This is the second of three posts covering the one day and two nights we spent in New York in 2011 doing, quite frankly, not a lot at all. You might want to take a look at the first part of the walk in Manhattan Photowalk: Midtown South To The Staten Island Ferry to get more of the background behind why we went and why we decided to just walk for bloody miles taking photos, but if I know you half as well as I think I do then you won’t bother, thinking instead that you’ll glean some information here about something important without all that effort of a click, a read, and another click. Make sure you’re sitting down in your comfortable Disappointment Chair.
This post isn’t going to contain a lot of anything other than the photos of New York’s streets as we made our way back from getting off the Staten Island Ferry to where our hotel was. We chose a different, more direct route to facilitate this from our outgoing trek since our walk thus far had taken us longer than we’d expected thanks to failing to grasp the scale on the map. For the most part we simply followed Broadway. Fewer points of interest, therefore, so fewer chances for me to waffle on about inconsequential crap. But I’ll try anyway, because I’m me.
We could see we weren’t too far from Wall Street and it was roughly in the direction we needed to walk anyway so very soon we happened upon the Charging Bull sculpture. Our visit in November 2011 took place just a month after the Occupy Wall Street protests had occurred so there were still barriers up around the artwork as it had been a target for vandalism thanks to its association with the capitalism that everyone was somewhat miffed about back then. Thanks goodness we’ve all learnt to worship capitalism again now, though, eh?
The barriers meant we couldn’t rub the bull’s testicles, and for that we’re glad. It’s supposed to bring luck but the only luck it can possibly bring you is the luck that you don’t catch anything off whatever the person before you had and left on the bronze surface.
Charging Bull was sculpted by Arturo di Modica, originally illegally dumped on Wall Street, then later moved to its home at Bowling Green, not too far away.
Wall Street itself was not interesting. I know, I’m as surprised as you that they didn’t think to make the financial hub of New York more fun for kids. However, outside Federal Hall, the place where George Washington was sworn in as President in 1789 and in which the Bill of Rights was written, we watched a man climb on top of the plinth of the statue of Washington to pose for a photo for his girlfriend or wife. Not going to lie, but we were disappointed that cops didn’t start shouting at him in thick New Yoik accents to get his ass down off there or something.
Something we didn’t realise, or would likely have cared about at the time, to be fair, is that Federal Hall is next to Trump Tower. Just think: a carelessly discarded, lit bomb from the Acme Corporation back then and we could possibly have changed the course of history and stopped the narcissistic orange fascist from rising to the dizzying heights of most-laughed-at nutball.
Looking west(ish) from Wall Street presented the incongruous view of Trinity Church in the gap between two skyscrapers. When this church – the third such church with this name built on this location – was constructed in the mid-nineteenth century it was, until 1869, the tallest building in the United States.
One of the good things about New York’s streets from the perspective of a street photographer is that you often need to stop and wait for traffic lights to let you cross. You end up with all sorts of people just across the road from you, stationary, and sometimes very interesting photographically. Not these people, mind, and I wouldn’t call myself a street photographer anyway, but you can expect to see random snaps of people waiting to cross streets throughout this New York photowalk.
The building with the attractive façade below is the Manhattan Municipal Building built between 1909 and 1914 in a style best described as all its own, but borrowing from European Renaissance. The gilded copper statue on the building’s top is called Civic Fame and is 7.6 metres high, making it the second tallest statue in Manhattan if including the Statue of Liberty, and built in a similar style too.
How many jeans do you want? Unlimited, you say? Seems a bit greedy but let’s see. Well, okay then, looks like New York’s the place for you.
I really liked how much grimy life there was to see in New York. The condition of the shop in the photo below with its tattered awnings, the scrawl of graffiti, and the questionably genuine products on sale is so attractive in a perverse way. We came away from this visit to New York with a feeling that yes, we could live here. In the city, that is, not the shop.
Leghead is a street artist from New York, although I don’t know if the girl and bunny image is his, or just the tagging, or both. Everyone’s got a message to broadcast, though, whether that you love the bunny image, or you want China out of Tibet, or you want people to know that your reasonable demand to tax the rich is offset by your conspiracy theories.
As someone who walks around with a dSLR I do like looking out for other invested camera owners, perhaps trying to catch their eyes so we can nod, work out who’s got the most expensive body and lens arrangement in order that we know our social standing amongst one another, and bask in that fellowship that we’re both living on the edge, risking a right proper mugging one of these days. This photographer was busy taking pictures of a model, though, so that never happened. I did search online without success after this trip to America to see if I could see the photo published anywhere on social media but it was a rather remote hope in the first place.
Time to dust off your detective skills. I want you see if you can identify the clues that will lead you to work out which building along this street is the McDonald’s restaurant. No cheating by trying to find the place on Google Maps, now.
The Strand Bookstore in 1996 was the largest used bookstore in the world and has also featured in a number of TV shows and movies, although I imagine half the buildings in Manhattan have featured in a TV show or movie at some point.
The picture of the two guys on the corner of this New York street below was probably my favourite capture of the day. Sometimes you just look at a shot and think “Oh yeah, I can get all obnoxiously pretentious about this lucky snap!”
The artist here is showing how people in modern society are in conflict and are not just mirrors to others but complete inversions. The white guy in the black top; the black guy in the white top. They’re not facing each other. See how one is looking to leave while the other remains, but notice the body language too. Apprehension and fear of the path ahead from one, but a relaxed state and acceptance from his negative. And above the pair of them are society’s signs: the white man can walk, but look again at which way the arrow is pointing and ask yourself what that says.
There’s one more post to complete this Manhattan Photowalk series and that will be the small amount of wandering around in the vicinity of our hotel in New York that we took on the Monday morning while waiting for the bus to take us back to Washington D.C. Expect rain. Expect some moaning about the false advertising present in the description “The city that never sleeps.”