new york

Skycaps on a break

Three skycaps (porters) at JFK airport New York on 24 April 2005. They're in a line at a table in the food court, eating and tallking. Two are wearing their big Skycap peaked caps

A skycap (porter) at JFK airport New York on 24 April 2005. He's sitting at a table in the food court, laughing.

Two skycaps (porters) at JFK airport New York on 24 April 2005. They're at a table in the food court, eating and tallking. They're wearing their big Skycap peaked caps

From the archives. At JFK, 24 April 2005. They’re telling me about the previous Friday night’s $205M Michigan lottery win.

1998, the last time New York City had the correct amount of visual chaos

It was the end of history but it was before 9/11, before the dot.com crash, a whole decade before the Great Recession

Zuckerberg was still at school. I was in New York. I had a beeper and an answering service, there was a tiny office with a desk and a chair and no one in it. I carried a Powerbook G3, a preposterous Powerpoint deck and yawning self-doubt. TBH I spent more time in Strand Books than selling the proposition and soon enough I closed the New York ‘office’ and retreated to the archipelago.

A dog leans out of the passenger window of a pickup in heavy traffic at the intersection of 6th Avenue and West 37th Street in Manhattan in 1998

A 1998 photo of International General Merchandise Inc, a grandly named store at 426 Broadway, NY, NY, that sold electronics, sunglasses, bags.

A 1998 photo of Pearl River, a famous Chinese restaurant on Canal Street in lower Manhattan

A Freezer Fresh ice cream truck in Manhattan in July 1998

Sneakers, a sportswear shop on Broadway in Manhattan in 1998

Sbarro, Italian pizza chain, at Times Square, New York, late at night in 1998

A busy scene at an intersection on West Broadway, Manhattan in 1998

Yellow cab close-up, late at night in New York, 1998

Jacob Wiesenfeld, a textile store in Manhattan in 1998

A hotdog restaurant in New York in 1998, the signs outside reference Mayro Giuliani's campaign for more politeness in the city

New Moda Custom tailoring, a store in Lower Manhattan in 1998

A Burger King and a yellow cab in midtown Manhattan late at night in 1998

A laundromat in Manhattan, New York, 1998

A $3.00 car wash in midtown Manhattan in 1998

Taxis, trucks and limousines in traffic, viewed from above, New York City, 1998

Plastic Land, a shop in midtown Manhattan in 1998

A neon sign in the window of Galaxy Deli Restaurant in midtown Manhattan in 1998

A blimp passes over lower Manhattan in 1998

Close-up of a yellow cab in New York CIty in 1998

A parking sign and a huge painted billboard in midtown Manhattan in 1998. The Met Life building can be seen at top left.

Signs for AAAAAA Ace Paper Box Corp and AAAAAA Ace Creative Packaging in midtown Manhattan in 1998

Mary's Video Supplies on West 23rd Street, Manhattan in 1998

A sign that shows the State of New York registration number of a car workshop in Manhattan, New York in 1998

A 1998 photograph of Ennio Jeweler, a shop in midtown Manhattan with signs in lovely mid-century commercial typefaces

These photos were all taken with a neat little Canon APS camera. There are more – lots more – on Flickr.

What’s a Mook?

Charlie waits for Johnny at the bar, Mean Streets
The Guardian is promoting a new partnership with postal video rental outfit Movietrak. I tried it out and got Martin Scorcese’s Mean Streets, a movie I haven’t watched in a decade, the next day. The DVD is beautifully packaged in a bag that doubles as a post-paid return envelope. The whole concept is very well thought out. Isn’t it remarkable that, in a home like ours, with broadband, dozens of movie channels on digital TV (including a ‘near video on demand’ service) and a perfectly good video shop half a mile away, services like Movietrak’s can still find a niche?

Ten years ago I’d have told you that Mean Streets was my favourite movie. These days I wouldn’t. The film is much too ragged. But those ten years have obviously added something else to my perspective. The courage and energy needed to push through a first feature like this one, to marshal those resources (De Niro, Keitel, New York City…) and to keep the whole thing moving at such a pace are unarguable and breathtaking. If I get a chance to create something half as good, half as authentic, just once in my life, I’ll die happy.

Intensely New York

I have no idea whose link I followed to find Hugh MacLeod’s gapingvoid.com but I think these cartoons drawn on the backs of business cards are just about the most New York things I’ve ever seen.

Wi-Fi in the park

Steve Johnson’s excellent weblog links to a great story in the NY Times about the free Wi-Fi network in Bryant Park. I remember the park as a gorgeous place to have Sunday brunch and read the papers, but that was before 802.11b. Bryant Park (right behind the NY Public Library if I remember rightly) was once so dangerous and run down it was literally boarded up. Wi-Fi didn’t save the park but it does now enrich the its complex ecology and will probably make its regeneration more robust.

The downtown music scene after 9/11

I sometimes listen to Radio 3’s Mixing It. Freaky stuff from every corner of music and only occasionally a bit po-faced. This week I stumbled across a web page about their visit to NYC in August 2002. They recorded a one-off programme with members of the downtown music scene, many of whom lived and worked within a few blocks of the WTC – Sonic Youth in Murray Street, Laurie Anderson in Greenwich Street, for instance. The programme is excellent – you can listen to it in Real Audio. Some of the artists interviewed have obviously had their worlds turned upside down by the event. Others do that amazing thing that only artists and egomaniacs can do – coming through a world-changing trauma, worldview, prejudices and ego intact – “yeah. It was a nightmare. And now I’m mostly working with tabla and tape loops…”

Digital divide – approx. 3000 miles wide

One look at this map (From the Public Internet Project via Werblog) showing Manhattan’s wi-fi nodes should be enough to prove that the biggest digital divide of all is the one that runs roughly North-South down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. What would a similar map of London, Paris or Berlin look like? Sparse, I’ll bet. The distribution of nodes within Manhattan also speaks volumes of the divide at ground level, though.

If I’ve got this right, the big, empty zone at top right is dominated by social housing likely to be light on Wi-Fi. The graphic recalls Booth’s extraordinary 1889 map of London, visualising Victorian urban poverty for the first time in startling, block-by-block detail. (got this wrong yesterday and credited the maps to Mayhew who wrote about the London poor. Luckily nobody visits this weblog so I think I got away with it).