River Greenway, though the Sanitation Department’s rendering plant across from the old Gansevoort Market still stands.

Over the past ten years or so the area east of Tenth Avenue below 14th Street, especially Washington Street but also Greenwich Street, has gentrified to an extraordinary extent, but this stretch of Tenth Avenue retains something of its original industrial character, in part perhaps because of its tangency to West Street: together, the two together form a concrete and asphalt barrier — heavily trafficked on West Street — nearly 200 feet wide with no viable pedestrian crossing to the Greenway/Hudson River Park and the river itself between Horatio Street and 14th Street.

Even so, even here, there are signs of change. Let’s take a look, starting at the “zero” end of Tenth Avenue, i.e., at West 12th Street.

(Note: click on images to see them rendered larger.)

West 12th Street

Tenth Avenue & West 12th Street, Northeast & Southeast Corners (2006)

Tenth Avenue & West 12th Street, Southeast Corner (2010)

Tenth Avenue & West 12th Street, Northeast Corner (2010)

SE — 2006: Scaffolding, renovation nearing completion; 2010: neighborhood now upscale (building has uniformed doorman now!); gray plywood construction fence still up with signs “sidewalk closed”; “Financing provided by Hypo Real Estate”; building permits; ads for “PLAZA”; old style trash can still there

NE — 2006: blue plywood construction fence one lot in; 2010: corner building down 2010, vacant lot with blue plywood construction fence old style trash can; building closer to Jane has had facelift

Jane Street

Tenth Avenue & Jane Street, Northeast & Southeast Corners (2006)

Tenth Avenue & Jane Street, Southeast Corner (2010)

Tenth Avenue & Jane Street, Northeast Corner (2010)

SE — 2006: no signs of change; 2010: porta-potty and structure next to it (mobile office?) suggests construction starting or imminent

NE — 2006: no signs of change; 2010: minor facelift to Hotel Riverview facade on corner (paint stripped off brick and belting, tuckpointing resurfacing, “cornerstone” now prominent & legible), also beyond entrance, the sidewalk doors to basement on Jane now out of sight; planter boxes wrap corner

Horatio Street

Tenth Avenue & Horatio Street, Northeast & Southeast Corners (2006)

Tenth Avenue & Horatio Street, Southeast Corner (2010)

Tenth Avenue & Horatio Street, Northeast Corner (2010)

SE — 2006: scaffolding; 2010: scaffolding down, facelift/renovation apparently complete

NE — 2006: possible vacancy or new tenant suggested by raw plywood sheet in front of first storefront window; 2010: no change

Gansevoort Street

Tenth Avenue & Gansevoort Street, Northeast & Southeast Corners (2006)

Tenth Avenue & Gansevoort Street, Southeast Corner (2010)

Tenth Avenue & Gansevoort Street, Northeast Corner (2010)

SE — 2006: no signs of change on corner, construction visible at back between Washington Street and Greenwich Street; 2010: Weichsel beef unchanged except for busted parking sign (2006) gone (2010), also “do not enter” sign facing Tenth — is the octagonal stop sign still there, behind it? (probably)

NE — 2006: no signs of change; 2010: building down at back between Washington & Greenwich north of Gansevoort — "do not enter" sign facing Tenth (octagonal stop sign still behind it? looks a little like it) — new building visible in back right, also in far back left

Little West 12th Street

Tenth Avenue & Little West 12th Street, Northeast & Southeast Corners (2006)

Tenth Avenue & Little West 12th Street, Southeast Corner (2010)

Tenth Avenue & Little West 12th Street, Northeast Corner (2010)

SE — 2006: no signs of change on corner, but High Line restoration visible; 2010: Gansevoort Meat Center has been cleaned up (“facelift” might be an exaggeration)

NE — 2006: scaffolding center left; 2010: new scaffolding on right side of tavern — new building visible in back and another one in far back (both left)

West 13th Street

Tenth Avenue & West 13th Street, Northeast & Southeast Corners (2006)

Tenth Avenue & West 13th Street, Southeast Corner (2010)

Tenth Avenue & West 13th Street, Northeast Corner (2010)

SE — 2006: construction behind parking lot; 2010: new building finished, parking lot still there; new stop sign, also another sign (faces into 13th, can’t see what it says)

NE — 2006: building appears vacant; 2010: overhead conveyor structure partly down

What do these visible signs of change mean? Especially in an area — not to say "neighborhood" — like this one, a kind of "no man's land," a rump, a remnant of many things simultaneously, left over from the heyday of the meatpacking industry, the elevated West Side Highway, the High Line (and before it the street level tracks), the piers — even for New York, even for Manhattan, this is a lot of change, much of it in a relatively short span of time.

This is enough for one post, but I'll return to the "what does it mean" question very shortly.

Tenth Avenue extension below 23rd Street with changes in Manhattan shoreline

2010-06-12T10:21:00.006-04:00

I couldn't resist putting the map below together to show both 1) the extension of Tenth Avenue south from its original, 1807, terminus at 23rd Street, and 2) the changes in the Manhattan shoreline since 1807.

Tenth Avenue extension below 23rd Street
with changes to Manhattan shoreline

Green is the original, natural (no land-fill) island of Manhattan.

Brown is the land-fill as shown on the 1865 Vielé map. (I'm not altogether certain that all the blocks shown on Vielé's map in the land-fill area were real rather than prospective.)

Blue is the Hudson River as of Vielé's map of 1865.

The heavy irregular line to the left is the current, 2010, shoreline with piers.

The street plan is modified from a current tax block map.

The original Tenth Avenue, as planned in 1807, is the deeper yellow line running north from 23rd street.

The subsequent extension of Tenth Avenue south to Horatio Street is indicated by the lighter yellow line.

(The initial extension was to West Street, between what is now Little West 12th Street and Gansevoort Street, probably by 1836, possibly already by 1831; I am not sure when the further extension down not quite to Horatio Street took place — before or after the erection or the demolition of the elevated West Side Highway?)

The yellow dots from Horatio Street to Jane Street indicate the apparent (but not official) extension of Tenth Avenue as experienced by a pedestrian.

Pictures and discussion of Tenth Avenue below 14th Street coming soon!

Tenth Avenue Delis

2010-06-11T06:53:00.003-04:00

After all that heavy lifting on the foot of Tenth Avenue yesterday — yes, I admit it, I got carried away by my love of maps — let's take a look at something simpler: delis.

Or is this any simpler?

Tenth Avenue & 88th Street, Southwest Corner
(2006 above, 2010 below)

One of the hazards of taking any closer look at almost anything in the city is that everything is so richly connected to so many other things in so many different ways as to make a mockery of the idea of "simple" or even "simpler."

Take, for instance, delis, not in the original, literal sense, from the German, delikatessen, "delicate food," "delicacies," but rather in the more contemporary sense of a small grocery store, often, though not always, on a corner, and often, but also not always, with some facilities to provide hot and cold take out, however limited the menu may be.

The first one of these you encounter walking up Tenth Avenue is on the southwest corner of 28th Street — this surely says something about how little the stretch of the avenue up to there has been residential or even commercial (as opposed to industrial) for many decades now.

The last deli before 110th Street is just above the northwest corner of 109th Street.

In between there are another 34 delis, for a grand total of 36 on Tenth Avenue up to 110th Street.

Or a bit over two per block above 28th Street.

Of these 36 deli enterprises, 16, or 44% were either new to the location (just a couple) or showed some combination of new awnings or new signage, usually with a new name for the business, 2010 vs. 2006.

44%! Nearly half, in fact!

That's a little over 5 per year, 15% annually, meaning, on the math alone, that these changes happen about seven years on average. (Yes, the sample is too small to say this with any certainty, but still, it gives a rough picture and, better yet, raises some questions.)

The first question is this: do the new awnings, new signage, new names indicate new ownership, or at least new management? Meaning, per the numbers, that delis change hands on average once every seven years?

Or are the visible changes just the result of the same owners or managers dressing up the business to keep pace with other changes, especially, no doubt, demographic changes, in their immediate locale? In which case, the question is whether the rate of neighborhood change is such as to motivate such changes every seven years?

Or both, of course.

In short, do changing deli facades, awnings, names, signage give us a kind of neighborhood-intrinsic "clock" against which to measure relative rates of change in the characters of neighborhoods?

These are not questions to be answered by looking at pictures, or if they are, I don't know how to read the answers from the pictures.

Would it be worth going back and asking?

Maybe ….

Tenth Avenue beginnings ….

2010-06-10T12:35:00.004-04:00

In effort to get some of the past few weeks' work to congeal into something beyond simple counting on the one hand and "ooh, look at that!" on the other, I've started work on an informal essay on the "signs of change" on Tenth Avenue from its southernmost corner on up to — well, I'm not sure how far on up to, at this point, but let's say on up to 110th Street, though that may prove to be too much.

Foot of Tenth Avenue at 23rd Street
Commissioners' Plan of 1807 (north is towards the right)

Though the planned essay is meant to be informal, it's not meant to be as informal as the posts on this blog, and as seems always to be the case, the result even of intending to tighten the screws a bit brings unexpected as well as expected results.

What I expected was that it would be seductively easier to start researching and writing about the content or subjects of the photographs beyond what one can actually see in them.

But then some of that is surely desirable, especially for a conjectural readership who may not know the avenue in the way that long term residents do.

And also, the "signs of change" I'm looking at are of interest because they, or their meanings, are shared at least by people for whom the avenue is a regular part of their lives, and, more broadly, by people for whom such signs in any large scale urban setting would be meaningful. So what I can bring to bear of my own experience, not specifically personally, but as a member of the community defined by those who know something of the avenue and its signs — or of such avenues and such signs — is no more or less essential than the knowledge and experience of any reader of a text is essential to its understanding.

What was unexpected was a difficulty I discovered in determining the southernmost corner of Tenth Avenue, which, as it turns out, has a history all its own, stretching back over 200 years!

I'll tell you a little bit about it (possibly more than either you or I ever wanted to know).

Most of the story is disclosed by maps, even though they often, especially in the earlier part of the 19th century, before the Civil War, tend to contradict one another — the result, I imagine, of some map makers and printers copying earlier maps by others, either outright or with only partial updates, and then dating them with their current date of publication, even if their content was already well out of date and superseded by other, more recent maps.

Let us begin just before the beginning, with William Bridges' 1807 "Plan of the City of New York with Recent and Intended Improvements." This is a good place to start because it is the last map to be produced prior to the appearance of the famous "Commissioners" map of 1807. The significance for our purposes of Bridges' map is simple: there is no Tenth Avenue, actual or planned, to be found on it.

The Commissioners' map and plan has its own fascination, especially in its details, but that's another story for another post, so I won't allow myself that digression here. The map of 1807 itself, which defined Manhattan's characteristic "grid," shows Tenth Avenue starting just below 23rd Street (and just above 22nd Street), that is, right where the avenue is terminated by the Manhattan shoreline as it was at that time, before a series of landfills extended the island out into the Hudson, first to Eleventh Avenue, later to Twelfth, and even, briefly, to a nominal "Thirteenth" Avenue.

I will mention that the Commissioners' Tenth Avenue extended unbroken all the way from this starting point northwards to just west of the old Kings Bridge over Spuyten Duyvil Creek.

Maps by City Surveyor Thomas Poppleton in 1817 and derivative maps by William Hooker in 1817 and 1821 don't extend far enough north to reach Tenth Avenue's starting point at 22nd/23rd Street, but do show that the shoreline build-out, already underway lower on the island, did not yet extend above Greenwich Lane, which is now (I believe) Little West 12th Street.

J. F. Morin's map of 1828, William Chapin's of 1831, and the "Fireman's" map of 1834 also show no shoreline build-out here, but do show Tenth Avenue now extended (in concept or reality?) down to a point between Greenwich Lane and 12th Street.

J. H. Colton's topographic map of 1836 definitely (?) shows the shoreline built-out above 14th Street, and also shows the extension of the avenue down to just below 12th Street.

The British Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge's map of 1844 shows the shoreline built out below as well as above 14th Street, but D. H. Burr's map of 1846, Dogget's map of 1848, and Atwood's map of 1849 fail to show any shoreline build-out below 14th Street, though they do show the extension of Tenth Avenue down to below 12th Street.

Hayward's 1850 map shows the shoreline built-out to Eleventh Avenue, as does Vielé's very famous topographical map — still used to locate the natural watercourses below today's artificially raised ground level in Manhattan.

Subsequent maps of the city's wards (1870), railroads (1885), and streets (1886) show the same situation for Tenth Avenue as Vielé's, though the 1886 map shows West Street extended diagonally past Tenth Avenue and on up to Eleventh.

Maps of 1902 and 1903 show West Street extended up to 29th or (probably) 30th Street, and a 1911 map by the People's Publishing Company (Chicago) shows this extension as "Thirteenth Avenue" between 23rd Street and 30th Street.

Thirteenth Avenue appears again on a Rand McNally street map of 1934, but thereafter, at least by the time of the Gousha road map of 1941, shows West Street — actually the elevated West Side Highway by this time — extended up to its present position, with no further shoreline build-outs.

This would seem to take us far afield of the southern terminus of Tenth Avenue, then or now, were it not for the interlude represented by the West Side Elevated Highway, begun in 1929 and opened from Canal Street up to 22nd Street in November, 1930. As a result, Tenth Avenue, though extended, as before, down to Little West 12th Street or just below, flowed into the remains of West Street below the elevated but with no local access to the elevated highway itself.

Forty-some years later, in 1973, the elevated highway just above Tenth Avenue's terminus between Little West 12th Street and Gansevoort Street collapsed. The subsequent demolition of the elevated highway, and the long process of rehabilitating West Street — the long-running "Westway" controversy I must leave to another post if indeed I get to it all — led eventually to Tenth Avenue running side by side with the new West Street from 13th Street down to Horatio Street.

And for the pedestrian, it is not at all obvious that it isn't Tenth Avenue for yet another block south, down to Jane Street.

So where Tenth Avenue begins is a whole history in itself, and even today there is ambiguity to footed eye, if not to the cartographer.

I'll start, however illegitimately, with "Tenth" Avenue and Jane Street — inclusiveness may not always be a better principle but it's often a more interesting one, especially since, in this instance, the changes in neighborhood character around the foot of Tenth Avenue — perhaps I should call it the "extended foot" of Tenth Avenue, from 13th Street down to Jane Street — are so extreme that a look at "signs of change" and actual change on Tenth Avenue that ignored them would be highly remiss, to say the least.

Tenth Avenue 13th Street — 110th Street: changes 2010 vs. 2006

2010-06-09T08:04:00.008-04:00

Summary stats for the signs of change on Tenth (Amsterdam) Avenue from 73rd Street on up to 110th Street (done a little more systematically than those for 14th Street — 72nd Street, which means I'll have to go back and reconcile the two, though they're not far apart):

Number of corners: 361

Total signs of change: 278

Corners with no change: 178 (49%)

Corners with changes: 183 (51%)

Newly vacant lots: 4

Major construction or demolition: 16

New buildings: 23

Renovations: 8

Face lifts: 22

Scaffolding up: 38

Scaffolding down: 15

New signage and/or awnings: 76

New tenants: 63

Newly vacant storefronts: 13

This amounts to 0.77 changes per corner overall; 1.52 changes per corner with change(s). This principally due, I think, to the high correlation between new tenancies and new signage and awnings.

Tenth Avenue 16th Street — 108th Street: average changes per corner
centered in moving five block window

The chart shows the average number of changes per corner, from 16th Street to 108th Street, centered within a 21 corner moving window (usually 2.5 blocks each way from the given street, for a total interval of about a quarter of a mile). The numbers in between on the x-axis are the major east-west streets (23rd, 34th, 42nd, etc.).

As the chart makes evident, there are five peak centers of change: the highest centered around 92nd Street, the second highest around 54th Street, the third around 75th Street, the fourth around 16th Street, and the fifth around 108th Street. There are three troughs of relatively low change density: the lowest around 61st Street, the next two, about equal, centered around 34th Street and around 99th Street.

A few conjectures: the 16th Street peak represents northward movement of gentrification from the former Meatpacking District, together with the emergence of Chelsea as the new art gallery district. The 54th Street peak represents a westward expansion of Midtown; the 75th Street peak may be a kind of second order "renewal" of this oldest part of the Upper West Side; the 92nd Street peak may, again, be a kind of second order renewal (perhaps due to an increased population density?); while the 108th Street peak is likely, in part, to be a southward and eastward expansion of the more upscale population drawn to Columbia University.

The 34th Street trough is explainable in part by the MTA railroad yards on the west side of the avenue below 33rd Street, the 61st Street trough by the public housing on the west side of the avenue and the Lincoln Center complex on its east side. The uptown trough may similarly be explained, at least in part, by the public housing there.

(These conjectures are very "off the top of my head" and, even if in some measure correct, do not pretend to address the underlying drivers of change in the city.)

Some lessons learned

2010-06-09T08:03:00.001-04:00

There are several more things I want to do with the "then & now" set for Tenth Avenue 13th Street — 110th Street before proceeding, or deciding whether to proceed, on up from 111th Street to the end of the avenue at Broadway/218th Street.

Mostly I want to reconcile the differences in how and what I was counting along the way so far, which changed several times (though not radically), but also to enumerate the various kinds of things that the people in the photographs are doing, or at least appear to be doing.

And to try to arrive at some more general result, though I'm not sure how well that's going to work out.

Tenth Avenue & 93rd Street, Northeast Corner
(2006 above, 2010 below)

In the meantime, though, before I forget, I want to put forward a few of the lessons learned thus far, especially since the detailed run-through from 73rd Street up to 110th Street this afternoon has brought them home to me with somewhat unexpected force.

The lessons learned are of two kinds: those pertaining to the actual photography, and those pertaining to the frequency, to the time series.

The photography lessons are straightforward enough:

1
Settle on a more consistent horizontal field of view, measured in absolute rather than relative distance, i.e., the corner ±125–150 feet, say, rather than a constant ±25º–30º or so would be helpful. Wide enough that a pair of photos, e.g., the NW corner of xth street and the SW corner of x+1th street would cover the whole block. And certainly a much greater consistency than I was aiming for in 2006.

2
Get a more consistent white/color balance, together with a more consistent exposure, if necessary obtained by a second shot at each corner with a calibrated gray-white-black card, would make time series comparisons easier by eliminating or at least reducing these sources of irrelevant variation.

3
In relation to #2, then use a much more consistent processing workflow, with much less cropping.

4
Take the extra time at each corner to ensure that the camera is level, or nearly so, to reduce the amount of perspective correction to be done in post-processing (which adds some other geometrical distortion while eliminating the converging verticals, something I'd like to maintain).

5
Possibly also make a much larger lens shade to reduce the amount of flare that sometimes creeps in later in the day.

6
Administratively, keep closer track of the shots during each shoot to reduce the likelihood of accidentally skipping a corner.

7
And don't hesitate to take as many "ID" shots as possible, to avoid subsequent confusion.

8
shoot everything that can justifiably be called a corner, whether it meets my narrower criteria for a "valid" corner or not — inclusive is the word during subsequent shoots.

The time series related lessons (insofar as they're not already covered above) are:

9
Since it is unlikely that I'll be able to shoot the whole island more than once every few years — though I'd like to — to select some key areas and shoot those much more frequently, say quarterly, over a span of five to ten years — good grief, I hope I live that long!

10
If, as before, all daytime Manhattan, and bright sunny days at that, then all in addition all weekday afternoons, no weekends, no holidays, for the sake of uniformity in vehicular and pedestrian traffic.

I'm sure there are even more lessons, but the above list is a tall enough order for now already!

Signs of change on Tenth Avenue: 73rd Street — 110th Street

2010-06-08T15:22:00.004-04:00

Detailed enumeration of the signs of change and the actual changes on Tenth (Amsterdam) Avenue from 73rd Street on up to 110th Street. (Not for the faint of heart or the easily bored.) To follow along, open a second window in your browser, and go to Tenth Avenue 2006 & 2010 (2).

As before, I’ll take the corners of each intersection in the clockwise order NE, SE, SW, NW. At each corner I'll describe the 2006 sign(s) of change first, then the 2010 actual changes.

Tenth Avenue & 100th Street, Southeast Corner
(2006 above, 2010 below)

73rd Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: P&G Café&Bar gone, green paint removed from façade, sign down, new tenant (?), also new tenants, awning to left

SE — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding up

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: scaffolding; 2010: scaffolding down, new no parking/standing sign

74th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; 2010: facades cleaned up, new awnings

SW — 2006: scaffolding; 2010: scaffolding down

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change except for new no parking/standing sign

75th Street

NE — 2006: scaffolding; 2010: scaffolding down

SE — 2006: vacant storefront; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: none; 2010: new tenant, new awnings match ones on right in 2006, scaffolding up on left

NW — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding up

76th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: corner storefront vacant, new tenant with new awning on left

SE — 2006: scaffolding on left; 2010: scaffolding down

SW — 2006: none; 2010: Jersey barriers replaced with posts

NW — 2006: none; 2010: new façade (actually a building renovation) on the right

77th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; 2010: Harrisons gone, new tenant Chirping Chicken (used to be across the street on SW corner) with new awning, signage

SW — 2006: none; 2010: new façade (actually building renovation), Chirping Chicken gone (moved across street to SE corner), parking garage also gone (?)

NW — 2006: none; 2010: Shoka gone, new tenant is The Vitamin Peddler [sic]

78th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding up

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: new awning for Duane Reade

79th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: Falafel gone, new tenant with new owning, new bus stop shelter

SE — 2006: none; 2010: street work

SW — 2006: none; 2010: new awning for Duane Reade, new style newstand

NW — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding up

80th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: Sarabeth's has new awning

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

81st Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: Louie's Café gone, new tenant is St James Café/Irish Pub, woodwork now brown not green, new awning on right

SE — 2006: none; 2010: Monsoon closed, storefront now vacant, signage down, also red lamps down, new signage at Haru next door

SW — 2006: none; 2010: Roppono gone, new tenant is Tangled Vine, old awning down, façade cleaned up, wall on 81st street side painted to match

NW — 2006: none; 2010: new phone booth, new no parking sign

82nd Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; 2010: barbershop gone, signage down, new tenant is Apothecary

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: Pizza place gone, signage down, new tenant is PF

83rd Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding up

SE — 2006: none; 2010: new awning for Sofia Storage, "store for rent" above Tibet Bazaar

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: Crossroads gone, signage down, new tenant is McGee Tavern, new awning, signage, paint, flags

84th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; 2010: new pedestrian crosswalk sign

SW — 2006: none; 2010: new awning for Le Pain Quotienne

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

85th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding up

SE — 2006: none; 2010: New Tower Copy gone, signage down, new tenant is Desktop USA, new signage

SW — 2006: none; 2010: Jinny Cleaners gone, new tenant is New Kam Lai, new awning on corner deli, is this new tenant also?

NW — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding up

86th Street

NE — 2006: scaffolding; 2010: scaffolding repainted, street work

SE — 2006: none; 2010: Sweet Corner gone, new tenant is Dunkin' Donuts, street work

SW — 2006: scaffolding; 2010: scaffolding still up (or new scaffolding? Seems to be higher in 2010)

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change except newspaper boxes moved, also new style no parking sign

87th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: scaffolding; 2010: scaffolding down, Plums gone, new tenant is Schatzie The Butcher, new awning, signage

SW — 2006: none; 2010: PC Richards still there (?) — signage changed, hard to discern actual occupancy

NW — 2006: none; 2010: new awning for deli (new owner too?), awning extending over sidewalk for Indain restaurant gone

88th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change, (but young trees have grown visibly)

SW — 2006: none; 2010: new owner for deli (?) with new signage, awning down, sidewalk enclosure up

NW — 2006: none; 2010: Jing Hua gone, new tenant (?)

89th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: Door Store gone, new tenant is New York Kids' Club

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: none; 2010: Papa John's now includes Subway and Häagen Dasz, new signage reflects this

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

90th Street

NE — 2006: some construction to the right; 2010: scaffolding up

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding up

NW — 2006: scaffolding; 2010: scaffolding painted red, now extends up (is this new or extension of old?)

91st Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: Altman Hardware & West Side Paints gone, new tenant is Express Supply (is this a new tenant or a renaming of the business?), new signage to match

SE — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding up, Café Roma gone, new tenant is Pudding Stones West

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: new awning, signage for Miyako Sushi

92nd Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: tree down on right

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: none; 2010: Pizza Bolla now Mike's Pizzeria, awning and signage to match

NW — 2006: none; 2010: Yuki Sushi now Kikuchi Sushi, new awning, Funny Business Comics gone, storefront now vacant

93rd Street

NE — 2006: restaurant space vacant, for rent; 2010: façade facelift, new tenant is Japanese restaurant, new awning to match

SE — 2006: dumpster, renovation of Little Apple Grocery space; 2010: new tenant is Apple NYC furniture, awning to match, Schneider framing gone, space now vacant, for rent

SW — 2006: none; 2010: Little Extras and adjacent travel business now 7-11, facelift and signage to match, young tree center right has grown significantly

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change except newpaper boxes

94th Street

NE — 2006: scaffolding; 2010: scaffolding down, new (?) tenant is Little Shop of Crafts, new signage, also new (?) Caffe Mocias

SE — 2006: scaffolding; 2010: scaffolding down, new signage, sidewalk enclosure for Galileo

SW — 2006: none; 2010: new deli owner (?) with awning and signage to match

NW — 2006: none; 2010: Sipon gone, new tenant is Pio Pio Salon

95th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: West Side Dental gone, new tenant is Mandek School

SE — 2006: scaffolding; 2010: scaffolding down, facelift

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: new deli owner (?), awning & signage to match, Baker Surgical gone, new tenant is Charm, again, awning & signage to match, Indian Café gone, new tenant is tapas place

96th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; 2010: new style bus stop shelter, news boxes gone

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: church doors now blue instead of red

97th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; 2010: old Associated signage down, not (yet?) replaced

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: Scheina gone, new tenant is Ozen, deli gone, new tenant is Dollar Variety, awnings to match in both cases

98th Street

NE — no such corner

SE — no such corner

SW — 2006: none; 2010: new tree in front of Xtreem Clean, more new boxes on corner

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

99th Street

NE — no such corner

SE — no such corner

SW — 2006: none; 2010: new signage, modest facelift for Pearl's

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

100th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: Home Center closed (?), scaffolding on left; 2010: new building, still being finished, scaffolding on left still up,though repainted

SW — 2006: none; 2010: new building, still being finished

NW — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding

101st Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; 2010: Lucky 99¢ store gone, new tenant is Noche Mexicana, Jackson Hewitt gone, new tenant is 99¢ More, awning, signage changes to match, Krik Krak has facelift, new awning too

SW — no such corner

NW — no such corner

102nd Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: none; 2010: Chinese & Japanese restaurants gone, new tenant is Café Roma, awning, signage changes to match, do not enter sign is gone

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

103rd Street

NE — no such corner

SE — no such corner

SW — 2006: none; 2010: new phone booth

NW — 2006: none; 2010: new awning (and owner?) for pizza place

104th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; 2010: NYPD Security Camera sign

SW — 2006: none; 2010: new owner for hair salon, awning to match, Dani cleaners has new awning (closed probably due to holiday)

NW — 2006: none; 2010: new pedestrian crossing sign

105th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

106th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: new tenants to left of pizza place, Nail Salon, Body Work, awnings to match, new tenant to left of them too, also awning to match

SE — 2006: none; 2010: new signage, awning for Empire Corner, MONY travel service gone (?) new signage, A-Singh Project now 99¢, new awning, also new awning for Kabab & Curry House

SW — 2006: none; 2010: new phone booth

NW — 2006: none; 2010: A Velez gone, renovation underway, new signage (new owner?) for bar next door

107th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; 2010: La Embajada gone, new tenant is Tropical Mission, awning & signage changes to match

SW — 2006: none; 2010: Century funeral home gone, façade facelift, new tenants are Windes, Hair Studio, Corniel Barbershop, signage to match

NW — 2006: vacant storefront next to pharmacy; 2010: new tenant is Thai restaurant, awning, signage to match

108th Street

NE — 2006: storefront vacant next to Karate-Do; 2010: new paint job for Karate-Do, new tenant next door is deli, awning to match

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding down, new tenants with awnings, signage to match

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

109th Street

NE — 2006: xxxxx; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; 2010: Mugi has facelift

SW — 2006: xxxxx; 2010: facelift, new tenant on left, young trees center right have grown

NW — 2006: none; 2010: fresh paint on corner business, new owner (?) awning on deli next door

110th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SUMMARY

See the summary statistics in yesterday's post.

Errors & omissions for uptown First, Second, Third, & Paladino Avenues, more …

2010-06-07T21:23:00.002-04:00

I just posted an "errors & omissions" set, photographed this afternoon, on New York in Plain Sight.

The set includes the missing corners (and a few reshoots) for First, Second, Third, and Paladino Avenues, as well as for the FDR Drive Frontage Road and for A New Street — yes, that is its official name, at least for now — all uptown (the lowest street number is 91st, and there's one at 98th — both on Third Avenue — but most of the 29 corners in the set are between 102nd and 128th).

Have a look!

Tenth Avenue 73rd Street — 110th Street: changes 2010 vs. 2006

2010-06-07T06:48:00.003-04:00

Summary stats for the signs of change on Tenth (Amsterdam) Avenue from 73rd Street on up to 110th Street (done a little more systematically than those for 14th Street — 72nd Street, which means I'll have to go back and reconcile the two, though they're not far apart):

Number of corners: 144

Total signs of change: 118

Corners with no change: 77 (53%)

Corners with changes: 67 (47%)

Newly vacant lots: 0

Major construction: 0

New buildings: 1

Renovations: 3

Face lifts: 9

Scaffolding up: 17

Scaffolding down: 7

New signage: 40

New tenants: 38

Newly vacant storefronts: 3

Tenth Avenue & 77th Street, Southeast Corner
(2006 above, 2010 below)

When I've reconciled the prior stretch (14th — 72nd) to these categories (and maybe revisited these as well), I'll post the stats for the whole avenue thus far, i.e., 14th Street up to 110th.

Then I want to do some slicing and dicing by neighborhood, and even look at some of the moving averages over, say, a ten block window.

And then have a look at what people are doing on or near those corners.

If that and some related pot-stirring looks like it's going somewhere, then I'll proceed on up above 110th Street.

Tenth Avenue 2006 & 2010 73rd Street — 110th Street now on-line

2010-06-06T10:43:00.002-04:00

The "then & now" set for Tenth Avenue from 73rd Street up to 110th Street is now available on line here.

I've also put the link under "links" in the right hand column.

Tenth Avenue & 73rd Street, Northeast Corner
(2006 above, 2010 below)

Soon — tomorrow? maybe … I'll start crawling up this stretch of the avenue, noting what's changed.

After which I may pause before shooting the corners above 110th Street — I'm not sure where, if anywhere, this exercise is going, and I think there are enough samples now to figure that out without doing the whole avenue first.

If something comes of it, then I'll go ahead with the rest.

I didn't mention this before, but you may notice if you haven't already that though Tenth Avenue is called Amsterdam Avenue starting at 59th Street, I've captioned the photographs in the "then & now" set "Tenth Avenue" all the same, as an administrative convenience on this end (don't ask).

Bailing the ocean ….

2010-06-06T07:04:00.001-04:00

A few years ago now the composer John Corigliano told me that in projects as big as this one there comes a time after the initial bursts of enthusiasm have worn off when it all begins to seem like bailing the ocean: no matter how much you work at it every day, nor how consistently, you don't seem to be making any dent in it at all.

And then, eventually, all of a sudden, almost, you're at or near the end, and it's finished.

At the time he said this, I'd processed and catalogued fewer than 1,500 of the images that constitute New York in Plain Sight and with nearly 10,000 to go had already reached the point he was describing, that is, the point of feeling like I was bailing the ocean.

Queensborough Bridge Exit & 61st Street, Southwest Corner)

And then, several years later, this past February, it was done, or very nearly so, and this has its own difficulties.

One of them is simply the "very nearly" part — I still have about 200 corners to shoot or reshoot, scattered more or less randomly all over the island of Manhattan, and I just haven't gotten myself together to go out for however many days it will take and get them done. (I did earlier this spring get about 200 "errors & omissions" done, the ones that were bunched together: little streets or squares that I'd missed, mostly.)

And then there's a certain amount of clean-up: only yesterday I noticed for the first time, that I'd missed a typo in the Tenth (Amsterdam) Avenue captions, so that a long stretch of captions referred to "Amersterdam" Avenue. And there have been others like that, too.

I really need to go through the whole thing, just proof reading and correcting.

And then there's a huge amount of work to get the whole thing moved onto a flexible content management system with a much friendlier and more flexible user interface.

To say nothing of the ongoing effort to introduce the project to all sorts of people and institutions who might be interested in it, or whom I wish would be interested in it.

All this, together with a nagging sense that I should do the whole thing all over again, and do it better, and more consistently (from a photographic point of view).

Which brings me around to the "then & now" sub-project of the last few weeks: it's a kind of pilot for doing it again, trying this and that, but with much greater consistency, especially in field of view of the images.

It's also showing me a little of the potential for having a time series, even with only two data points, 2006 and 2010, though of course more would be better.

And also that a four year interval is maybe too long: it would be "nice" — wouldn't so many things be "nice"! — to have it done annually, or quarterly, or monthly (annually is probably good enough).

And the "then & now" work is a kind of escape or procrastination vis-á-vis the task of getting out there and getting those last 200 pictures taken.

How hard can it be? Only two hundred, how much is that after 11,289? Nothing, relatively speaking, but 200 all the same. Still, already the "then & now" set has reached 361 images of Tenth Avenue, nearly twice as many as the remaining errors and omissions, so what's the big deal?

Well, part of "the big deal" is that I need a break from it, and the "then & now" sub-project is way of taking that break without feeling like I've altogether abandoned the main project.

Another part of "the big deal" is a nagging suspicion that the whole project is just too esoteric, if not actually eccentric, too far outside the various pales of art and documentary that, I must admit, I tried so carefully to stay outside of ….

Or maybe, the nagging voice pipes up at this point, the pictures just aren't good enough. "Shut up!" is all I can say to that one.

This has been a sort of whiny post, which I'm posting mainly because it documents in its way another aspect of the project, of projects generally, especially big projects, that I don't want to leave undocumented: namely the ups and downs of doing them.

I guess the last few days, especially, and especially perhaps because of the hot and humid weather here — might as well blame the weather — have been more among the downs than the ups.

Another friend of mine, at the time an executive at IBM, used to say to me: "Richard, your problem is that you think you know what's going to happen, and you don't." Well, I don't know if that's specifically my problem, or a problem that we all have, but even so, it's a problem that I'll admit to sharing with lots of other people.

More importantly, though, I think, is the hope implicit in what she said.

So, it's Sunday, it's early, not even 7 AM, let's have another cup of coffee, get on with this and that (I'm getting towards the end of processing the 73rd Street — 110th Street "then & now" images from last Monday), and see what if anything unexpected the day brings.

Tenth Avenue 14th Street — 72nd Street: major changes 2010 vs. 2006

2010-06-04T09:41:00.003-04:00

Signs of change may be as minor as the appearance of new street furniture, e.g., those colorful boxes for the free papers or a new kind of trash can, or of a new awning on a deli or a new paint job on a storefront, or of a series of Sabrett's vendors every other block where you never saw even one before.

Tenth Avenue & 42nd Street, Southeast Corner
(2006 above, 2010 below)

But then there are also the major changes: newly empty lots (sites of recent demolitions), new construction in progress, new buildings (finished or nearly so), and major renovations (underway or finished).

I thought I'd count these and see what we've got, in the stretch of Tenth Avenue from 14th up to 72nd.

A few relatively minor judgment calls — when is a building still under construction and when is it "nearly finished" (and does this matter)?

I did NOT include new buildings that are visible in the photographs but are not sited on or close to the corners that are the actual subjects of the photographs, i.e., I didn't count new buildings and construction visible in the backgrounds.

RESULTS

Newly vacant lots: 4

Under construction: 1

New buildings: 19

Major renovations: 8

TOTAL: 32

So, 15% or about one in seven of the 216 corners has undergone or is currently undergoing these major changes since I first photographed them in 2006.

While 136 of the 216 corners, 63%, shows signs of change at some level or other.

That is, 32 out of the 136 corners showing change, or 24%, show major change, as just defined above.

One in seven corners, one in four corners showing change — is this a lot? a little? "normal"?

We'll have to look at more photographs to answer that — a fine argument, perhaps, for doing the whole project over again next year. But also a fine argument for doing it every year. Or at least for systematically photographing some area at regular intervals — annually? quarterly? monthly? — over a period of, well, as many years as possible.

"72nd Street Divide"

2010-06-03T08:25:00.002-04:00

A personal observation, though not one about me:

Anyone who walks with any frequency on any of the longer avenues in Manhattan for any great distance notices — how could one not? — that the character, the visual character, of the passing streetscape is relatively consistent for a while, then gradually, or sometimes rather abruptly, changes character, only to change again a half a mile later, or a mile, or sometimes two miles.

Tenth (Amsterdam) Avenue & 57th Street, Southeast Corner
(2006 above, 2010 below)

This segmentation into stretches of different character is surely associated with the sequence of neighborhoods that the avenue passes through, but I suspect that this is not always a very close association, especially when the avenue, or a particular stretch of it, marks a boundary between neighborhoods rather than their spine.

And sometimes the sense of continuity extends through more than one, indeed through several neighborhoods, though someone paying close attention would be able to discern neighborhood specificities within the more largely sensed continuity.

So, for me anyway, Broadway seems of a piece from its foot at Bowling Green up to Vesey Street (no surprise that), but then the next segment, to my eye, runs from Vesey all the way up to Union Square (though of course there are differences along the way, for instance, passing through the "cast iron" district between Canal and Houston).

I don't want to make to much of this, and there's probably not much danger of that, since I don't know what to make of it, but I don't want to let these more peripheral, vaguer perceptions pass unremarked either — there might be something there.

As there seems to be on Tenth Avenue, which has always — well, for 20 years — seemed to be all of a piece from around 14th Street on up to 72nd Street, despite the sequence of neighborhoods along the way.

And then at 72nd Street, with very little preluding, the character of the avenue changes rather dramatically, and stays rather intensely itself up to, say, 86th Street, after which it begins to dissipate, enough so that the transition, if that's what it is, at 96th Street isn't nearly as abrupt.

This may be just because, so far, Tenth Avenue is just far enough west to not partake so strongly of the sequence of neighborhoods that runs up of the center of the island, but not so far west as to have the flavor of Eleventh Avenue or West Street.

So that the segmentation of character is less marked than on, say, Eighth Avenue.

And it may be that Tenth Avenue is a weak boundary between the neighborhoods to either side of it below 72nd Street, but shifts gears at that point and becomes a spine, a main artery, above 72nd (along with Columbus — which reminds me that, due to the one-way plan, Tenth is the spine for uptown traffic, Columbus the spine for downtown traffic).

And that above 86th Street, or more certainly 96th Street, it's losing its central character again.

As I said, this is just how it seems to me, and it seems pretty vague too, but let's keep it in mind, if only towards the back of our minds, huh?

Incongruities, dissonances, disparate intentions ….

2010-06-02T15:57:00.003-04:00

I've just spent a couple of hours looking at the "then & now" set, 14th Street — 72nd Street.

Tenth (Amsterdam) Avenue & 50th Street, Southwest Corner
(2006 above, 2010 below)

At first I was looking for, as I discussed in the immediately preceding post, signs of conflict, signs of cooperation, signs of the major groups that collectively, in conflict and cooperation, may be said to produce a neighborhood.

It wasn't long — just a few corners — before I sensed a need to simplify, and so I began to look for something much simpler, or what I thought would be much simpler: incongruities, dissonances, in the photographs.

Even this turned out to be difficult. I thought maybe it was just that the images I was looking at were too small — for speed and convenience I was using a set of medium size JPGs. So I switched to the more cumbersome but much more detailed full size TIFFs from which the JPGs had been generated.

No help at all, or very little, though I did, simply, I suppose, as a result of the more intense scrutiny, discover lots of details that I'd missed in my more rapid virtual stroll up the avenue.

But very little that I could unequivocally all an incongruity or a dissonance: something out of place, something that didn't fit.

And after a while it began to dawn on me that the problem might be not that there are no incongruities, no dissonances, to be seen in the photographs (or, for that matter, to be seen live on the street), but that there are so many of them, of so many kinds, and in such varying degrees, that they so to speak cancel one another out.

E.L.Doctorow, introducing Ric Burns’ New York: A Documentary, speaks very eloquently of the "universe … of totally disparate intentions" represented by everyone going about their separate business on the street, and how "that’s what happens in the city, in that somehow the city can embrace and accept and accommodate all that disparate intention, at one and the same time."

Which leads me to thought of the street as a kind of no-man's land arising out of the unresolved but nonetheless suspended conflicts of all the different people who use it. So that the streetscape comprises all mixed up together the visible signs of the whole, only partially coherent process, in such an intense jumble that the concept of incongruity or dissonance doesn't really apply.

A sort of atonality as it were. Incongruity, dissonance, as something you notice most as a result of its absence in areas that are exceptionally homogeneous, like Battery Park City, or Trump City, or perhaps certain stretches of Park Avenue. Or when faced with the relative incongruity of some of the new buildings on Tenth Avenue, which all look more or less alike, compared to the longer standing architecture, rather a lot of which has or had been in place for well over a hundred years.

Am I only talking about architecture though? — it's certainly the easiest to recognize.

But what about the new style up-scale trash cans on the east side corners from 15th Street to 17th Street? Are these the new style for municipal trash cans? Will they eventually be everywhere? Or do they belong to the local "business improvement district," or to the developers of the new or renovated buildings there?

That's one nice thing about photographs: they stay still while you stare at them, you can just keep on looking and looking, trying to see if there's more to see (there usually is).

So, OK, what about it? Does this knock down my idea of looking for visible signs of conflict, cooperation, etc., or even the weaker form, signs of incongruity, of dissonance?

Maybe.

I'm not quite ready to give up on the idea yet, though I probably should be.

Unfortunately, there's no practical way to post the photographs at their original resolution, or I'd invite you to have a go at it yourself. You might see more than I do — I've been looking at these photographs for so long I may have become blind to a lot that's in them.

I suspect that this is what happens to everyone in the city, and in real life on the street, not just in looking at photographs. Survival — perhaps everywhere, at all times, on the central African grassy plains 200,000 years ago as well as in Manhattan today — may mean learning what to look out for and what not to see, not to hear, not to smell, what to become blind to, deaf to, indifferent to ….

What makes an area a neighborhood, cont'd

2010-06-02T10:18:00.011-04:00

While I'm working up the "then & now" images for Tenth Avenue from 73rd Street up to 110th Street I thought I'd return to the question I explored a little in a previous post, namely, "what makes an area a neighborhood?"

Originally I'd titled that post "What is a neighborhood?" but the "is" seemed so fraught with essentialist dangers that I changed it to "makes" — and added "an area" in order to emphasize a little bit the notion of process implicit in "makes."

I've been chewing on this for the past several days now, partly out of a fear that what I had to say in that post was no more than a bland repetition of some obvious, if not actually trivial, generalities. (I have a similar fear about this post, but slightly less so than with the previous one.)

But it's so easy to move into the "interesting" stuff, and to develop it in various ways without noticing that one has left the obvious, the trivial so far behind that the connection with the hard social reality that the obvious and the trivial represent gets lost altogether. So I want to stay close to the obvious and the trivial, and would rather be defeated by the difficulties they pose than to be successful — even if only in the most minor and esoteric of ways — at the cost of losing sight of them.

Of course it may be that I'm just not up to the job, in which case failure is inevitable, but until that's become obvious, it's worth a try anyway.

So the question isn't, after all, "what makes a neighborhood?" though these words roll right off the tongue or slide friction-free right through the fingers onto the keyboard and into the text.

The question is, "who makes a neighborhood?" what people? what groups of people? and how do they do it?

A neighborhood, that is to say — in any sense beyond an arbitrary label applied to an equally arbitrarily defined area — is the product, the on-going product, of a complex collective action, a sort of summation of the cooperative, conflicting, indifferent, conscious, unconscious, knowledgeable, ignorant, selfish, and unselfish actions of a whole lot of people with the most diverse and often divergent interests and intentions.

For instance:

the people who both live and work in the neighborhood, the people who live in the neighborhood but work elsewhere, the people who live elsewhere but come to the neighborhood to work;

the people who own the businesses in the neighborhood (and some of them live there, and some don't);

the people with children who go to school in the neighborhood (or elsewhere), people who don't live in the neighborhood but whose children go to school there;

the people who come to the neighborhood only to shop, the people who live in the neighborhood but do their shopping elsewhere (by now it may be clear that these categories overlap, sometimes considerably — but an individual's own interests may be in conflict or harmony with one another as well);

the people who own the buildings;

the people who make deliveries to and from the neighborhood or who own or manage the firms that make those deliveries;

the people who just pass through every day or every working day on their way to or from work, the people who pass through occasionally on their way to or from somewhere else, the tourists and other visitors;

the police, the firemen, the sanitation crews, and the emergency medical service personnel who deal with such problems in the neighborhood;

the young, the not so young, the middle aged, the elderly;

the upwardly mobile, the stable, the downwardly mobile;

the richer, the poorer, those in between;

the people who have just moved in, the people who have been there for years but not decades, the people who have been there for decades, or for their whole lives, the people who are contemplating moving out, perhaps especially for reasons having to do with their sense of the neighborhood as no longer affordable or otherwise desirable;

the city planners, tax assessors, education officials, transportation officials, health and safety officials;

and so on and and on and on.

SO complicated: a really close look at even a single intersection within a neighborhood, and a single more or less coherent group of people associated with it, takes years of research, which is probably why it's not done nearly often enough. Check out Mitchell Duneier's Sidewalk for a terrific, near-contemporary example of such a study done here in New York.

In the context of New York in Plain Sight and, in particular, my "then & now" sub-project, this raises the question of how much of these complex dynamics is visible in the result, as captured in the photographs, either individually or considered in "then & now" pairs?

Meaning: can one see not just the signs of change and what has changed, but can one see, or read from what one can see, the signs — let's simplify here — of cooperation and conflict among at least those groups that have or have had the greatest influence on the collective result, that is, on the neighborhood and its character?

So: not just signs of change but signs of cooperation, signs of conflict, and signs of the cooperating or conflicting groups with a claim to the neighborhood.

At moments like this I dream of having — no, not doing — a longitudinal study along the lines of those medical studies, e.g., of heart disease, that track a large cohort of specific individuals at regular intervals over many years.

Meanwhile, absent such a fantastic study, the question remains, how much of neighborhood-making is visible to the eye alone?

A Gedanken experiment: assume that it's the year 2110, a hundred years from now, and we want to answer these questions about neighborhood-making. We have available to us the usual sorts of data: census data, various surveys made at various times and for various purposes, tax records, building permit records, other municipal records — and photographs, including the photographs of New York in Plain Sight and the "then & now" photographs.

In short, assume that we have everything we have today, in 2010, except that in 2110 we can, alas, no longer go out talk with the people (there might be a very small number of exceptions) in the neighborhood as we can, at least in principle, today.

What then? And is that any different from the situation today if we simply don't go out and talk with the people in the neighborhoods?

(This Gedanken experiment is just a way of asking if there's such a thing, or if there could be such a thing, in some meaningful way, as a "sociology of the visual per se," as opposed to or in addition to a "visual sociology" in which the visuals, the images, are either a kind of field notes, or evidence, or a presentation medium (not that images in a sociology of the visual per se couldn't be all of those things too).

I'll be returning to this topic very soon, and may have a go at looking at the Tenth Avenue "then & now 14th Street — 72nd Street" photographs in this light while I'm preparing the 73rd Street — 110th Street set.

Stay tuned ….

Whew! The (near) miracle of back-up ….

2010-06-01T13:36:00.000-04:00

Whew! The (near) miracle of back-up saved the day, or a lot of it. (LightRoom could be less clumsy in this regard, and could conceivably have some real facilities for going backwards through the transaction journal, but still, it wasn't quite the disaster that I first feared.)

So, sooner rather than later for continuing with "Then & Now" from 73rd Street up to 110th Street.

But I'll still post some speculative pieces anyway — what did the man say? At non effugies meos iambos (just Google it), though of course my claim to poetry is much, much weaker than his ….

Uh-oh ….

2010-06-01T13:01:00.000-04:00

I just made one of those stupid mistakes on the computer that costs you the better part of two days work overall, so I won't be able to move on up from 73rd Street to 110th Street as soon as I'd planned.

Bear with me, and in the meantime I'll offer up some more "speculative" posts.

Signs of change on Tenth Avenue: 58th Street — 72nd Street

2010-06-01T09:06:00.004-04:00

Continuing on up from 58th Street to 72nd Street. To follow along open a second window in your browser, and go to Tenth Avenue 2006 & 2010 and scroll down or click through to image #172.

As before, I’ll take the corners of each intersection in the clockwise order NE, SE, SW, NW. At each corner I'll describe the 2006 sign(s) of change first, then the 2010 sign(s) of change.

Tenth (Amsterdam) Avenue & 72nd Street, Southeast Corner
(2006 above, 2010 below))

58th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; 2010: 10th Avenue Gourmet Deli now G&G Deli (awning gone too)

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: construction trailer, sidewalk closed, poster

59th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: poster

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: none; 2010: sidewalk closed, poster

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

60th Street

NE — 2006: construction, cranes; 2010: tennis courts finished

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

61st Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: construction; 2010: tennis courts finished

SW — 2006: none; 2010: wall painted blue on 61st Street

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

62nd Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding rear right

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: no such corner

NW — 2006: no such corner

63rd Street

NE — 2006: no such corner

SE — 2006: no such corner

SW — 2006: no such corner

NW — 2006: no such corner

64th Street

NE — no such corner

SE — no such corner

SW — 2006: none; 2010: telephone booth gone

NW — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding

65th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; 2010: construction trailer upper left

SW — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding, netting

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

66th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding, netting

SE — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: old corner building gone, new one nearly finished, construction fencing still up

67th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding

SW — no such corner

NW — no such corner

68th Street

NE — 2006: scaffolding; 2010: scaffolding down

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — no such corner

NW — no such corner

69th Street

NE — 2006: store vacant; 2010: new tenant

SE — 2006: none; 2010: Blockbuster gone, vacant store front, new tenant at right

SW — no such corner

NW — no such corner

70th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: scaffolding; 2010: scaffolding down

71st Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: Broadway Gourmet Deli, clothing store gone, AT&T new tenant of both spaces

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: scaffolding, dumpster; 2010: scaffolding down

NW — 2006: construction wall, vacant store front at right; 2010: new tenant

72nd Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding, North Bank out, Captial One Bank in (is this new tenant or result of merger?)

SE — 2006: none; 2010: new-style newstand

SW — 2006: scaffolding; 2010: scaffolding down (but construction continues?), Bank of America new tenant

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SUMMARY

In 2006, only 7 out of 46 corners (15%) showed signs of change. In 2010, compared with 2006, 26 out of 46 corners (57%) show signs of change, many of them major (new buildings up, old buildings gone).

Signs of change on Tenth Avenue: 43rd Street — 57th Street

2010-05-31T13:35:00.005-04:00

Continuing now with the signs of change (2006) and the actual changes (2006-2010). To follow along, open a second window in your browser, and go to Tenth Avenue 2006 & 2010 Part One: 14th Street — 72nd Street and scroll or click through to image #112.

As before, I’ll take the corners of each intersection in the clockwise order NE, SE, SW, NW. At each corner I'll describe the 2006 sign(s) of change first, then the 2010 sign(s) of change.

Tenth (Amsterdam) Avenue & 51st Street, Northwest Corner
(2006 above, 2010 below)

43rd Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: new awning & sidewalk tables not out (why?)

SE — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding

SW — 2006: none; 2010: plywood construction fence

NW — 2006: none; 2010: Omni Dry Cleaners now Pet Ark

44th Street

NE — 2006: scaffolding on far right; 2010: scaffolding down

SE — 2006: blue plywood construction fence and vacant lot behind it; 2010: new building finished

SW — 2006: vacant lot on left; 2010: blue sheeting on chain link fence gone

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

45th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: street work; 2010: Lali Restaurant front repainted

SW — 2006: none; 2010: "Exit Reality" ad gone from building to the right

NW — 2006: none; 2010: Clinton Grille now Pony Bar, scaffolding up on left

46th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: corner storefront vacant; 2010: Eat Fresh deli new tenant of corner storefront

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

47th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change, except Budweiser neon sign in window

SW — 2006: none; 2010: Erik's Barber Shop now Bis.Co. Latte

NW — 2006: none; 2010: new maroon awning next to 5 Brothers (new tenant?), also next to that, Hell's Kitchen replaced D&S

48th Street

NE — 2006: for rent sign on fire escape at left; 2010: new awning on Indian restaurant, Alfa Distribution Corp closed, storefront now vacant, Gourmet deli awning Shortened on 48th street side, black awning replaced red one a little further on

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: construction fence, big cranes, building at back under construction; 2010: lot still vacant but no new building, building at back finished/

49th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: storefront to the left of Discount Wines & Liquors vacant

SE — 2006: sidewalk work; 2010: building to right of Deli either new or big renovation job, replaced Rincon Music, "for rent" sign on it

SW — 2006: construction fence, crane; 2010: fence repainted, lot still vacant, crane(s) gone

NW — 2006: none; 2010: scafffolding up towards left

50th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; workmen; 2010: Ramses Deli new tenant or just new awning/signage?

SW — 2006: none; 2010: mural wall on 50th

NW — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding up on left, concrete ramp wall has stone facing now

51st Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: Mariachi Mexico Restaurant now Heng Thai Bistro

SE — 2006: xxxxx; 2010: scaffolding still there

SW — 2006: none; 2010: lower floor façade resurfaces, also stone facing on wall

NW — 2006: none; 2010: renovation finished, new tenant is Ristorante Il Melograno

52nd Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: store closed, mural walls painted over, store for rent, blue building in back repainted beige

SE — 2006: none; 2010: 10th Ave Diner now City Light Diner (name change or new owner?)

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: window frames repainted — new restaurant tenant?

53rd Street

NE — 2006: scaffolding; 2010: scaffolding gone, former tenant appears to be gone too, new scaffolding at right, new (?) façade beyond that

SE — 2006: none; 2010: blue building repainted beige

SW — 2006: construction, crane, blue fencing, etc; 2010: new building finished

NW — 2006: scaffolding; 2010: scaffolding gone

54th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: Studio Coffee House now 10th Ave Wines & Liquors, street work sign at far right

SE — 2006: none; 2010: new building replaces old, scaffolding still up, street work too

SW — 2006: scaffolding; 2010: scaffolding gone

NW — 2006: none (but building seems new); 2010: no change

55th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; 2010: Mobile Audio closed, signage down

SW — 2006: none; 2010: new awning, signage for 10th Avenue Gourmet Deli

NW — 2006: none (but building seems new); 2010: no change (or is B&N a new partnership with John Jay?)

56th Street

NE — 2006: Caterers closed, storefront vacant; 2010: new tenant is Hanci Turkish Cuisine

SE — 2006: none; workmen; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

57th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding, Food Village gone, Chase, Duane Reade instead (or did Food Village just contract towards left?)

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: scaffolding; 2010: scaffolding down

NW — 2006: none; 2010: Jake's Saloon repainted

SUMMARY

In 2006, 19 out of 60 corners (32%) showed signs of change. In 2010, compared with 2006, 44 corners (73%) show actual changes, many of them major (new buildings up, old buildings gone).

73rd Street - 110th yesterday

2010-05-31T08:17:00.012-04:00

Yesterday (May 30) I got myself into the city — it was a really gorgeous afternoon — and photographed the corners from 73rd Street up to 110th Street for the "then & now" (sub)project.

The light couldn't have been better, except towards the end of the shoot, coming back down the west side of the Avenue (shooting the east side corners) I ran into some problems with flare (this happened shooting the stretch from 13th to the 34th too) of a kind that I've never had before (same lens for this project for over four years now) so something's up that I need to figure out and take care of it.

Yesterday's shoot included one of my favorite corners on the whole island: Tenth (in this stretch called "Amsterdam") and 104th Street, the northwest corner. I'm not sure what I like about it so much, maybe it's the particular green of the store awning against the particular red of the brick building (see below — and if you click on the image it will open up much larger so you can see what I'm talking about a little further on in this post).

Tenth (Amsterdam) Avenue & 104th Street, Northwest Corner
(2006 above, 2010 below)

Just for fun I've adjusted the cropping so that two photographs match as much as possible in this respect, and also adjusted the white balance, though that only partly overcomes the time of day difference (2006 closer to 5 PM, and later in the summer (compare the trees on the right), 2010 around 3 PM late spring.

It would be even more fun to have all the then & now photographs cropped and otherwise adjusted to match as closely as possible, but that's a project of such enormity that I'm just not going to give it another thought. (I might eventually do it for a relatively short stretch of the avenue though, if and when this "then & now" thing gets a little more focussed.

It'll be a few days, maybe even the end of the week before I get the "then & now" set put together for this stretch, but in the meantime I thought I'd put up that favorite corner, essentially unchanged since 2006 ….

The white plastic saw-horse barricades are gone, a pedestrian-crossing warning sign has gone up, the corner cupboard under the vegetables has been rebuilt, the brick wall at the back under the awning has been painted a sort of electric yellow-green, the big tree on the right has been trimmed back a little (you can see the stump of the missing branch just below the fork), the air-conditioner has been taken out of the second floor second window to the left of the building corner — I'm sure there are more differences: the trash can has been moved, but this could happen every day for all I know, and what does it matter? (Is that a "good" question?)

What gives this corner its main character hasn't changed: Kim's Fruit & Vegetables (and Fish Market on the left), the green awning, the red (painted, I think) brick, the trees left and right.

Unchanged (almost) — sometimes that's the way I like it.

Maybe later today I can get to the enumeration of "signs of change" on the stretch from 43rd Street up to 57th Street. I think it's going to be too hot to go in and photograph the stretch from 111th Street up to 145th or 155th. Or maybe I'm just too lazy today, and besides, I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, photographing vs. processing. (But why should that matter?)

A rank beginner … again

2010-05-31T07:53:00.001-04:00

Take my word for it, it's peculiar to find oneself in the position of being a rank beginner in a field in which one has a Ph.D., as I do in sociology.

This sort of thing can happen, especially, I would think, in the "hard" sciences, when some theoretical or even empirical advance renders the prior knowledge of its practitioners more or less obsolete, or at least in need of serious rethinking — the settled "truths" of Kuhn's so-called "normal" science become unsettled — in much the same way that "settled law" can be unsettled by an audacious Supreme Court decision — and everyone is a beginner again.

Or it can happen, much less glamorously, in fact quite unglamorously, as it did in my case, because the combination of external circumstances and, no doubt, personal failings or inadequacies conspired to prevent the expected consequence of getting a Ph.D. in field like sociology, namely an academic career.

And now, nearly thirty years later, I find myself starting to "do" a kind of sociology again, not out of any grand sociological ambitions such as motivated getting the Ph.D. — and who knows, I might have done better had I been able to do the Ph.D. without such grand, not to say grandiose, ambitions — but rather as a kind of unexpected and somewhat indirect consequence of the New York in Plain Sight project.

I won't bore you — not today, anyway — with how that came about. But however it happened, and however (possibly) irrelevant its etiology, the fact is that I've found myself starting to think about "sociological" kinds of questions in relation to the photographs of New York in Plain Sight and what might be done with them, at least by me.

And it's a peculiar sensation, having lots of dimly remembered questions and even more dimly remembered answers rattling loosely around in my head — to say nothing of a whole card catalog (remember those?) strewn about all over the brain pan — as I start to try to make some sense of New York in Plain Sight not as a documentary project per se or an esoteric work of art on perhaps too grand a scale, but as a data set: broadly conceived, a body of recorded information to which one can turn with questions, even conjectures, and find answers, or confirmations, or refutations.

And at the same time, I want to respect the photographs as photographs — not in order to make great claims for them as such, but rather to limit, or quasi-limit — "loosely restrain" is perhaps a decent first approximation — the scope of the questions, eventually, to what can be dealt with via the photographs themselves, or in conjunction with similar, and closely related photographs (as in the "then & now" set I'm assembling for Tenth Avenue and working through on this blog).

I have a idea, probably exaggerated, of a "real pro" in almost any field of inquiry as being someone who knows what the questions are, what the approaches are, the methodologies, the tools, etc., and who has the skills and experience to proceed directly and forthrightly towards analyzing the questions and reducing them to a manageable number, deciding on an approach or a methodology and some relevant tools, and who can then proceed "into the field" and produce at least a workman-like "professional" result within a reasonable amount of time, say a year or so for a small study (longer, of course, for one with a larger scope).

There may even be people like that — I've met some who I think match this description, and who even do work that interests me, that I admire, and who — let's face it — I envy.

But that's not me, not in this field, not now, anyway (maybe someday).

On the other hand, there may be merit in being a rank beginner, especially a rank beginner again. What's that classical Greek proverb we had to learn, "archae hamisu panton" / "beginning is half of all"?

It's not often one gets to be a beginner again, especially as one gets on a bit in years (I'm 64 going on 65), and it may be useful, insofar as it's possible, to get over the sense of being a sociologist manqué and get on with the doing of some sociology.

And to pay a lot of attention so to speak to "the phenomenology" of all the floundering around that's attendant upon being at such a beginning.

Not because I think my flounderings are anything special (except to myself of course) but because we — and here I do really mean the collective "we" and in a very broad sense — usually don't pay much attention to what happens in this very early, formative phase of an activity, a project, an inquiry, when we're more or less completely "at sea" and have scarcely any sense of direction, of what we're doing, beyond a vague hunch that "there's a pony in there somewhere."

So this blog is becoming a sort of double set of "field notes": one being my notes on my looking at the photographs of New York in Plain Sight", the other being my record of the process of beginning again as I experience it, day by day, sometimes even in the very process of writing about it.

Maybe that will be interesting or useful to some readers some of the time, or sometime, and then again, maybe not.

One of John Cage's great stories in Indeterminacy concludes with the admonition that if you find something boring after looking at it for a minute, look at it for two minutes; if you find it's still boring, look at it for four minutes, then eight, sixteen, and so on. Eventually you'll find that it's not boring at all ….

I do hope John was right about that.

What makes an area a neighborhood?

2010-05-30T09:29:00.007-04:00

Sometime, I believe it was in the 1990s, the New York City Planning Department published a lovely map of the city's neighborhoods, a current version of which can be found here.

From this map, we can see that the southern end of Tenth Avenue is in the West Village, and then passes, successively, northward, through Chelsea, Clinton (formerly "Hell's Kitchen"), Lincoln Square, the Upper West Side, Manhattan Valley, Morningside Heights, Manhattanville, Hamilton Heights, Washington Heights, and up into Inwood, where it ends at Broadway/218th Street, just a couple of blocks below the northernmost intersection on the island, where Ninth Avenue crosses Broadway again at what might have been 221st Street, were there any such.

Tenth Avenue & 14th Street, Southeast Corner (2006 above, 2010 below)

The map's makers cleverly sidestepped the issue of neighborhood boundaries, and just put the labels more or less squarely in the middle of the named area.

Nevertheless, there must be some sort of boundary or at least transition zone between a given neighborhood and the neighborhoods adjacent to it. At some point we recognize that we're no longer in Chinatown but are now in Little Italy, or have gone from Gramercy into Murray Hill, and so on.

Neighborhoods are not only real estate developers' fictions, though they are — and always have been — that too. Especially for people who live "in" the neighborhood of a neighborhood, i.e., either actually in the neighborhood, or adjacent to it, these areas have, or are perceived as having, a very definite core character, something that makes them recognizable, at least to the initiate, as one rather than another, as the Upper West Side rather than, say, the Upper East Side, as Hamilton Heights rather than the Lower East Side — even though (the reader is invited to verify this at New York in Plain Sight) they may share similar kinds of architecture or even nearly identical buildings or, especially, building ornaments, or signage styles, or demographics.

What can we say about this (reminding ourselves to be fearless in the face of apparent trivialities)?

Well, in the first place, a neighborhood is a contiguous area of some size, spanning at least, let's say just for argument's sake, two or three avenues east-west and twenty or thirty blocks north-south (or the equivalent of this in the off-grid areas of the city).

A neighborhood is further such an area as is self-defined, self-identified as such by the people who live and/or work there or in adjacent neighborhoods, and to some extent, by everyone in the city who has some sense of its neighborhoods.

How do they do that?

Of course, there's no single answer to that question, but one of the most important answers is in terms of ethnicity, based on the ethnic origins and culture of a more or less homogenous population of immigrants who lived and/or worked in a given area for a long enough time — several generations — to give it their unique stamp.

So, obviously, Little Italy, Chinatown, Kleindeutschland ("Little Germany" — no longer recognized as such but included in what is now called the "East" Village — a nominal upscaling of the northern end of the old Lower East Side. And also the unofficial but no less real Korea-towns, Little Indias, Little Odessas, and so on.

Or partly by a combination of geographics and the demographics of wealth: the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side (though the the cyclical fortunes of the Upper West Side show that the import of these designations can vary considerably over the years).

Or by some prominent geographical feature, again, usually combined with some fairly specific demographic, e.g., Murray Hill, Morningside Heights.

Or by some prominent historical feature, e.g., Fort Washington, Fort George, Wall Street.

Or named after formerly independent towns or villages, e.g., Harlem, Inwood, Manhattanville, Greenwich Village.

And then there are the true developers' neighborhoods: Battery Park City, Trump City/Place, Stuyvesant Town, Peter Cooper Village.

And the developers' fictions: SOHO, NOHO, TriBeCa, Clinton, which subsequently became "real" neighborhoods. — Is Chelsea one of these?

Of course, once an area has been established as having a given name, people will use it, and thus reinforce the sense of it as a neighborhood.

This is pure speculation on my part, but I imagine that the social class/status of an incoming group has some effect on its ability to call a neighborhood after itself, especially if the neighborhood already has a well-established name. So there is, or isn't yet, a Dominican-ville, and the great African-American migration of the 1920s-1940s into Harlem didn't produce a name change, though the somewhat later Hispanic immigration did lead to calling a part of that area "Spanish" (sometimes "East") Harlem.

Jane Jacobs gave us a vivid picture of how a "functional" neighborhood "works" with her famously intricate ballet of the urban sidewalk, but the question remains, how does a neighborhood as such come into being in the first place, a real — and even functional, in Jacob's sense — entity?

Neighborhoods change, their character changes, they "decline" (poorer people move in), they "gentrify" (richer people move in), they expand (Chinatown), they contract (Little Italy), they come into being (TriBeCa), they disappear (Little Germany).

How does this work? and how much does it matter? and why?

One part of an answer may be that New York is famously known as a city of neighborhoods, a fact of life — or so I'm told — for every local politician: if "all politics is local," then in New York "all politics is neighborhood politics."

This would seem to indicate that not only do neighborhoods have identities but that the people who live in them identify with them and, in varying degrees, with the other residents of their neighborhood who share this sense of identification.

Which is to say that neighborhoods are, or can be, communities, in the sense discussed a few days ago in the post on "telling about society": areas in which people move together, follow one another, have not only a partially shared identity but also shared interests and a shared interest in promoting and defending these interests.

But to what extent do they do this? And how much enough to make a neighborhood something more than a label on a map? Is neighborliness a "wired in" aspect of the human condition? Do we become, or tend to become, neighbors in the communal sense of the word, simply as a result of being neighbors in the sense of living in proximity to one another, so that our paths cross frequently, we tend to shop in the same shops, locally, our children go to the same schools, and so on?

This is probably enough of raising one question after another for one post, but I shall be returning to this question, to these questions, again and again in the coming weeks and months.

I'm raising these kinds of questions not because I have any high hopes of being able to answer them, but because as part of a framework for looking at the photographs of New York in Plain Sight and of "Tenth Avenue Then (2006)and Now (2010)" they may serve to keep the eye more alert for "signs of change" — or even other features of the Manhattan streetscape — than it would be without them.

And because the search for good questions is an essential part of any inquiry, especially, though not only, at the beginning — and in this case (Tenth Avenue Then & Now) the process of somehow discovering good — i.e., fruitful, productive — questions has scarcely even begun.

A question of style

2010-05-30T07:53:00.002-04:00

A reader of this blog, the composer and essayist Michael Kowalski (see his marvelous essay, "The Curatorial Muse"), checked in with me recently by email to chide me a little, but gently, on the question of style.

The question Michael raised is, as he put it, "the tension between the breezy, conversational style and the difficult ideas, punctuated by the esoteric asides," which, has, he went on to say, "a bit of a tease to it"

Well, guilty as charged, I'm tempted to say, and let it go at that, especially after my overly-exuberant post on "telling about society," with its esoteric asides on Locke, Eliot, Husserl, and the like.

So — on the one hand: apologies for that.

I certainly don't want to lapse into that sort of name dropping that manifests itself conversationally in such gambits as "well, I was having lunch with Adorno last week and he said, over kritische veggie burgers at Chez Bien Pensants (you know the place I mean) …."

On the other hand — what is the style appropriate to an intellectual blog that, however, wants to be read more in pursuit of the difficult ideas and less, in fact not at all, for its own difficulties?

I'm aiming for that "breezy, conversational style" in the hopes of getting a clear view of the "difficult ideas," in much the same way as I hope to present clear views of the difficult subject of New York "in plain sight" in my "subjectless" photographs.

But I suppose one can over do it. I surely can.

Another aspect of this blog, something I'm aiming for, is to make it a kind of almost stream of consciousness diary of my own thoughts and activities, more or less usually focussed on the New York in Plain Sight photographs or problems or issues related to them.

Not that I don't edit, but I do mean to leave it relatively raw, without a lot of wordsmithing.

The "esoteric asides" of course can quickly degenerate, as I suppose they already have from time to time, in the direction of mindless name-dropping and showing off, but then, if that's not altogether true — and I hope it's not — then how to point in this that or the other direction, possibly even esoteric direction, without making an even bigger deal of it, which would surely be counter-productive?

As usual, I'm going to beg off with the excuse that I don't know ….

But I do want to offer the hope that it's possible to take ideas seriously without getting all po-faced about them at the same time (not that Michael, who has a delightful sense of humor, was suggested anything of the kind).

As with everything else here — and possibly everywhere — we'll just have to keep going and see how it turns out.

"Tenth Avenue Then & Now" extended up to 72nd Street

2010-05-29T22:05:00.002-04:00

I have extended the set of photographs "Tenth Avenue Then (2006) and Now (2010)" to include all of the 216 street corners from 14th Street up to 72nd Street.

The set may be viewed here.

I am preparing two additional sets, which will carry the "then & now" concept northwards from 73rd Street up to 155th Street, and then from 156th Street on up to Broadway/218th Street.

Signs of change on Tenth Avenue, 13th Street — 34th Street (updated to include 2006—2010 comparisons)

2010-05-29T14:25:00.007-04:00

This post updates two prior posts on "signs of change" on Tenth Avenue (13th—23rd Streets and 24th—34th Streets) to include a comparative look at change, based on the photographs I took Wednesday (May 26) and assembled with the prior (2006) set. To follow along, open a second window in your browser, and go to Tenth Avenue 2006 & 2010 Part One: 14th Street — 72nd Street . Though I start with 13th Street in the text below, the "then and now" photos only begin at 14th Street. I've not repeated the summary statistics for 2006 (see original posts for those).

As before, I’ll take the corners of each intersection in the clockwise order NE, SE, SW, NW. At each corner I'll describe the 2006 sign(s) of change first, then the 2010 sign(s) of change.

Tenth Avenue & 19th Street, Southeast Corner (2006 above, 2010 below)

13th Street

NE — 2006: typical blue paint of a construction or renovation site, though no work appears to be underway yet; derelict structure over sidewalk (it's an overhead conveyor with hooks to move meat — whole carcasses — from trucks into the packing house); 2010: overhead conveyor partly dismantled

SE — 2006: scaffolding; construction fence (same blue); truck delivering large pipes; workmen; 2010: new building finished, corner lot still vacant

14th Street

NE — 2006: High Line freshly painted white on north side of street; old black still visible to right; Mobil station has new look to it; 2010: High Line now painted dark blue-gray

SE — 2006: construction fence (same blue as 13/SE), same derelict overhead conveyor structure as 13/NE; at this end of the block, vacant lot behind fence.; 2010: High Line elevator at left, corner lot still vacant, overhead conveyor dismantled, brick wall of building on th eleft painted gray

SW — 2006: no obvious signs of change in progress though brick work looks to have been cleaned fairly recently; "stucco" on ground floor definitely not original; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: no obvious signs of change in progress except if you know that the brick bulding at the right rear was originally a Nabisco factory building; 2010: traffic triangle planted with trees, shrubs

15th Street

NE — 2006: scaffolding; 2010: scaffolding gone, graffiti gone; High Line painted blue-gray

SE — 2006: High Line pillars freshly painted white on Mobil Station property, black/rust on left; again, Mobil Station looks new; ditto store fronts on left; 2010: High Line painted blue-gray

SW — 2006: no obvious signs of change in progress, but banners for "Hudson River Park" betray recent origin of this "mini park"; 2010: Hudson River Park banners down; new "no parking" sign

NW — 2006: orange plastic construction netting on sidewalk, workman (?), caution sign; 2010: sidewalk now clear

16th Street

NE — 2006: construction wall (brown this time) with signage for new condo building ("The Caledonia") going up behind it; 2010: new building finished, another new building replaces Chelsea Garden Center & extends down 16th Street

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: no obvious signs of change in progress, but this is, again, the former Nabisco factory building; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: sections of concrete Jersey barriers; also the recently painted brickwork; 2010: Jersey barriers gone, brickwork either repainted or paint has discolored with age

17th Street

NE — 2006: Red Rock West Saloon may be new (?) but Earth Restaurant is definitely new and not in keeping with style of old neighborhood; 2010: Red Rock West Saloon may have closed: scaffolding, netting; possible new building towards right, Earth Restaurant now something else (fresh façade)

SE — 2006: vacant lot with signs of construction — must be "The Caledonia" seen advertised on the wall at 16/NE; upscale furnishings shop new to old building; dog (breed) not typical of old neighborhood either; 2010: new building visible to either side of corner store, which appears to have changed hands and become a clothing store

SW — 2006: no obvious signs of change in progress, but "ghosts" of prior structural elements above windows to the right betray fairly recent renovation; 2010: new awnings up — match prior "ghosts"

NW — 2006: construction netting on High Line; some scaffolding there too; 2010: new buildings in background; new billboard

18th Street

NE — 2006: store fronts are newish on left; "La" Lunchonette is new neighborhood style; van on right is delivering new stuff apparently for new business; 2010: new buildings on 18th Street

SE — 2006: Star Diner probably ancient (?) but restaurant next door is new neighborhood style; 2010: new building on former vacant and adjacent lot (building on right in 2006 has been torn down), scaffolding still up

SW — 2006: construction netting on High Line; 2010: High Line netting gone, otherwise no change

NW — 2006: construction netting on High Line; scaffolding on left; 2010: no change (but the Gehry and other building on the right at the rear are new)

19th Street

NE — 2006: no obvious signs of change in progress, but restaurant, especially sidewalk table awnings definitely new neighborhood style; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: vacant lot; construction visible at far left; 2010: new building on former vacant and adjacent lot (building on right in 2006 has been torn down), scaffolding still up

SW — 2006: High Line scaffolding at far left; 2010: no change, except ads no longer on fence

NW — 2006: none; 2010: Truck leasing has been replaced by building supply firm

20th Street

NE — 2006: construction; scaffolding; signage for new building; 2010: new building finished, stone wall replaced by iron fence

SE — 2006: no obvious sign of change in progress, but Cookshop is definitely new neighborhood style; 2010: no change, except side tables, umbrellas (may be seasonal difference)

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change, but note Sabrett vendor in 2010, also new building visible to rear

NW — 2006: none; 2010: 7 Eleven Gallery is new tenant of corner building

21st Street

NE — 2006: none except (maybe) recently cleaned brickwork; 2010: no change, except plantings gone from front yard

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change on corner itself, but new building to right is finished

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change, except graffiti in 2010

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

22nd Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: Empire Diner closed

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: no obvious signs of change in progress except dog breeds (but see NW); 2010: Auto Parts on corner shuttered — closed?

NW — 2006: veterinarian is new neighborhood style; 2010: veterinarian closed, "for rent"

23rd Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: new Chase signage

SE — 2006: restaurant closed / being renovated; 2010: restaturant still — or again? — closed, but now painted green

SW — 2006: vacant lot with construction fence; 2010: no change except plywood fence now blue

NW — 2006: none (I don't think — I remember the very modern gallery building on the corner being there as many as a dozen years ago or more); 2010: no change

24th Street

NE — 2006: plywood construction wall over storefront; 2010: store now open

SE — 2006: scaffolding on 24th street (London Terrace renovation); 2010: scaffolding down

SW — 2006: new storefront at far left is "new neighborhood" style; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none (LukOil — Russian firm, deserves a mention); 2010: new building to right of LukOil

25th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

croner store shuttered, new awning — new owner? — on pizza place next door

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

26th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: none (but what about the two tractors?); 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

27th Street

NE — 2006: none

SE — 2006: none (or are the Village Voice and Gotham Writers Workshop boxes signs of change here?); 2010: no change

SW — 2006: Kasmin's gallery (though it was one of the real pioneers here, I think); 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: new construction on right, Punjabi Food gone

28th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change, except Sabrett instead of Hallal vendor

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding over deli, new building replacing Auto place on left

NW — 2006: none; 2010: audio shop replacing restaurant to right of Club Management

29th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding up

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: none; 2010: car park stacking mechanism new

NW — 2006: scaffolding, netting = construction or substantial renovation; 2010: turns out it was demolition in 2006: building now gone

30th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: buildings gone, blue plywood construction fence around vacant lot

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: scaffolding, netting = construction or substantial renovation; 2010: turns out it was demolition in 2006: building now gone, also building on left gone, new building behind it visible

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change, except graffiti, posters

31st Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding up to left and right

SE — storefront boarded up; 2010: building gone, blue plywood construction fence around vacant lot

SW, NW — no such corners exist (Tenth Avenue overpass of Penn Station railroad yards here)

32nd Street

no such corners exist (Tenth Avenue overpass of Penn Station railroad yards here)

33rd Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; 2010: lower deli awning gone — deli too?

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: O'Farrell's bar & restaurant closed

34th Street

NE — 2006:;vacant lot with construction equipment visible behind slatted chain link fence; 2010: no change except slatting — or was it sheeting? — gone from chain link fence

SE — 2006: sign: "under new management"; 2010: new signage — corresponds to "new management"?

SW — 2006: none (the McDonald's has been there for a long time); 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change except posters

SUMMARY

In 2010, compared with 2006, 47 out of 81 corners (58%) show signs of change, many of them major (new buildings up, old buildings gone).

Signs of change on Tenth Avenue: 35th Street — 42nd Street

2010-05-28T06:06:00.009-04:00

With this post I'm switching over to the comparative look at change, based on the photographs I took Wednesday (May 26) and assembled with the prior (2006) set. To follow along, open a second window in your browser, and go to Tenth Avenue 2006 & 2010 Part One: 14th Street — 72nd Street , and then scroll or click through to image # 076 (Tenth Avenue & 34th Street, NE).

Tenth Avenue & 37th Street, Northeast Corner (2006 above, 2010 below)

As before, I’ll take the corners of each intersection in the clockwise order NE, SE, SW, NW. At each corner I'll describe the 2006 sign(s) of change first, then the 2010 sign(s) of change.

35th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: none; 2010: corner shop apparently closed; awning down; wall ad on building to the left of "Taxi Parts"

NW — 2006: none; 2010: wall ad on building to the left in 2010 photo (center right in 2006 photo)

36th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SE — 2006: none; 2010: large pillar for billboard now painted brown

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

37th Street

NE — 2006: plywood construction wall; 2010: new building finished

SE — 2006: corner shop closed; 2010: new business (bicycles) in corner shop

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: new buildings finished, replacing whole visible block each way

38th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: new buildings visible in midtown, corner itself unchanged

SE — 2006: plywood construction wall; 2010: new building finished

SW — 2006: none; 2010: new buildings finished, replacing whole visible block each way

NW — 2006: scaffolding; 2010: scaffolding down, otherwise apparently unchanged

39th Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: new buildings visible in midtown, corner itself unchanged

SE — 2006: construction netting over building on right; 2010: new building(s) replace old on right; new building visible in midtown; also construction netting now visible on building in center

SW — 2006: red-orange plastic Jersey barriers; 2010: barriers gone; "500" is now "501"

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

40th Street

NE — 2006: light boom crane; scaffolding; 2010: scaffolding still in place

SE — 2006: none; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

41st Street

NE — 2006: blue plywood construction wall; 2010: building under construction

SE — 2006: drilling rig; 2010: no change

SW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

NW — 2006: none; 2010: no change

42nd Street

NE — 2006: none; 2010: scaffolding

SE — 2006: blue plywood construction wall; 2010: building under construction

SW — 2006: scaffolding; 2010: scaffolding still in place, repainted (blue instead of red)

NW — 2006: corner business apparently closed; 2010: new (?) corner business apparently open

SUMMARY

While only 9 out of 32 corners (28%) from 35th Street to 42nd Street showed signs of change in 2006, by 2010 19 out of the 32 corners (59%) had actually changed, in many cases dramatically.

——————————

In the next week or so I'll be going back to the corners already covered, from 13th Street to 34th Street, and updating the posts to include the 2010 comparisons.

It's still an open question, whether all this simple counting, even with the addition of the 2010 comparison photos, amounts to anything, but I'm going to stick with it, probably all the way up to Broadway/218th Street, on the grounds that even if it doesn't in and of itself yield anything directly interesting or useful to "tell about society," the process, including its tediosity, is likely to give rise to ideas that are fruitful in this regard.

So please bear with me, or if you can't bear it, just drop in every now and then — there are always the more discursive posts, and occasionally one of them may strike your fancy.

Then and now revisited ….

2010-05-27T16:03:00.007-04:00

I've always loved those "then and now" books: you know, photographs of New York in 1900 side by side with photographs of New York in 2000, and so on.

And at the same time, with my intellectual reading glasses on, I've looked down my nose at them: fun, but not serious.

Too easy.

Tenth Avenue & 17th Street, Southeast Corner (2006 above, 2010 below)

Well, it's like this: since starting my crawl up Tenth Avenue looking at "signs of change," I've been feeling more and more like, yes, I can identify these signs, but what actually happened? And, of course, what's happening now?

So yesterday, in all that heat — it was the hottest day of the year here so far: 95º in mid-afternoon — I went into town (as we say here on Staten Island) and photographed Tenth Avenue from 14th Street up to 42nd Street, inclusive.

Soon I'll do the next stretch of Tenth Avenue, and so on, until I've reshot the whole thing, though that might take the rest of the summer to get finished.

Came home, processed the images, put together a new set combining the old and the new pair-wise: old (2006) on top, new (2010) below, corner by corner.

The new ones, the ones I shot yesterday, were all shot at a focal length of about 35mm, and I didn't do much cropping in from the sides, so the field of view is pretty consistent across the set.

And generally wider, sometimes, though not always, much wider than the photos from 2006.

Also the light was different, the white balance in particular, and the camera is different too, though the lens is the same.

And the heat got to me a bit also, with the result that the photos in some instances have problems that I might have avoided otherwise. (But they'll do for the immediate purpose, though I have to reshoot some of them eventually.)

And my ideas about processing evolved over the past four years — the Tenth Avenue pictures were the first ones I processed way back when, and I'd do it differently today.

So I compromised, and made the 2010 images look more like the 2006 images than I'd have liked, and, conversely, changed a bunch of the 2006 images to be more like what I'd go for today.

But they're reasonably consistent with one another now, though not as consistent as I'd like.

It ain't so easy after all, this "then and now" thing.

If I'd known — isn't that always the way — that I'd ever be doing this again, I would have been much more consistent with field of view in 2006.

And a bunch of nits, this and that, I won't go into it all. But I do find it amusing that, having spent a good many years, off and on, in my previous life, splicing disparate data sets together to try and arrive at usefully consistent time series (with all the data "massaging" that involves), now here I am dealing with time series construction and its problems all over again.

The thing is: times series tell us a lot, or can be made to. (I'm reminded all of a sudden of that great old statisticians joke: "if you torture the data long enough, it will confess …."

Be that as it may, I'll be using the comparative set from now on as I continue to wend my way up Tenth Avenue, looking for signs of change not only then but also now, and, now, also looking at the changes that actually did happen.

The link to the "then and now" set is here. I've also put the link in the "links" box on the right of this page (below the "archive" list).

Excursis: Telling about society ….

2010-05-27T07:55:00.010-04:00

Howie Becker called his book — well, one of his many books — Telling About Society. I like the book, I like the title. I like Howie too, though I don’t know him very well: we started an e-mail correspondence last fall, centered on the street corners project (albeit with many entertaining digressions) and I only just met him in person last week for a few hours.

He’s a terrific sociologist and a good writer too. And, especially, he's one of the least pretentious people I’ve ever met. He writes that way too, which I admire almost as much as I admire the research and thinking he’s done over the course of a long and fruitful career. (Have a look at Art Worlds sometime).

So the title, “Telling about Society” is very much like him: straightforward. It's easily understood, even by people who aren’t social scientists, as including all the many different ways in which people who have looked at society — which is surely everyone of us, though we may not ordinarily think of it that way (broadly conceived, this is the ethnomethodological gambit) — report or “tell” about what they’ve seen, learned, studied, whether that’s the decennial U.S. census, a Gallup poll, a community study, a documentary film, a memoir or a short story or a play, a set of photographs — even New York in Plain Sight, I’d venture to say.

Tenth Avenue & 25th Street, Southeast Corner

I like this way of keeping one's fingers out of what I call the conceptual Vegematic (to which shelf I would also consign the methodological Cuisinart) but at the same time I have a speculative streak in me that wants to play with the twin questions “whaddya mean, ‘telling?’” and “whaddya mean, ‘society’?” — and I’m tempted to add a third: “whaddya mean, ‘about’?”

So bear with me while I speculate, or drop in again tomorrow or the next day when I’ve come back down to earth (assuming I’ve ever been there, or left, or can find my way back).

Actually this is an old theme of mine, one that I’ve started writing about innumerable times, then always given up. Maybe that was the best idea — giving up, that is — and maybe it wasn’t, but the questions still nag, so here we are.

Ever since the American Heritage Dictionary was first published some forty years ago with a concise dictionary of Indo-European roots as an appendix, I’ve been fascinated by what looking at these roots may tell us, or at least by what thoughts may be provoked by looking at them.

And the ones that fascinate me the most are these (I’m abbreviating, and also slaughtering the original, elegant, and meaningful typography):

kom  beside, nearby, with
mei-1  to charge, go, move
— whence community: to go, move together

sekw-1  to follow
— whence society: the result of our following one another

del-2  to count, recount
— whence to tell: to give an account of

(from The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, 2nd Edition)

Not to suggest that any combinations of sounds such as those imputed to these ancient roots, their even more remote ancestors, or their contemporary descendents intrinsically bear these meanings, or for that matter have ever represented any meanings at all except what generation after generation has learned anew—and with variations—to associate with them since time immemorial.

But perhaps to prick the imagination a little as a way of getting started: to tell about society is to give an account of our moving together, of our following one another.

Or at least to give a partial account of how some of us more or less move together, more or less follow one another, to some extent, some of the time, in some circumstances.

How does this work? And why do we do it?

As to how it works, put crudely, it’s “monkey-see, monkey-do” all the way, I think, i.e., to move upscale into the Greek if not on into Aristotle, it’s mimesis, plain and simple.

Or maybe not so plain or simple (and I don't mean to impugn the intelligence of monkeys, either), but isn’t that what words are for? To give a definite mental locus to “a new simple idea” even though it is the result of compounding many other simple (and not so simple) ideas? (Hmmm, just moved into John Locke territory, let’s not go any further in that direction for the time being).

So let’s shelve the how it works question — I’m sure I’ll find my way back to it in another post before too long (not that I have any solid answers).

But why do we do it? Why do we “tell about society,” why do we recount how we move together? And what are we doing when we do?

Two observations:

1
Telling about society is part of the complex process of society itself and of living in society (and in this sense, as social mammals who "fly" our conduct "by wire" exclusively via the "models" of the world we've learned and continue to learn, we are never NOT living in society): one of the ways in which we follow one another, move together, is to tell one another about how we do it.

2
Though most of the time in most of our actions (movements), we’re following one another (however imperfectly, which is an important source of the variation that we later, retrospectively, sometimes identify as “creativity”), when we tell one another about society we’re venturing out of our “follower” mode and into a kind of “leadership,” albeit a leadership of a special kind, unlike the sort of leadership that leads a troop over a hill or a society into a depression (but not unrelated either), a sort of “bracketed” movement (… oh oh oh oh that Phenomenological rag, it’s so elegant, so intelligent — apologies, T.S., apologies, E.H, just couldn’t resist), an “as if” movement that can, sometimes, short-circuit a whole lot of more or less random milling amount (there’s a lot of “Brownian motion” so to speak in social action) and get us to a result (sometimes a blown fuse) a lot sooner.

Another word for this is “teaching.” (I’m not going to get into the Wittgensteinian thing of “showing” vs. “telling” — not now.)

——————————

When I took a job in the Boston area in the mid-1980s I was astounded at the style of driving there. Coming from Upper Fairfield County, CT, it seemed as if the rules of the road, signage, signals, etc., were no more than a half forgotten moral framework, like the Ten Commandments or whatever, to be remembered from time to time but not really of much relevance to one’s day to day conduct as a blasphemer, idolater, Sabbath breaker, adulterer, thief, and liar (to say nothing of coveting, well, everything, but hopefuly not falling into actual murder).

I mean: red light? But no one’s coming, or at least I can get through the intersection before they reach it. One way street? But I’m only going the wrong way for one or two blocks. No left turn here? That’s just ridiculous! And so on.

But gradually as a daily participant in this sink of vehicular iniquity, I learned to drive that way myself, and had some rude awakenings a few years later when I came back to the New York metropolitan area.

My private theory, developed while driving in Boston, was that drivers in an area teach other drivers how to drive, and they do it by driving the way they do. Much as pedestrians in Manhattan teach other pedestrians how to walk in the city (there are analogies between Manhattan pedestrians and Boston drivers, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader).

And so it is — this is my real thesis, or one of them: human beings never ever stop learning, not even for a millisecond. There’s nothing to be done about this, it’s just the way we are (we’re not the only animals for which this true).

With inevitable result that we’re also always teaching, non-stop, never mind whether intentionally or unintentionally, formally or informally: teaching one another how to behave, how to move together, how to follow one another, in short: how to live in society.

And “telling about society” is how we do this when we do it intentionally, whether formally or not, and no matter what medium we use.

Jürgen Habermas said somewhere a long time ago in his work on “communicative competence” that “every language is its own metalanguage” and while I’m not going to take up the idea of society as a “language” (nor, thankfully, does he), I would say that if we regard society as the on-going collective product of our moving together, our following one another, then “telling about society” is our “meta-society,” our “meta-moving” together or “meta-following” one another, our "meta-community."

And this does, I think, have a further consequence: what we are telling, and how we are telling it, and to whom, matters, has an inescapbably moral dimension, even if we can’t at all reliably or successfully or consistently lay out the sense of that dimension and what it means as a guide to how we drive or walk or do “sociology,” whether in Boston or New York or wherever else there may be people moving together, following one another ….

Well now, I really have gotten myself into the deep end of the pool so I think I'll leave it at that.

Signs of change on Tenth Avenue: 24th Street — 34th Street (2006)

2010-05-26T06:47:00.002-04:00

Continuing up Tenth Avenue … (once again, open a second window in your browser, and go to Tenth Avenue 13th — 110th to follow along, or else toggle back and forth between the blog and the photos using your browser's forward and back buttons).

As before, I’ll take the corners of each intersection in the clockwise order NE, SE, SW, NW. And for this post, too, I'll list every corner and what I found.

Tenth Avenue & 24th Street, Southwest Corner

24th Street

NE — plywood construction wall over storefront

SE — scaffolding on 24th street (London Terrace renovation)

SW — new storefront at far left is "new neighborhood" style

NW — none (LukOil — Russian firm, deserves a mention)

25th Street

NE — none

SE — none

SW — none

NW — none

26th Street

NE — none

SE — none

SW — none (but what about the two tractors?)

NW — none

27th Street

NE — none

SE — none (or are the Village Voice and Gotham Writers Workshop boxes signs of change here?)

SW — Kasmin's gallery (though it was one of the real pioneers here, I think)

NW — none

28th Street

NE — none

SE — none

SW — none

NW — none

29th Street

NE — none

SE — none

SW — none

NW — scaffolding, netting = construction or substantial renovation

30th Street

NE — none

SE — none

SW — scaffolding, netting = construction or substantial renovation

NW — none

31st Street

NE — none

SE — storefront boarded up

SW, NW — no such corners exist (Tenth Avenue overpass of Penn Station railroad yards here)

32nd Street

no such corners exist (Tenth Avenue overpass of Penn Station railroad yards here)

33rd Street

NE — none

SE — none

SW — none

NW — none

34th Street

NE — vacant lot with construction equipment visible behind slatted chain link fence

SE — sign: "under new management"

SW — none (the McDonald's has been there for a long time)

NW — none

SUMMARY

10 out of the 38 corners on Tenth Avenue from 13th Street to 23rd Street — 26% — show signs of change that are either obviously change in progress (5 corners, or 13%) or else evidence that would (I think) be apparent to anyone who knew the neighborhood of recent change (5 corners, or 13%); 28 of the corners (74%) showed no signs of recent change.

——————————

Well, not so much change manifest here as in the half mile to the south. But are appearances deceiving? Actually there was more change underway in the blocks west of Tenth Avenue, on over to Eleventh, in this stretch of Tenth than in the first half mile we looked at. But in this stretch, largely, I suppose, because of the big housing projects, both private (London Terrace) and public (Elliott Chelsea Houses), Chelsea Park (between 27th and 28th Streets), the 30th Street Post Service building, and then the Penn Station railroad yards (on the west side of Tenth between 30th and 33rd Streets) the changes don't quite reach to the Tenth Avenue corners.

Or, put a little differently, in this stretch, Tenth Avenue is a less permeable boundary street between the areas to either side of it. Below 23rd Street, the gentrification extends to the east as well as to the west of Tenth Avenue, whereas in this stretch it stops, mostly, just west of Tenth, so the appearance, and perhaps the pace of change is less intense here, and more of the character of the avenue as it was prior to the art galleries' move from SoHO to Chelsea remained intact — though now (2010) more change is visible than was the case four years ago when these photographs were taken.

Which brings up a corollary point, namely that the big avenues in Manhattan can serve as "spines" (or main arteries, to use a different biological metaphor) for a neighborhood in one stretch and switch so to speak to being boundaries between neighborhoods in the next stretch. — Do these roles change with time and the character of the neighborhoods involved? Do spines ever become boundaries and vice-versa? And under what circumstances? — well that really would be another story, but let's keep the thought on file.

— Once again, I'm proceeding tediously slowly here, at that outset, in order to force spending time with each of the photographs, even more time than (perhaps) the photographs warrant, out of an admittedly vague sense that "ideas" may result from this "contemplative immersion," especially here at the beginning of the process, that could get swamped by moving faster.

Though of course, I could just be getting stuck in a lot of obvious trivia, too.

A quick look ahead ….

2010-05-25T08:04:00.000-04:00

A fast run up Tenth Avenue, just now, all the way to the top, with a simple tally sheet in hand (this of course done sitting right here at the computer, no sweat), yields the following overall (but crude) result, which may provide some context for the slower looks at the more or less half mile segments to come:

136 out of a total of 649 corners (21%) showed signs of change in progress or more or less obvious signs of recent change.

This amounts to nearly one such sign of change on average in every one of the 206 blocks on the avenue from bottom to top. The variance, of course, is the real story, if there is one.

The highest density was in the first stretches we covered, 13th — 34th Streets (I'll post 24th to 34th Streets later today), with 41 out of 80 corners (51%) showing signs of change.

The lowest density was from 97th Street up to 125th Street with only 4 out of 90 corners (4%) showing signs of change.

Midtown, broadly defined as 35th Street to 59th Street, showed signs of change at 28 out of 100 corners (28%).

The Upper West Side, 60th Street to 96th Street had 20 out of 134 (15%)

Harlem, 126th Street to 168th, had only 19 out of 142 (13%).

Fort Washington / Fort George, 169th Street to 190th Street, showed 8 out of 55 (15%).

Inwood, Dyckman to Broadway at 218th, 16 out of 49 (32%), but this result is skewed by the extensive roadwork under the elevated tracks (and I'm uncertain about how to deal with that).

These figures will surely be revised as I go up the avenue again more slowly, but are surely — famous last words — not too far off.

These stats, and even the somewhat more detailed ones that the slower pass is yielding, probably don't mean much in themselves, but this sort of simple counting may show something a little further on in the project when it can be overlaid or cross-tabbed with other features.

A brief note on "signs of change"

2010-05-25T05:10:00.006-04:00

I just looked ahead through the next few miles of Tenth Avenue, that is, from 24th Street on up to 72nd Street, just to sort of get a "preview" of what I'll be looking at more closely in the coming days.

And found myself thinking about the "signs of change" that I'm watching for in this pass along the avenue.

Tenth Avenue & 21st Street, Northwest Corner

Certainly there are obvious signs, signs that you wouldn't miss even if you were from Ulan Bator and just visiting for the afternoon: buildings under construction, or being demolished, scaffolding, safety netting, and other equipment, windows boarded up or papered over, fresh paint or tuckpointing or obviously (?) new facades not in keeping with the character of the obviously (?) older buildings around them.

And as we saw, there was a lot of that in evidence on the Tenth Avenue corners between 13th Street and 23rd Street, though rather less of it as we got closer 23rd Street.

Then the less obvious signs: a chic home furnishings shop in a neighborhood where that is, or until recently was, an anomaly, if not altogether inconceivable; younger people with fashionably upscale dog breeds and an upscale veterinarian to service them in a neighborhood where previously dogs were mutts and took care of themselves without any veterinarian; people in fashionable business or casual attire in a what was for decades a strictly working class neighborhood, and so on.

Or as we might say, the visible signs of gentrification's invisible graces of class, status, power, education, and so on (I may be getting carried away here, but perhaps the exaggeration, if it is one, will get the point across).

Which does raise some questions:

1
where does a neighborhood begin and end? what are it's boundaries? how fluid are they?

2
more specifically, what are the visible signs of a neighborhood's being a neighborhood? in architecture, commerce, signage, street life, appearance of people on the street, maintenance and upkeep of the sidewalks and streets — clean or littered, freshly paved or pot-holed?

3
since neighborhoods change their character as well as their boundaries, what is the temporal extent of a neighborhood's character? (What is now the Upper West Side was initially rural, then a shanty town or series of shanty towns, then was "gentrified" in the 1880s-1890s, then slipped back again into disrepute, becoming a "slum" by mid-century, revived in part by the Lincoln Center "urban renewal" project, and now once again tremendously fashionable (and expensive).

This is a very crude estimator, but one could say, in the roundest of numbers, that each of these phases has covered on the order of 50 years, with the characteristic of each phase centered on, say, the middle twenty or thirty years, the time in between being "transitional."

I'm just shooting in the dark here, playing around with the notions in advance of really finding out what I might be talking about.

This isn't an entirely idle question, if we're concerned not only with how a neighborhood evolves but how people come to identify themselves as being from that neighborhood, and how people know when they've walked from their own neighborhood into another one, just by what they see (and hear and smell).

And if we're interested in how people "on the street" and "in the neighborhood" perceive change, then we would want to know what the time frame is in which the change is perceived.

And that depends on the time scale of memories — and the shared memories — of the people living in or working in or regularly coming to or passing through the neighborhood. Meaning, I suppose, that a neighborhood with high turnover of people is perceived by them "on average" on a shorter time scale than a neighborhood with a relatively stable population.

Of course, there would be, and are, different time scales operating simultaneously.

A bit of personal reminiscence

When I moved back into the city nearly twenty years ago, I lived in a fourth floor walk-up on 15th Street, just off Sixth Avenue, next to the old New York State National Guard Armory. It was a non-neighborhood, situated in between the Flatiron, Union Square, Chelsea, and Greenwich Village neighborhoods, with none of their amenities and none of their character either.

I was there for about nine years. When I moved in, the street, especially in front of the armory, which had a substantial overhang over the sidewalk on the south side of the street, was home to a lot of homeless people. Fourteenth Street, a block to the south, was still pretty sleazy, and Sixth and Seventh Avenues heading north were no great shakes either, at least for the first few blocks.

The renovations began (they'd probably already begun and I didn't know it because I wasn't there then): scaffolding went up around the big building on the southeast corner of Sixth Avenue and 14th Street along with signs advertising "luxury condominiums." Down the block on 15th Street going west a few landlords began to spruce up the facades of their buildings. Going east a chic tile shop appeared, and an upscale toy store. Rumor had it that the armory would be torn down for something else, a CostCo or whatever. Some of the old buildings on Sixth Avenue north of me were demolished, and similarly on Seventh Avenue, and new high rises began to go up.

I left when the noise from the demolition of the armory and the construction of the new building made living where I was impossible for me (I lived right next door).

I'm fairly often back in that neighborhood, and sometimes walk past the building where I used to live. No doubt the neighborhood has changed enormously since I moved there. And is still changing, though the pace has slowed since the start of the depression now already nearly two years ago or more.

Now some of these changes were unmistakable: the demolition of the armory took over a year and the building was so large (it faced both 14th Street on the south and 15th on the north and was about half a block long) was the most striking — and then the construction of its replacement took another couple of years.

So: huge, big, long, exceedingly visible (and, alas, audible).

Other changes were faster: repaving Sixth Avenue (overnight), Bed Bath & Beyond opening (months and months of signage before the actual opening), one of the second hand book store on 18th disappearing (with 30 day going out of business sale), and upscale paper shops moving in, and so on and on and on — it's a familiar story.

And no doubt a similar range of time frames when a neighborhood is in decline, which is to say, when it becomes more attractive to poorer people than had previously been its main demographic.

——————————

Not sure, as usual, where this is heading, but wanted to spend some time on these thoughts (and experiences, too).

There is a type of musical analysis developed a hundred years or so ago by Heinrich Schenker that, in essence (though I don't remember him ever expressing it this way himself) looks at the structure of a piece of (tonal) music as it works on three different time scales, or so to speak with "moving sonic windows" of different durations:

1
the actual notes we hear, or their concatenation into recognizable, unitary "figures" — the most immediate and short-term of the sonic "windows," which he called the "foreground";

2
an intermediate length "window" that more or less corresponds to what we keep in our "active memory" of the piece as we experience it (meaning, perhaps, the previous 10 or 20 measures and what we're predicting or anticipating for the next 5 or 10 — and constantly revising our expectations as the piece goes on) — he called this the "middle ground"; and

3
the longest window, which is defined by the whole piece itself, which he (notoriously) called the "Urlinie" — the primordial or fundamental line of the piece.

And continuing into a further digression, the wonderful essay from now 50-60 years ago (originally, I believe, a lecture at Darmstadt) by Karlheinz Stockhausen that posits and then explores the idea of a continuum between rhythm and pitch, i.e., the implications of a sliding scale of time frames or metrics.

And a further bit of an afterthought: is a look at "signs of change" actually a look at the overlay of nevertheless distinguishably different time frames? time frames that overlap, moreover, and modulate our shared experience — even our sharing of experience — of change in the city, if not elsewhere or even everywhere?

This evening, or tomorrow morning at the latest, back to the next segment of Tenth Avenue and its concrete signs of change, from 24th Street up to 34th Street.

Signs of change on Tenth Avenue: 13th Street – 23rd Street (2006)

2010-05-24T08:22:00.006-04:00

A frequent failing of mine: trying to do too much all at once. Already, going through the first 42 corners of Tenth Avenue, the laundry list of things to make and things to do that I posted yesterday seems like too much (though many are things I’d like to get to on subsequent passes — I’m a big fan of many simpler rather than fewer more complicated iterations).

Tenth Avenue & 17th Street, Southeast Corner

Howie Becker suggested I look for “signs of change” and since I’m always happy to get ideas wherever they come from I’ll latch onto that one fast!

(Twenty-some years ago the painter John Hultberg told me, vis-á-vis my own work as an artist, which he was critiqueing for me, that I shouldn’t ever worry about originality. “You can’t prevent it,” he said to me.)

So, let’s at least start this 2nd pass by looking for signs of change. — It’s not so many corners, let’s just run through them and say what they are (open a second window in your browser, and go to Tenth Avenue 13th — 110th to follow along, or else toggle back and forth between the blog and the photos using your browser's forward and back buttons).

I’ll take the corners of each intersection in the clockwise order NE, SE, SW, NW.

For this post, at least, I'll list every corner and what I found; in later posts I may just summarize the results, if listing everything seems more tedious than it's worth — we'll see.

13th Street

NE — typical blue paint of a construction or renovation site, though no work appears to be underway yet; derelict structure over sidewalk (it's an overhead conveyor with hooks to move meat — whole carcasses — from trucks into the packing house)

SE — scaffolding; construction fence (same blue); truck delivering large pipes; workmen

14th Street

NE — High Line freshly painted white on north side of street; old black still visible to right; Mobil station has new look to it

SE — construction fence (same blue as 13/SE), same derelict overhead conveyor structure as 13/NE; at this end of the block, vacant lot behind fence.

SW — no obvious signs of change in progress though brick work looks to have been cleaned fairly recently; "stucco" on ground floor definitely not original

NW — no obvious signs of change in progress except if you know that the brick bulding at the right rear was originally a Nabisco factory building

15th Street

NE — scaffolding

SE — High Line pillars freshly painted white on Mobil Station property, black/rust on left; again, Mobil Station looks new; ditto store fronts on left

SW — no obvious signs of change in progress, but banners for "Hudson River Park" betray recent origin of this "mini park"

NW — orange plastic construction netting on sidewalk, workman (?), caution sign

16th Street

NE — construction wall (brown this time) with signage for new condo building ("The Caledonia") going up behind it

SE — none

SW — no obvious signs of change in progress, but this is, again, the former Nabisco factory building

NW — sections of concrete Jersey barriers; also the recently painted brickwork

17th Street

NE — Red Rock West Saloon may be new (?) but Earth Restaurant is definitely new and not in keeping with style of old neighborhood

SE — vacant lot with signs of construction — must be "The Caledonia" seen advertised on the wall at 16/NE; upscale furnishings shop new to old building; dog (breed) not typical of old neighborhood either

SW — no obvious signs of change in progress, but "ghosts" of prior structural elements above windows to the right betray fairly recent renovation

NW — construction netting on High Line; some scaffolding there too

18th Street

NE — store fronts are newish on left; "La" Lunchonette is new neighborhood style; van on right is delivering new stuff apparently for new business

SE — Star Diner probably ancient (?) but restaurant next door is new neighborhood style

SW — construction netting on High Line

NW — construction netting on High Line; scaffolding on left

19th Street

NE — no obvious signs of change in progress, but restaurant, especially sidewalk table awnings definitely new neighborhood style

SE — vacant lot; construction visible at far left

SW — High Line scaffolding at far left

NW — none

20th Street

NE — construction; scaffolding; signage for new building

SE — no obvious sign of change in progress, but Cookshop is definitely new neighborhood style

SW — none

NW — none

21st Street

NE — none except (maybe) recently cleaned brickwork

SE — none

SW — none

NW — none

22nd Street

NE — none

SE — none

SW — no obvious signs of change in progress except dog breeds (but see NW)

NW — veterinarian is new neighborhood style

23rd Street

NE — none

SE — restaurant closed / being renovated

SW — vacant lot with construction fence

NW — none (I don't think — I remember the very modern gallery building on the corner being there as many as a dozen years ago or more)

SUMMARY

31 out of the 42 corners on Tenth Avenue from 13th Street to 23rd Street — 74% — show signs of change that are either obviously change in progress (15 corners, or 36%) or else evidence that would (I think) be apparent to anyone who knew the neighborhood of recent change (16 corners, or 38%); only 11 of the corners (26%) showed no signs of recent change.

———————————

Tomorrow I'll go back through these corners and have a second look at the kinds of change that are visible in the photographs (construction; renovation; cleaning up; new "style").

What I’m about here, insofar as I know and can say what it is at this point ….

2010-05-23T20:00:00.004-04:00

An astute reader of this blog (Howie Becker) wrote to me this afternoon to suggest that personal reminiscences such as the handful I put into the previous post weren’t helpful from a sociological point of view which is oriented instead towards collective, shared meanings and that I should stay focussed on what we can see (rather than remember) and whose meanings might be more or less the same for lots of people.

Well of course he’s right about that. (And so nice to have readers — especially readers who respond thoughtfully, critically — thanks, Howie!)

No doubt I should have been a lot more explicit about what I'm up to here, and could have been, too, without in any way running the risk of getting my fingers caught in the conceptual Vegematic (or Cuisinart, if you prefer something more upscale). So here goes:

What I was up to — besides, I suppose, a certain amount of undisciplined self-indulgence — in mentioning those things was to get across (if only to myself) the simple and perhaps trivial fact that we, each of us, bring to what we see and hear (and no doubt touch, taste, smell, and feel as well) very specific memories of our personal experience and that constitute no small part of what hermeneuticists might call our “pre-understanding” of what we’re looking at, hearing, experiencing, either “live” or via a recording medium like photography.

And that’s not so much of a hazard when it’s easily recognized as something like “99th Street where my friend so-and-so lived for many years” but could be more so in more subtle ways such as having watched the stretch of the avenue under and near the High Line go from being something pretty grubby to something very chic.

Am I not seeing what’s there to be seen because I’m looking at it through the filters or lenses of my more general — and yes, much more widely shared — memory of it, or am I not seeing the residuals of that former condition because my eye is so absorbed in what’s new?

And — if this is not too lame — I want this blog, at least in this phase, to record, albeit necessarily selectively, a good chunk of what actually passes through my mind as I’m going ahead with the work of looking, including, I fear, a certain amount of what’s merely personal and, I’m even more afraid, an even greater amount of what’s inane, not to say downright stupid.

This is because, with memories of several decades of working on and managing big software projects in a variety of engineering contexts, and memories of lots of ongoing disputes as to how to do them (the “software development methodologies” struggle), I want to convey here, at least a little, how the work actually gets done, or at least how I actually get it done, including all, or a representative selection of, the “stuff” that I do when I'm doing something that gets left out when I retrospectively try to understand how I did what I did.

Because, I think, the connection between how we actually get something done, and what we think we’re doing when we do it, and especially what we think we were doing after we’ve finished doing it, is, if not altogether tenuous, then at least a lot looser than we’d like to imagine, and, by leaving in as much as possible the “junk” activity (mental or otherwise) in the description of the process the door gets left open for later coming to a different understanding of what was happening than would be possible (probably) if that stuff were left out.

Of course looking at that would be another project altogether — or would it?

In any event, here’s the program for the next five or six weeks, as I see it as of now:

1
A “walk” up Tenth Avenue, starting at 13th Street and ending at Broadway/218th Street.

2
the walk divided into segments defined by the major cross streets, so, e.g., 13th to 23rd, 24th to 34th, 35th to 42nd and so on. So, typically, 10-15 blocks or 40-60 corners more or less.

3
Probably only about 20 corners a day, if that — I have to try this out to see what works — so two or three days for each segment. This totals up to five or six weeks, maybe a little more.

4
Each corner/photograph looked at in the first place just for whatever seems — to my eye — most prominent, salient, visually.

5
As Becker suggested, looking at the objects in the photographs and their various attributes (e.g., color, condition) as signs or indicators of something else, e.g., kinds of change, neighborhood demographics, etc., that are otherwise less visible or not visible at all.

6
Probably some elementary counting and enumeration: on this corner: residential building (and private or public housing?); business (and generally of what kind); vacant lot; something under construction (or demolition); how many people actually on the corner (not “in the wings”, I think); and doing what (walking, waiting to cross, talking, hanging out, etc.). — I'll keep all this in a spreadsheet and (probably) report the contents only selectively on the blog (but we'll see).

Please note that this second pass is meant to be just that, a second pass, with possibly many more passes through the set to follow. (All the good methods, whatever the field, are, I think, iterative.)

7
It’s a pest to put in all the pictures and I’ll soon overrun my space allotment if I do, so I’ll put in only a selection, and leave it up to the reader to keep two windows open, one for the blog, the other for New York in Plain Sight, Tenth Avenue (which is in two parts):

Part One: 13th Street — 110th Street

Part Two: 111th Street — Broadway/218th Street

8
And if the approach outlined above turns out to be going nowhere fast, I’ll bail out and try something else as soon as I wake up to that fact. (But I think it will go somewhere, just not sure where yet.)

So tomorrow — or possibly Tuesday, as tomorrow is pretty jammed up with other things: you know, life its own self — the first 20 or so corners of Tenth Avenue, a little closer look, starting at 13th Street.

First pass, fast ….

2010-05-23T11:23:00.004-04:00

Notes to yesterday evening's (100522) first, fast pass through the Tenth Avenue photos:

Already, just going from Tenth at 13th Street up to 20th Street I see that I'm looking at these photographs with eyes that know this neighborhood rather well, so that I'm seeing them very much in the context of my prior knowledge —

Tenth Avenue & 13th Street, Northeast & Southeast Corners

— OK, that's the High Line in the background on 13th Street, now finished and open as Manhattan's newest and possibly chicest park (well, maybe after Gramercy)

— amazing what's become of the formerly very grotty Meatpacking District

— now moving up into the Chelsea art gallery district (I remember when this was absolutely nothing, and all those galleries were in SoHO)

Tenth Avenue & 20th Street, Southeast Corner

and so on: shall I write all of these random thoughts up as I go along? No, not on this first pass, this enough to give the flavor of it, in this respect, I think.

Of course, just at the very beginning, at 13th Street, I took the two corners again early in 2010 and can't help wanting to make comparisons of the "then and now" type.

Is the discipline to disallow that sort of digressive thinking or is it rather to encourage it and see where it leads? Don't know yet. At least for a while I think I'll let everything lead me wherever it goes.

And personal memories intrude too:

Tenth Avenue & 24th Street, Southeast Corner

24th Street, SE — where my friend Carl Morse lived all the time I knew him until he died not quite two years ago.

Tenth Avenue & 26th Street, Northeast Corner

26th Street, east side — the scary projects between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, and somewhere in there the theater where I saw a production of my friend Bill Hoffman's play "Cornbury" last winter — no, gosh, winter before last already. Everett Quinn was fabulous as Cornbury.

Tenth Avenue & 27th Street, Southwest Corner

27th Street SW — Paul Kasmin Gallery — flashbacks to London 40 years ago, also memories of a great show of Morris Louis paintings maybe ten or a dozen years ago.

Tenth Avenue & 30th Street, Northwest Corner

30th Street, NW — one of the very few exceptions to my "no retouching" rule: the brick wall on the left was totally "blown out" (white) due to overexposure due in turn to not wanting to underexpose the corner itself under the High Line (and in its shadow). So I took that part of the wall from a prior exposure in which the shadows were almost completely "plugged" (black) but the sunlit wall was fine, and merged the two in PhotoShop. (But this doesn't, in my book, count as "substantive" retouching.)

OK, enough of this sort of thing, it takes too long for this first, fast pass, so let's roll on through.

Finished the fast pass around 7:35 PM and I started around 7 PM so about 35 minutes to race through 649 photographs, whew.

This was mostly meant just as a sort get reacquainted, so no systematic result, except as indicated, a sense of the different levels of looking/responding to the pictures, depending on how much I'm paying attention to the context I bring via "the eye's mind" (as I called it in a previous post), and how much of that is personal experience as opposed to general — I think I mean "book" — knowledge. And the difficulty of seeing what's in the pictures without too much reference to this context of prior knowledge.

Will try to look at them, going forward, at least in part, as if they were anywhere, and not where I know them to be, or for that matter, when.

Impossible to do in any absolute sense of course, but an orientation even to the impossible can maybe change "how things look" nonetheless, and thus sort of freshen up the eye.

Why Tenth Avenue? And a few stats ….

2010-05-23T09:52:00.003-04:00

I didn't give a lot of thought to which street or avenue to start with, mostly because the choice seemed pretty obvious to me. Here's why:

Going through the whole set — 11,485 photographs (I think) — would be just too much.

A single neighborhood, e.g., the East Village, Chinatown, Spanish Harlem, Inwood, would be too uniform, though of course even in a single neighborhood there's a lot of variety.

The cross (east-west) streets just aren't long enough to provide enough corners to look at, though of course the changing scene from one side of the island to the other would be a study in its own right. "East Side, West Side …."

That leaves the long "north-south" avenues, and a restriction, even then, to those that run for many miles and pass through many neighborhoods.

Which gets the choices down to Broadway (the longest), and the "grid" avenues: First, Second, Third, etc., and the subsequent additions: Lexington and Madison.

Not Broadway, then, even though it's the only one that runs the whole length of Manhattan, just out of a sense that it's been over-done (and very well done too, sometimes).

After which the next longest is Tenth Avenue, which runs from just below 13th Street all the way up to the Broadway Bridge over the Harlem River at the very top of the island, starting in the West Village and passing through Chelsea, Hell's Kitchen, Clinton, the Upper West Side, Manhattan Valley, Morningside, Harlem, Hamilton Heights, Washington Heights, Fort Washington/Fort George, and Inwood — so that satisfies the multi-neighborhood requirement for sure!

A few stats on the photos:

649 photographs (but I'll look at a some rejects, too, and some reshoots)

Shooting dates:

April 10, 2006: 13th Street & 14th Street

May 18, 2006: 15th Street up to 34th Street

July 1, 2006: 35th Street up to 59th Street

July 10, 2006: 61st Street NW, 79th Street NW, 104th Street NE & NW (most of this stretch I subsequently reshot, these were the keepers from the July 10th shoot)

July 19, 2006: 60th Street up to 110th Street (with the above exceptions)

August 12, 2006: 111th Street up to 168th Street

September 1, 2006: 218th Street SE (from an Inwood shoot).

September 12, 2006: Dyckman Street up to Broadway (at 218th Street)

September 17, 2006: 190th Street SW & NW (from a St Nicholas Avenue shoot)

September 21, 2006: 169th Street up to 189th Street

All shot with Canon 1 Ds Mark II 16.7 megapixel digital SLR; all with Leica 28-90 R lens

Tenth Avenue was laid out on the famous Commissioner's grid plan of 1807/1811. Unlike the other avenues defined by that plan, which end at 155th Street (but have since been extended north), Tenth Avenue is shown running all the way up to the top of the island (it now stops two blocks short of the top).

Since 1880, Tenth Avenue from the north side of 72nd Street on up to where it meets Fort George Avenue has been known as Amsterdam Avenue. Sometime thereafter (?) the name Amsterdam was extended south from 72nd Street to 59th Street. Tenth Avenue resumes under its own name at Dyckman Street in Inwood.

"Field notes"

2010-05-23T08:59:00.000-04:00

I don’t want to get caught up in the conceptual Vegematic here but I thought a few words about “field notes” might be in order despite the risk of sliced fingers.

Of course, the New York in Plain Sight photos themselves can be regarded as a kind of “field notes,” though that wasn’t my intention per se in taking them. Or was it?

I did keep a project journal during the 2006 shooting — readers of the first round of posts will have gotten a sense of what that's like — which isn’t the same thing as keeping field notes, mostly because during the shooting itself there was no time to be making notes and also because there was so much work to do with each day’s take afterwards that even the project journal notes were often pretty minimal.

On the other hand, now, starting to go through the New York in Plain Sight photos as if they, and not their subject directly, were the object of study (tricky, that — let’s just see how it goes), the process of looking at them, of trying to see whatever it is that there is to see in them, what thoughts they prompt, and how those thoughts hang together across a whole bunch of them, possibly even all of them, is a project in its own right, and it makes sense to me, at this point, to start keeping "field notes" on looking at them, just as I might have made such notes instead of photographs (or in addition to photographs) but didn’t at the time I took the pictures.

And why bother?

Because the exercise — the discipline, even — of writing, even of jotting, of putting into words the experience of looking is a first step in abstracting from the virtually infinite amount of detail in the photographs themselves and getting at a explicitly conceptual understanding of what emerges as “of interest” (at least to me) as a result of having a close look at the pictures with precisely this result in mind.

So we’ll see ….

Restart

2010-05-22T18:36:00.001-04:00

I stopped posting to this blog a couple of weeks ago when I felt that I'd run out of things to say. Maybe I'd overdone it with 31 posts in 30 days — friends warned me against this hazard when I started but of course I ignored them. So call it "burn out" or whatever.

But actually there's a little more to it than that, or just that, I think.

I started making notes towards what became New York in Plain Sight now already five years ago; started the planning in earnest four and a half years ago; and started the photography proper four years and nearly three months ago. Followed by three years of editing, processing, cataloging, keywording (still not finished, not by a long shot), prepping for the website, and general cleaning-up (including catching corners that I'd missed and reshooting ones that had, in my judgment, not turned out well enough, for whatever reasons).

All this gave simple purpose and meaning to my life (at least in this respect) throughout these past four to five years — and then, more or less all of a sudden, most of that work was done (though there's still a lot of clean-up to do), which has left something of a hole in my days, and brought with a lot of uncertainty about what's next.

NO, I am not going to move on to tackle on the street corners in Brooklyn, or Queens, or the Bronx, or Staten Island!

And starting the blog helped fill that void — until I began to run out of things to say (I'd accumulated a bunch of ideas over the last few years, and recorded a lot of them in a project journal, and the blog has been a way to give them a first approximation of order, and even to try out developing them a little in one direction or another without getting too caught up in trying to make something too finished out of them too soon.

But more than running out of things to say — maybe I did, maybe I didn't — came a very disorienting sense of not knowing what to do next, whether with New York in Plain Sight or with something else, entirely different, possibly not even photography-related.

It seemed premature to call New York in Plain Sight "done done" when in truth it was scarcely even "done" and at the same time I was — and in a way still am — rather at a loss as to what to do with it now.

One obvious thing to do, and which I did do, was to notify and/or update a lot people about the "done" if not "done done" status of the thing.

Then it occurred to me, mostly in consequence of a wonderful meeting with some terrific sociologists and urbanists to look at and discuss the project last week (I'll report on this in another post soon), that I'd been conceiving New York in Plain Sight too narrowly, namely as a photography project, and conceiving my role in it equally narrowly, namely as a photographer.

It's entirely possible that finishing up the photography isn't the end of New York in Plain Sight but instead is just barely the beginning of something.

But what?

Well, one of the great principles that I've resorted to from time to time in my life (though of course only when forced by circumstances) is that when you don't know what to do next with some project or undertaking, and have spent enough time considering that to be pretty sure that this is a correct assessment, then the thing to do is to do something — almost anything will do — and have at it, vigorously, just to see what turns up as a result.

And if the first "something" turns out to be a dead-end (it does happen), well, then, try another something, and so on.

So here goes: with only the vaguest idea of what I'm about, I'm taking the Tenth Avenue corners and plan to have a serious look, or actually multiple serious looks at all of them, and see what comes of that.

And to record the process here, on the blog, so to speak as daily or near-daily "field notes" of the process.

So far, the only thing to report is that for speed and convenience I made a set of full size JPGs (meaning the same size, pixel-wise, as the archival files) this morning of all the Tenth Avenue corners and imported them into their very own LightRoom catalog (so as not to run the risk of messing up the master catalog).

This evening I'll walk through the whole set, just to see what I can see and, especially, to see whether there are any surprises, not that I'm expecting any: I've been looking at all these photographs over and over again for several years now and actually they've all gotten to be pretty familiar to me, so the biggest surprise would be to be surprised at all.

At the same time I do know that the real surprises more often come from looking longer and more closely at what one already "knows" than from looking at what is unfamiliar and thus most vulnerable to being seen with all one's stereotypes, expectations, and prejudices as filters.

I'll let you know what happens tomorrow or the next day — expect new posts every day or two now, at least for a while, while I see how this turns out.

Time out

2010-05-11T08:04:00.001-04:00

River Terrace & Vesey Green, Southwest Corner

I think I've said all I've got to say for the time being about New York in Plain Sight, though I'm sure there will be more before too long, at which point I'll resume blogging.

"Never apologize, never explain …."

2010-05-09T10:27:00.003-04:00

I've long been a fan of the maxim attributed to Noël Coward: "Never apologize, never explain …." Not that I follow this maxim myself — I am a chronic over-apologizer and over-explainer (is there a 12-Step Program for this? don't tell me, I don't want to know) — but I admire the insouciance, and perhaps the wisdom, of an attitude that I am unable to attain to myself.

Tenth Avenue & 30th Street, Northwest Corner

And so from the outset of the New York in Plain Sight project I've been torn between two pairs of opposing impulses:

1
to explain everything vs. to explain nothing

2
to apologize for the evident madness of the undertaking vs. to say nothing about it.

Of course, if one has, or ever has had, intellectual ambitions (not to say pretensions) of any sort (I confess, I confess), then explanations are more in keeping with that, and the more voluminous, the more detailed and expansive, the more so.

Why not relate the project to the very essence of photography? Or if one believes that there is no such essence, then at least to what various people at various times and places have thought that essence to be, however mistakenly?

And so on — surely further examples are unnecessary, though of course they would make for a longer and thus more "serious" post.

Why not just let the project speak for itself, so to speak, without any "captioning" of this global, explanatory kind?

True enough, many photographs are only meaningful in relation to their captions, or at least become more meaningful, or their meaning more specific, in relation to their captions and even in relation to what else the photographer and others — e.g., critics, curators — have to say about them.

And on the other hand, in some circumstances, especially in some photo essays — I'm thinking of Frank's The Americans — the uncaptioned images nonetheless in effect caption or explain one another by their relationships with one another not only in their subjects but in their sequencing within the essay.

That said, isn't it enough to know, and does it even really need to be said at all, that New York in Plain Sight is a set of pictures of everyday life at street level in daytime Manhattan in the long summer (mostly) of 2006? Doesn't saying more result in more closure instead of greater openness?

So that "less is more" really means something in this regard?

I think I'll say no more about it — for now. (I know that tomorrow I'll be unable to resist more explanations.)

And the madness of it? The most I think I should say about that is, probably, "never apologize, never explain …."

R. Mutt

2010-05-08T09:39:00.016-04:00

I’m one of those people who are “interested” in things like the origins of art and questions like “what is art” and so on.

I put “interested” in quotation marks to indicate that my interest in these topics isn’t all that serious — I haven’t made a career or a profession out of them, which seems to be a requirement these days for having anything to say about anything — but that it’s still interest enough for these things to be have been on my mind with some frequency for a good part of my life.

Baxter Street & Grand Street, Southeast Corner

So here’s what I think (this is not a scholarly blog, so I’ll just tell you, minus references, bibliography, arguments with others who think differently, etc.):

Art has its origins in decorating the human body (e.g., body painting, tattoos, scarification, hair styling, jewelry, etc.) and, equally, and from this point of view, equivalently, in ways of designing and decorating ordinary everyday artifacts (e.g., clothing, pots, housing, tools, weapons, etc.).

These designs and decorations serve partly as kinship markers and partly as sexual selectors.

Sexual selectors in much the same way as the male peacock’s tail (though artifactual rather than natural in their production): sexual attractiveness (and, ultimately, differential reproduction) is favored by their possession and by their size, complexity, expense, etc.

Kinship markers in the sense of identifying who is related to whom, and in what degree, at least to the extent of marking the boundaries of forbidden and permitted sexual partnerships — the location of this boundary being itself social/consensual in origin.

In short, these designs and decorations told us — how many hundred thousand years ago? if not still today? — who we might legitimately include among our prospective sexual partners, and who among them were the most attractive?

I would imagine the differentiation of designs and decorations among different kinship communities emerged in much the same way as linguistic differentiation: a natural consequence of the course of linguistic change in more or less closed communities.

And perhaps the decorations of the human body served the same purpose to begin with (as if there were any specific “beginning,” which I’m sure there was not) and only later began to take on the role of differenting sexual attractiveness within a kinship group.

In any event, the twin functions of “art” (as we’ve come to call it): regulating reproduction by artifactually creating or augmenting differential sexual attractiveness and by marking the boundaries of legitimate sexual partnership surely developed together, over the long transition from whatever we once were to what we now can recognize as unequivocally “human,” i.e., like ourselves (which always, apparently — not to also say, “alas” — depends a great deal on how we understand ourselves too).

We may even have “co-evolved” along with them, i.e., our responses to “art” may be so to speak “wired into us” by now — but I’m not sure that that’s a necessary consequence of the preceding propositions (which isn’t to say that it might not be true).

Eventually — when? how? — decoration became a separate domain of human endeavor (another example of the division of labor), though not one that has ever really lost all contact with its roots, and people who could do so made things for the (apparent) sake of the decorations themselves — “art for art’s sake” has surely been with us for tens of millenia — and one that could connect with, support, and be supported by, the new regimes of social organization that then emerged along with sedentism, agriculture, cities, industry, religion, "spiritual values," and so on, and that are still very much characteristic of our lives today.

The idea of a non-decorative art — sometimes called "anti-art" — which arrived in 1917 under the signature “R. Mutt” (= German “Armut” = “poverty,” among many, probably equally valid, though not mutually exclusive, interpretations) has added a new wrinkle to our sense of art, and gradually the question of “taste” (the ability to read in a nuanced way the social implications of art/decoration, so eloquently discussed by the 18th century Scottish moral philosophers) has been displaced by the question of “art.”

The new, post-R. Mutt, career of the art work is to make the transition from being, at its creation, “not art” in the judgment of the reigning art-world, to being recognized as “art” by a suitably transformed or reconstituted art-world.

The job of the would-be artist is, accordingly, to make something that isn’t “art” and then to change the existing art-world, or create a new one, or both together, in which it will be “art.”

Without, of course, challenging this paradigm or its results.

What might have been “revolutionary” 100 years ago — or in some cases, possibly even 200 years ago (I’m thinking of Beethoven here, and yes, music does fit this paradigm as well) — is now social mobility, or at least entrepreneurship.

But then, when wasn't it?

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Or people do (or don’t).

… no, seriously ….

2010-05-07T10:21:00.002-04:00

Sometimes it's just not possible to take all of this so seriously.

I think I'll go out with the camera and take a bunch of pictures — it's a nice enough day here in New York — just for fun (what an idea).

Saint Nicholas Avenue & Wadsworth Avenue, Southwest Corner

But as I was about to hit the "publish post" button, the thought occurred to me: maybe I am taking New York in Plain Sight too seriously.

It is, after all, just a bunch of pictures. A rather big bunch — about 11,500 — but still, just a bunch of pictures.

Nice enough pictures, many of them, and some people seem to enjoy them; still, lots of people seem to be indifferent to them — well, that's hardly a surprise.

Not that I want to dismiss the more serious stuff — just don't want it to overwhelm the project, or, more importantly, to overwhelm me ….

I think I will go out now with the camera now and take a bunch of pictures — just for fun.

"Publish Post"!

Project journal entry for April 21, 2006

2010-05-06T07:38:00.001-04:00

Sometimes — often, and more and more often, actually — I think I've spent the last four years with New York in Plain Sight wondering just what the hell I was doing and why.

But only rarely have I found myself doubting whether it's worth doing — although of course there are occasionally days like that as well.

Eleventh Avenue & 29th Street, Southeast Corner

Since yesterday was one of those days — and today isn't — here's where I was at on the "what and why" questions around 9:30 PM on April 21, 2006:

… every street corner is both a self-portrait of the local people for whom it marks one corner of the village square, and part of the larger self-portrait comprising all of the island's street corners.

The following was then crossed out:

Let's get dirt simple, and pragmatic.

Why street corners?
     uniformity
     variety
     manageability
Try again later when not so distracted.

The entry then goes on again:

This afternoon — 182 street corners — the Lower East Side — Bowery to Essex, Hester to Stanton, inclusive.

[...]

More about street corners project:

     — so democratic _ all — rich, poor, white, black, young, old, etc.
     — not selective — another take on "all"
     — There is an elusive something about the size of the project

17,000 photos more or less [at this time my estimate was still about 50% too high] and its inclusiveness, and its totality-ness (all Manhattan), and the interaction of this size with my intention to somehow regard the thing in its entirety as a single work of art — of which the individual photographs are the elements — and of course any single one of them may be considered an artwork by itself … still, I definitely want to regard, I definitely intend the whole as a single work of art that exists as such only at the level, the level of the totality of all the individual photographs.

So here the question is: what does it mean to have a work so vast?

One that one can't possibly see all at once? In this sense, it's musical, in that it can only be experienced in time — any viewing of it has a whole and complex past, present, and future.

But not just one route through it, unlike most music, which has only one route (though not only one performance).

Even as a serial piece it's odd: there is an implicit order, at least, in the subject, there is a topology — or even several topologies — for instance, the 4 corners of one intersection are a set of neighbors, but if I walk down one side of the avenue and up the other, they are not neighbors as 4 but as 2 pairs of two.

Sometimes, these days, what keeps me going with it is the daily report from Google Analytics on visits to the main New York in Plain Sight web site.

The numbers aren't high, but they're steady, and it's nice to know that a few dozen people (typically) are dropping in every day to have a look.

Which is a good part of why I did it.

Random corner #3: Fifth Avenue & 76th Street, Southeast

2010-05-05T08:28:00.004-04:00

This Wednesday's random corner is Fifth Avenue and 76th Street, the southeast corner. As usual, I'll just run through a quick sampling of what turns up in a handful internet searches and some of the standard reference works.

Fifth Avenue & 76th Street, Southeast Corner

Both Fifth Avenue and 76th Street were defined by the Commissioner's street plan of 1807-1811, though the plan envisaged this as a full, four-corner intersection.

Today 76th Street is interrupted at Fifth Avenue by Central Park (it resumes on the other side of the park at the Commissioner's Eighth Avenue, now known as Central Park West. So 76th Street tees into Fifth Avenue — actually it tees away from Fifth Avenue, in accord with the Manhattan one way street rule that "it's odd to be going to Jersey, even to Queens" — and offers only a northeast corner and today's southeast corner.

Originally about halfway between the Commissioner's Hamilton Square and Observatory Place (two of four small parks in the area provided for by the 1807-1811 plan), today the intersection is about halfway between the Frick Collection (between 70th & 71st Streets) and the vast complex of the Metropolitan Museum (main entrance at 82nd Street).

So at Fifth Avenue and 76th Street we are deep in the heart of the famous "Museum Mile," which also includes the Neue Gallerie (at 86th Street), the Guggenheim (between 88th and 89th Streets), the National Academy of Design (at 89th Street), the Cooper-Hewitt Museum (at 91st Street). The Museum of the City of New York is just a little further up Fifth Avenue (at 103rd Street).

Prime real estate, this, though as is usual with such neighborhoods, the visual interest to the photographer is in inverse proportion to the ambient wealth ….

The Harkness House at the other end of the block (northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 75th Street) gets a mention by White & Willensky; otherwise there's little to see on this side of the street except piles of limestone, canvas awnings with well-polished brass stanchions, and uniformed — not to say liveried — doormen.

De gustibus non est disputandum — I suppose everyone has to live somewhere.

The Sabrett hot dog stand graces this corner with a little real color and an excellent hot sausage as well.