I highly recommend reading “When The Bronx Was A Forest: Stroll Through The Centuries” by Michael Kimmelman. It’s a great discussion of the way the human landscape overlies the natural one; it’s a nice refutation of ridiculous stereotypes about the Bronx. The picture above is the Bronx River, probably where is passes through the Botanical Garden …
The Covid-19 lockdown had the odd effect of making the entire spring season disappear. Spending three months largely indoors, with a reduced project workload but a huge increase in administrative work, erased any sense of the tail end of cold weather and the start of warm weather. The lockdown has mostly ended in time for …
To continue the thought from a post last week, a lot of people noticed that city centers were improved – in horrible circumstances – by the reduction in car traffic during the Covid-19 lockdowns this spring. It’s inevitable that people will look for a silver lining in this enormous cloud, but beyond that we need …
By coincidence, I happened to be back in the Bronx about three blocks from where I took a picture of Billionaire’s Row using my cell phone’s camera, only this time I had a proper camera with me. I didn’t have a real telephoto lens, but rather an adjustable lens with an somewhat-approaching-telephoto focal length. The …
Mike Wallace was nice enough to pull out the sections of Gotham specifically referring to past epidemics and put them all in one place: A Tour of the Plague Years in New York City. Some of it seems familiar, some does not. For those not familiar with Gotham, Wallace and Edwin Burroughs capture New York …
