Lots of people getting out of town today. I’m glad that I’m not one of them. Hope that no matter where you are, you have a decent time of it tomorrow.

[Photo Credit: Thig Nat]

NYCmovie

Seen on Broadway last night.

[Photo Credit: NY Bits]

Meanwhile, uptown, the Dominican boys don’t mess around. Last weekend, there they were, still playing baseball.

The local was running behind schedule this morning so the conductor announced that after 72nd Street the 1 train was going express to Times Square, bypassing my stop in the process. I got off at 72nd and took one step to the side of the door onto the platform. My left foot was maybe six inches away from the ledge and I had to look away as the train pulled out of the station so I wouldn’t get dizzy. Then, as we waited for the next train to approach, I looked back at the faces huddled behind me and then shifted my weight on my back leg, away from the tracks. I was less than a foot away from disaster but not sensible enough to lose my spot.

[Photo Credit: Rob Brulinski]

Hey, all you out-of-towners. What’s your Manhattan address?

As a kid I never understood this sign. Saw it all over the city but it made no sense. Why would anyone want to post dollar bills? And how do you post something anyway?

Seen on the street last week in the Bronx.

I have a friend who won’t buy books on the street because she doesn’t want lice in her library. She doesn’t mean this as a put down, her concern is authentic. I never thought of it that way though I’m picky about the condition of a book when I buy it on the street. Condition, my desire for the title, and the price. Last week I picked up a good paperback copy of E.L. Doctorow’s Book on Daniel. What’s the last book you got on the street?

It was in December of 1999 when I started looking at the clock every day at 11:11. It happened in the morning and at night, at home and at work. Happened three, four days in a row, and then nothing for a day or two and then again for a week: 11:11. It continued into the new year, not every day but sometimes for a couple of weeks at time . And if it wasn’t 11:11 on the nose, it was 11:09 or 11:12.

This went on for months. I didn’t know what to make of it so I just decided to take the moment for myself whenever I saw it was 11:11.

A couple of years later I started dating Emily who eventually became my wife.

Today is her birthday: 11/11/11.

I have my answer.

Over at Codex 99, check out this cool post about subway tiles.

I finished a novel this morning on my subway ride to work. I had to read the last paragraph twice and felt that peculiar almost weightless feeling that comes when you finish a book. I read the last page again and then looked up, disoriented. The car was crowded and two older women stood in front of me. I had noticed them before but didn’t want to break the spell of that last page.

Now that I was done I offered my seat to the shorter woman who looked older. She refused.

“You saying I look old?” she said and then smiled.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “If I see you again I won’t extend the courtesy.”

She liked that and when the person sitting next to me stood up at the next stop, she sat down.

“You know you are damned either way,” she said. “If you offer the seat you can offend someone’s pride, if you don’t offer it, you have no manners.”

“The worst is when you offer it to a woman you think is pregnant,” said her friend, still standing after she refused my offer to sit, too. “Then you find out she’s not.”

I told them that my parents raised me to have manners but for most of my life I performed acts of kindness selfishly, keeping score of how many nice things I’d done.

“Well, it’s karma,” said the standing woman.

“No,” I said, “it was a set-up to feel burned if things didn’t go my way.”

I said that now I do what I do because it makes me feel good not because it means anything else.

“That’s a good philosophy of life,” said the older woman sitting next to me.

I told her that it was a relief. We talked about courtesies and feminism and she said that women can confuse gender and manners. Then she said, “Where are we?”

“Two more stops,” her friend said.

I asked where they were going and the woman sitting next to me said, “Roosevelt Hospital.”

“Oh, for you or to see someone?” I said, regretting it as soon as the words came out of my mouth.

“I’m starting chemo today,” she said.

“Really? You look vital,” I said and regretted that even more.

She said she felt great but worried that her children were so upset.

“I told them that I’m as strong as I’ve felt in a long time,” she said and we talked about feeling helpless. Her kids are helpless to make her better and she is helpless to help them. As she spoke I remembered the review of the new Joan Didion memoir that I’d read last weekend in the New York Times. The book is about how the author handled the death of her daughter, which happened shortly after the death of her husband. John Banville concluded his review with:

The author as she presents herself here, aging and baffled, is defenseless against the pain of loss, not only the loss of loved ones but the loss that is yet to come: the loss, that is, of selfhood. The book will be another huge success, for reasons not mistaken but insufficient. Certainly as a testament of suffering nobly borne, which is what it will be generally taken for, it is exemplary. However, it is most profound, and most provocative, at another level, the level at which the author comes fully to realize, and to face squarely, the dismaying fact that against life’s worst onslaughts nothing avails, not even art; especially not art.

The older woman sitting next to me looked strong and she smiled and told me how much she liked her doctors. When we got to 59th street I leaned over and kissed her cheek and she stood up and the two women pushed through the crowded car. I looked after them and saw the older woman turn back and smile and me. I thought of my wife and how I always look after her when I leave her on the subway. The woman waved and then was gone.

[Photo Credit: Dark Magoo]

Check out this photo gallery of Penn Station over at Retronaut.

I found it difficult to look at these pictures without feeling torn up.

Sunday was Marathon Day. My wife Amelia was running so we went full out with t-shirts, posters and banners. At 124th St and 1st Ave, my older son sat on my shoulders and we yelled out to every runner we could while we waited for her to pass. The runners were psyched to get cheers, but when they came from the squeaky voice of a four year-old, their smiles were double wide. It’s a special day in New York, but I’ll let our runner explain how it feels from inside the ropes:

I am proud to live in New York City every day, but today showed me why ten times over. The support and enthusiam from EVERYONE, in EVERY Borough was just mind blowing and made me so proud to be a New Yorker!!!!

A helluva town.

Big city of dreams.

Pictures of New York by Louis Faurer via Everyday I Show.

I know the clocks change this weekend but for the past few weeks I’ve been up early in the dark. Today, as I was sitting on the living room floor, stretching, I looked up and saw the sun through the drawn shades. Nothing like the sun to start the day off  on the good foot.

My basketball game ends around 8:30 PM on Tuesday nights. Always check the Yankee score before I get on the train. Then, when I get off at 207, I sneak a peak into the bar on Broadway, which is sure to have the game on. If I can’t catch the score there, I’ll definitely get a glimpse in the cigar shop, where five or six guys will be huddled around their old school TV set.

Last night the end of the season hit home for the first time. No score to check. Nothing interesting at the bar and the cigar smokers blowing smoke at each other instead of Derek Jeter.

The baseball season, a constant presence for such a lengthy part of the year, functions as an adhesive to life in the city for a lot of people. I’m one of them. And when it’s gone, especially in those years the Yanks don’t win it all, it’s an effort to move on without it.

Our good pal Mark Lamster had a long piece in the New York Times last Sunday. You don’t want to miss it:

IT sounds like something out of a dime novel, or maybe a Nicolas Cage film. Behind the mute facade of a largely windowless neo-Gothic tower lies an ingenious system of steel vaults traveling on rails. Within those armored containers, which have been in continuous use since the Jazz Age, are stored some of New York City’s most precious objects and, presumably, a good number of its darkest secrets.

This building actually exists, and you will find it on an otherwise unremarkable stretch of Second Avenue, just north of the end of the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge. It is the Day & Meyer, Murray & Young warehouse, and since it opened in 1928 it has been the storage building of choice for many of New York’s wealthiest families, most prestigious art dealers and grandest museums.

The company’s early client list reads like a condensation of the New York Social Register, with names like Astor and Auchincloss, du Pont and Guggenheim, Havemeyer and Vanderbilt prominent. The press baron William Randolph Hearst stored entire rooms bought in Europe there during the construction of his castle at San Simeon, Calif.

Congrats to Mark for the story, and another job well done.

My cousin’s too big for trick-or-treating, but he was still bummed that Halloween was cancelled. Downed power lines, still rippling with electricity, all over his town. Kids had to stay inside, munching from the family stash.

In our neighborhood, it was business as usual, a rare time when Halloween in the city is better than the variety just across the Bridge.

We have a candy exchange in a big park. The scene is both efficient and chaotic as you can fill your pumpkin in minutes, but the total experience pales in comparison to the coordinated march from house to house that I remember from my childhood.

Luckily, we have a few local spots that give my kids an idea of how it’s supposed to be…

It’s cold today, not autumn chilly but the start of winter cold. Last day of what has been an enjoyable baseball season and I am sorry to see it end.

I saw these guys on Broadway when I got out of the subway, walked over and felt the ground shake beneath me. A good feeling, watching men work, the ground vibrating.

Where else but Retronaut?

More NYC goodness from Vivian Maier (via Retronaut):