Last month in New York, strong winds and heavy rain wreaked Stalinesque havoc on the only (known) object of affection shared by Rihanna and Andy Rooney: the umbrella. Luckily, Patrick Griffin documented the devastation.
Rooftop Beers with Good Friends
Are a hell of a way to end a three day holiday weekend. Happy Fourth, everybody.
Civilization by Marco Brambilla
This video mural was created by artist Marco Brambilla for the The Standard, a hotel here in New York. The video, which will be played back in high definition, will be viewed by passenger’s in the hotel’s elevators through special portals. The movement of the video will coincide with the direction the elevator is traveling. Read more about the project here.
Chinatown, overhead.
This is a particularly colorful picture I took with my phone a while back when I was walking over the Manhattan Bridge. What you’re seeing there is a few Chinatown rooftops.
Sounds of the F Train
This recording was done with my cell phone during my train ride home from work the other day. This guy is one of my favorite subway musicians.
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New York’s Rooftop Water Tanks
(Photo credit: Lawlesco)
Ever wonder about those wooden water tanks you see on top of all those buildings in New York? I had a hunch that I knew what they were there for, so I looked it up. It turns out I was right. Back in 1978, The New Yorker ran a piece in Talk of the Town on the Rosenwach Tank Company of Long Island City, a company that still builds and maintains the tanks.
No one has ever come up with a better way of making a rooftop water tank than by girdling a cylinder of wooden staves with metal hoops and adding a conical roof, and New York, which has thousands of cylindrical wooden rooftop water tanks with conical roofs, couldn’t exist without them. The tanks are here because the water that comes into town through the aqueducts will rise to about the sixth floor without any assistance but has to be pumped to tanks on top of taller buildings to provide water pressure on their upper floors. This scheme provides plenty pressure, because the water arrives at those floors by falling straight down. Rosenwach has built and installed well over half of the city’s tanks.
…
“You can’t draw a New York skyline without water tanks,” Wallace Rosenwach says. He’s fifty-six, a jolly Teddy bear of a man. “You look down from the top of a high building and see a sea of tanks. We’re stupid enough to insist on manufacturing our own tanks. They last forever, unfortunately.”
What Lies Beneath New York Harbor
The folks at New York Magazine did a little investigation to find out exactly what’s rattling around beneath the East and Hudson Rivers.
One of my favorite entries on the list:
Teredos and Gribbles
Two kinds of hungry pests gnaw away at the pilings that hold up structures like the FDR Drive, the U.N. school on East 25th Street, and the Con Ed plant at 14th. Teredos, which start life looking like tiny clams, grow up to be worms “as big around as your thumb, and nearly four feet long, with little triangular teeth,” says commercial diver Lenny Speregen. Like underwater termites, they devour wood. And Limnoria tripunctata, a.k.a. “gribbles,” are bugs about the size of a pencil dot that look like tiny armadillos, and eat not only wood but also concrete. Speregen says he’s seen fifteen-inch-diameter columns that have been gnawed down, hourglass style, to three inches. The city has tried jacketing pilings in heavy plastic to keep the critters out, but it hasn’t worked well: Floating ice tears up the jackets in winter. “I never said this wasn’t a war,” says Speregen.
That’s right–underwater termites and worms that eat concrete. I’ll grab my swimming trunks.
Dr. Jonathan Zizmor Haunts You in Your Subway Dreams
If you’ve ridden the subway, there’s a one in five chance you’ve seen his ad. The good doctor actually makes for a great interview. These little oddities are what makes this city sparkle to me.
Dr. Jonathan Zizmor, The Subway Doctor on Gothamist
via NYMag
Apparently, some guy in Brooklyn…
Apparently, some guy in Brooklyn thinks that there’s an old steam locomotive buried beneath Atlantic Avenue in Cobble Hill. Oh yeah, and in that locomotive, he’s pretty sure he’s going to find the diary of John Wilkes Booth which, of course, lists his co-conspirators in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
What’s Behind the Wall? at New York Magazine
Andrew W.K.’s Party House
Andrew W.K. fans who don’t happen to live in New York City may be wondering what their party rock messiah has been up to recently. He opened a dance club. New York Magazine checks in with him as he works the levers and pulleys behind the curtain at Santos Party House.
Incidentally, I’m not totally convinced that the dude they’re hanging out with in the lighting booth is Andrew W.K. at all. Here’s why.
Just kidding. Or am I? Party Hard, folks.
How Andrew W.K. Is Democratizing Nightlife With Santos Party House at New York Magazine
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