Tag: urban

Caffeinated American

San Diego, California

We’re spending most of January in southern California (south of fire-ravaged LA). Technical note: I used Adobe Camera Raw’s beta reflection remover on this and it did a pretty fair job, except for the white blob on the far right and some vestiges along the top. Expect to see lots more California shots over the coming days and weeks, many of them kind of touristy.

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.”