Early days of the IRT. 

Rest in peace, Ossie Shectman.

[Photo Via: Johnie_b]

Another dope New York City picture by Steven Siegel: Williamsburg Bridge walkway, NY Streetscapes, via Snowce.

Via Colossal, check out Jose the Amazing photographed by Chris Arnade.

A different kind of subway map.

The Hopper drawing show at the Whitney.

I’ve got more on Hopper over at The Stacks. 

Found over at Kottke, this map of midtown Manhattan circa 1890.

From National Geographic Found. (A dope site.)

Gotta love looking into the windows, right?

[Photo Credit: John Fraissinet]

The Woolworth Building by Dan Poharyskyi.

And more.

Gothamist gives the 7 best milkshakes in New York.

Alan Taylor’s In Focus is a great site–bookmark it, folks.

Here’s a gallery of the Rotten Apple back in the Seventies.

My father did some work for CTW in the 1970s. He’d bring us home Sesame Street albums and once we cleaned our rooms were allowed to listen to them. One time, Dad took my sister and me to visit the set of Sesame Street. We sat on this stoop and looked into Mr. Hooper’s store. Nobody was filming. The crew was busy. I remember a kid riding a bike around. We sat there, next to Oscar’s garbage can, quietly, and wondered where Mr. Hooper was.

[Pictures via: Loosetooningaround]

Mugged, mugging. I remember hearing those words all the time growing up. Always aware that it could happen, that it would happen. When it did, getting mugged didn’t mean you’d be killed, just that someone would take your shit.

That is mind, here’s David Freeman’s 1970 New York magazine story, “Mugging as a Way of Life”:

Twelve years ago, when the moon was made of paper and a pleasant old man was the President, Hector Diaz moved with his mother, his grandmother and a platoon of assorted relatives from the slums of North San Juan to El Barrio in the slums of North Manhattan. None of the Diazes spoke English and there were 10 people in three rooms, but the rooms were big, the plumbing was inside and the older Diazes took strength in little Hector, who was 9 and had eyes the color of ripe olives and who seemed to learn English faster than he grew. On Hector’s 11th birthday the family moved to Simpson Street in the South Bronx and Hector moved to the streets, where along with more English he learned the ways of the IRT and of airplane glue.

Two years ago Hector moved from Simpson Street to Avenue C on the Lower East Side, where he changed his ecstasy from glue to red wine in brown paper bags and then to heroin in glassine envelopes. Hector is still the only Diaz who can speak English and his eyes still look like olives, but green ones now, stuffed with red pimento. The Diazes, or what’s left of them, still live on Simpson Street and Hector visits them occasionally. But Hector spends his days on the streets of the Lower East Side, where he and a friend named Louise share their nights in burnt-out buildings and support themselves by mugging their neighbors.

For a time, in the fifties, the streets that run east of Avenue A to the river and below Houston Street to the Brooklyn Bridge on New York’s Lower East Side were almost a shrine, praised as the breeding ground of armies of doctors and lawyers all of whom looked like Harry Golden. Praising the tenements of their youth (“Sure it was tough, but we had love and desire . . .”), Lower East Side alumni sounded like Nixon talking about his astronauts. Today the incipient Jewish judges are gone, and the hippies of a few years ago are mostly gone, departed for communes or the suburbs. The streets and the buildings, exhausted from generations of bright, aggressive youngsters followed by stoned hippies, look tired, as if they need a rest after 65 years of social ferment. Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall are gone; the streets are lined with garbage now—human and automotive—and the people are mostly Puerto Rican. The billboards are in Spanish and in every store window a red sign screams “How do you know you don’t have V.D.?/ ¿Cómo sabe Ud. que no tiene enfermedad venérea?” The old-law tenements are crumbling, collapsing, burnt-out hulks. Their windows are covered with tin and plywood and their roofs are ripped away so that the sunlight floods into the upper stories like shrapnel.

[Photo Credit: Steven Siegel]

“What is your superpower?”

“Fix the trains.”

Because it’s hard to get enough of Humans of New York.

Gotta love the Petrossian Building on 58th Street and 7th Avenue.

Picture by Ampersand Design.

This is cool. Head on over to The Verge and learn how two people became the voice of 110 airports and the NYC subway.

Story by Lessley Anderson:

Airports trigger anxiety. Subway systems cause paranoia. We all know the statistics: it’s riskier to get in your car than it is to board an aircraft or take a train. But our collective memories of bombings, hijackings, and poison gas attacks often turn public spaces of transport into psychic mine fields. Stuck in limbo between the here and there, pushing through a crush of strangers, we are totally vulnerable and alone. Except we’re not. There’s always the voice.

You know, the one that tells us that “smoking inside the terminal is prohibited,” and that “unattended baggage will be removed immediately,” and that “the next stop is Times Square.” It’s sort of irritating, yet something to cling to, as familiar and pervasive as the smell of Cinnabon or axle grease.

It may surprise you to learn that these announcements are not only real people, but for the most part the same two people. They are Carolyn Hopkins and Jack Fox, two cheerful, church-going retirees who also happen to be longtime buddies.

The story of how they came to conquer the sound systems of the majority of major transportation centers across the country is groovier than you’d expect. It has roots in the music industry, and features a homespun business that was able to grow beyond its Southern roots and go global by capitalizing on a weird technological niche.

The next stop is Louisville, KY.

[Photo Via: Rad Collector]

Guy I know went to the game last week when Derek Jeter returned to action.

Sent me this e-mail:

Went to the game again today, got a $5 ticket, bought it a couple hours before the Jeter announcement.

On the train on the way up, I see a couple. (I was running late so there weren’t many of us). The girl’s wearing a Jeter T-shirt, looking at her cell phone. The guy’s got on a Yankees wife-beater, Yanks shorts, and he’s holding one of those bona fide gray Jeter jerseys that cost like a 100 bucks.

I sidle up and say, “Hey, got the Jeter gear! His first game of the year!”

The guy looks at me then looks away. “I dunno, we don’t follow them.”

The girl keeps on checking her phone.

[Photo Credit: Meredith Winn]

I understand why they move slowly down south. This heat, man, it’s not meant for rushing around. Still, the city cooks along at it’s brisk pace despite a heat wave. But many of us are taking caution to move as deliberately as possible. Gotta pace yourself in this weather, man.

Picture by Bags. 

Check out what I found over at Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York–man, this is so dope–Roy Colmer’s photo collection of New York City doors. Three thousand pictures taken in 1976.

Here’s the front of my grandparents apartment building:

Man, this brings back memories. I was five when this picture was taken. Sometimes, the Internet is cool in unexpected ways.