From the Navy Yard to the Graveyard

I went on my second tour of the Brooklyn Navy Yard a week ago this past Sunday and Green-Wood Cemetery yesterday. Both yards are steeped in history and were outstanding tours. Now I have even more pix in my Flickr uploading backlog. 

It puzzles me that I was born about 1 1/2 miles away in Sunset Park and don’t think I’ve ever been in Green-Wood Cemetery before. There is an incredible collection of very old trees in the cemetery and it was a beautiful melange of fall foliage to photograph. It is a world class botanical garden in its own right. Living in Brooklyn, who needs to drive to see fall foliage? 

It is only recently that the Navy Yard has been open for public tours. There is no doubt that I will be on another tour in the near future. It’s great that they have instituted an outreach program to the community. It is a most interesting place to be with a camera. There are photo ops everywhere, as there are at Green-Wood Cemetery.

Nest Sunday I will go on a walking tour of the Sunset Park Neighborhood where I was born. Now that should be most interesting. The tour guide grew up there in the ’40s and ’50s.

The Results on Ice

This is what he’s looking at. 

At the suggestion of dear daughter Karen, I subwayed over to Rockefeller Center skating rink to shoot some pix of the electoral college map. I’ve got lots of photos of the rink and the map to upload to Flickr but this is my favorite. Have a look at the Flickr photo set here. I’m still working on it. 

This guy just walked into this photo. There’s nothing posed here. It’s serendipity that he’s alone. Trust me, there were lots of people constantly walking by.

He’s wearing a Top of the Rock Observation Deck coat and I assume he works there. As you can see he’s pondering the map. 

What color do you think his skin is?

I’m not gonna tell ya!

My Fair Lady

The Queens pix are finally uploaded to Flickr. See them in a set here or click on the photo. This photo was taken with my camera by Myles Devin of Elgin, Moray Scotland who was about to sail on the QE2. Lucky him! 

Myles and friends post to a forum at CruiseCritic.com.  This is a site search of his posts as screen name CunardQueen. There’s some interesting information from people who cruise the Queens.

Kung Hei Fat Choy!

I have no memory of the last time being in the marvelous mecca of entertainment known as Radio City Music Hall. It may be fifty or more years ago.

In any case, it was a lot of fun last week celebrating the Lunar New Year with a large group of Chinese Americans. The show was an extravaganza but anticlimactic. I had already had my big thrill for the day just getting inside the theater. I felt like I was in a cathedral. It was awesome.

I have faded memories of luxurious facilities in the theater. They were brought back to life when I walked down to the rest room. Note the unexpected scale figure who walked into the picture. The men’s lounge was the men’s smoking lounge back in 1932 when it opened just a year before my birth. Of course, smoking by glamorous actors was a part of mainstream life in the golden age of movies. I too started smoking at a very early age. Oh my have times changed.

I clicked my little point and shoot camera many times inside the theater but none of the photos could do justice to what I saw. Oh for an SLR and tripod. The seats were unfilled because I was very early, I took the picture from my seat which was not far from the stage.

The show was spectacular but perhaps more evocative of The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins than a Lunar New Year celebration. I must admit dozing several times. Perhaps you can get an idea from this promotional video including the rather trite viewer raves. The show had no content like anything I remember from running all those Firecracker 10K runs in Los Angeles Chinatown. For sure, I wasn’t expecting to be propagandized at this show. The video too is high quality propaganda.

I found this review on the web. The writer expressed my thoughts far better than I could. He read my mind.

By bmesc on 1/16/2008

Make no mistake: This is a fulan gong show and it is not subtle. 50% of the pieces are directly referencing fulan gong and its teachings. The MCs say “fulan gong,” the song lyrics directly reference fulan gong, dance pieces glorify fulan gong teachings and the scene depicting police (with a big red communist symbol on their backs) killing a fulan gong follower is too graphic for children. If the title of the show was, correctly, a Fulan Gong New Year Spectacular, would you go? They marketed this show in a misleading way. I know a bit about Chinese culture, being married to a Chinese born wife. To be fair, she thought half the show was good, and the scenery is spectacular, but she, as I, could not believe how overtly they preached their beliefs. The sad thing is, if you do not know much about Chinese tradition, this show does not really represent it. They seem say that China of long ago, when religious beliefs were prevalent is how it should be. My wife and I thought we’d see a big production of the types of shows you can see during various San Diego Chinese New Years’ events, but there are no traditional songs in this show and they use traditional Chinese dance to tell their own stories glorifying what fulan gong teaches. This is not a Chinese New Year celebration per se. The most well known aspect, the dragon dance, is absent. If you did not know this was the year of the rat, you would not know it after the show, either. They didn’t mention it. I had no opinion of fulan gong before I went to this show, and I’m not for or against fulan gong or the Chinese government, but after seeing this show, it is hard not to believe the fulan gong is a politically motivated religious group. (To be clear, my rating is 1-Star but my preview incorrectly indicated 5)

Earlier in the day, I became an official “New York Senior Citizen” when I applied for and got my senior discount MetroCard. With it, I can now ride the subways and buses all day and all night for only $38 a month. What a deal! The experience was very much like getting a passport by the way.

The MetroCard center happened to be just around the corner from my old IBM office at 2 Broadway. I well remember those long (2 hr each way) trips to and from East Windsor, N.J. via the Penn Central at Princeton Junction. I particularly remember the walk through the grounds of Trinity Church. I have little or no memory of the mural so prominent at the entrance to 2 Broadway. It’s a hint as to where my mind was in those days. Note the Starbucks next door. I sat there for a while and watched the passing parade of people on the street outside. People watching in New York is so much fun.

This is a sample nearby at the well known bull sculpture.

I thought seriously about going to the Giant’s ticker tape parade the day before but decided not to when I got up and saw the weather. You can see some of the paper debris on a building across from 2 Broadway. I certainly have earned a lifetime membership in the Giant’s fan club from those days long ago rooting for the likes of Charlie Connerly, Y.A. Tittle, Fran Tarkington, Frank Gifford, Kyle Rote and Frank Summerall. This is a team however for younger fans and I was just a bystander to this miraculous victory.

This fun day ended with an interesting vignette. I walked  a couple of blocks to the R train entrance, went down a flight of stairs to find that I was on the uptown side. As I was standing there scanning the signs, I heard a woman’s voice (with a slight Spanish accent) ask which direction I was going. When I answered Brooklyn, she said I was on the wrong side of the street and then gave me detailed directions. With that she asked if I’d like an elevator back up to the street level then proceeded to walk over and press the button for an elevator. She obviously noticed me staring at the signs and quickly sized up the situation. You’ve heard New Yorkers are always in a hurry with no time for courtesy? Fuggedaboutit! I’ve been shown more courtesy and respect as a senior on the subway and streets of New York these past months than all the years driving around Southern California in my little “glass bubble”, even with the top down.

Big Apple Holidays

Holiday events started on Friday evening with a concert at the almost 100-year-old Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd just a few blocks away. I happened to surf in to the concert announcement on the Meetup.com site. The St. Petersburg Men’s Ensemble sang Russian classics and folk songs a cappella. They were outstanding.

Afterwards at the coffee and cake social, I met Pastor David Rommereim. We had a most interesting conversation, which I look forward to continuing.

Saturday evening was a dance concert at the renowned Joyce Theater in Chelsea. I well remember going there on a NYC trip in 2000. I was staying at the Chelsea Lodge nearby. It’s a great venue (not too large) and the Tango Fire performance was a sell out. It was interesting that the audience responded to the instrumental tango more so than the dance performers. To my surprise, the orchestra got the most rousing applause from the audience at the end of the concert.

My main interest is the dance. These stage performers are very acrobatic, ballet-trained dancers as you will see in the video. However, I much prefer the tango and milonga dancing I watch on YouTube. It’s great to see some of the sometimes-portly older folks and their smooth moves. In the coming year, I’ll find some places to see these types of amateur dancers. It will likely be a ballroom venue.

Be sure you’re over 18 before watching this video.

Christmas day turned out to be a walkathon on my creaky old knees. I went to Manhattan for not one but two walking tours, with my own solo tour in between. By the end of the day I could hardly move. I had walked in a meandering path from 49th street down to 18th street with a lot of standing in one place listening to the tour guides. That’s more stress on the knees than walking.

The Municipal Art Society sponsored the morning tour of Rockefeller Center. I’ve been on a number of MAS tours in the past and they’ve all been memorable events.

The walking tour led by Tony Robins was smack in the middle of a multi-ring circus known as Rockefeller Center on Christmas day. What a show! I could have stayed there for many hours just people watching. I kept thinking about the fact that I really do live in NY. I’m not a tourist or commuter like the old days. It was a great feeling.

After the tour I walked down to the Grand Central area and over to Bryant Park to check out the skating. Then it was a walk down to 18th street and 6th avenue for the “Ladies Mile” tour. Bernie Cohen who is also a fountain of information led it. It was a revelation to see these old department store buildings and the present occupants including The Container Store, Bed, Bath & Beyond, Burlington Mills and Home Depot among others.

This is a “shopping mall” like no other I’ve seen and I’ve seen a lot of them in the course of business and shopping in Southern California. Some may recall that I was one of the pioneers in marketing preserved palm trees. Shopping centers were prime prospects.

There are a few photos posted to Flickr with many more to come including street photography from my daily walks in Balboa Park in 2006. Posting photos with captions and description copy is a tedious job. Flickr can use up a lot of free time, that’s for sure.

Today, I’m off to The Museum of the City of New York. It’s the last day of the Glory Days of New York Baseball exhibit. I was a die-hard Dodger fan back in the late ‘40s and the 50’s until Walter O’Malley stuck a knife in Brooklyn’s heart when he moved the team to L.A.

It will be interesting to reminisce about those years, never to be repeated. Can you imagine three major league teams in NYC? Baseball was King of the Big Apple before growth hormones, steroids, gargantuan salaries and egos. The players I saw at Ebbets Field were real people among real people. I look forward to seeing some minor league baseball at Keyspan Park, home of the Brooklyn Cyclones in Coney Island. I’ll find some new “boys of summer” to root for.

Incidentally, it’s a strange feeling to walk by the site of Ebbets Field on my many trips to the Ebbets Field Middle School. It’s across the street from home plate. The site is now occupied by a large and rather ugly housing project. It’s a sad commentary on what was once there. Oh well, “ever onward and upward” as we used to say in Big Blue.

Those were the days when the Big Apple was sort of the “Big Blue Apple” with the somewhat mythical IBM “World Headquarters” at 590 Madison Avenue. I used to have this picture in my mind of Tom Watson, “the wizard”, sitting in a top floor office slowing spinning a globe of the world while pondering his next move. If he was a “corporate bastard” a term used by many treehugger boomers, he was a benevolent bastard. Many forget who paid for their college educations.

IBM sold the building but the well known atrium still exists with most of its bamboo. I made a good friend there on one of my NYC trips. I met Helen on a MAS walking tour. She lives in Northern California but perhaps one day she will be a Brooklynite again. I’ll go by 590 Madison again one of these days. It will always be the IBM Building to me.