Tag: Manhattan

Discussion

100th St and Manhattan Avenue, New York

The man in the car saw me passing with my camera in hand and called out to me. We then had a wide-ranging discussion for about a half-hour – or rather we listened to an amusing monologue most of that time with the occasional word got in edgewise by me or the man on the left. We covered all of the issues of the day, somewhat parabolically, with insights into the current regime alternating with arcane, insider quasi-conspiracy theories. Time well spent.

Back-Up

94th St and First Avenue, New York

As part of my project on the gentrification of my old neighborhood (upper Yorkville and lower East Harlem) I was visiting sites from my childhood. I didn’t remember this structure and asked some men who were hanging out near here on a bench about it. They told me it was one of a handful of backup generators that had been installed since Hurricane Sandy for the surrounding public housing apartment complex.

Mack’s

East 96th Street, New York

This modern luxury high-rise apartment block stands next door to an apartment building where I lived as a boy, on the site of a former one-storey auto-body repair shop known as Mack’s because the Black man who owned and operated it was called Mack. Unknown to us at the time, he was Carl C McNair, father of “Ronald Erwin McNair (October 21, 1950 – January 28, 1986)… an American NASA astronaut and physicist [who] died at the age of 35 during the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger.”