Every early September a day comes that is just beautiful – particularly sunny, bright, and gently warm. On such days, I’m sure many feel it again as clearly as if it was yesterday. That Tuesday 10 years ago, the morning was clear and warm, with radiant sunshine, the kind that makes you cup your eyes [...]
Entries Tagged as 'new york'
9/11: Still-Searing Images, 10 Years Later
September 16th, 2011 · 2 Comments · Explore New York
Tags: landmarks·manhattan·meditations·new york·spiritual places
Meditation: Looking Mindfully At Details
August 5th, 2011 · 6 Comments · Columns and Features, Explore New York
In the middle of a number of us playing soccer on a delightful summer evening, one of my partner’s grandchildren said, “Look at that sky!” The sky just before sunset was full of large pink, gray, white, and lavender swirling patterns above. How wonderful that she was aware of the beauty around us and shared [...]
A Bit of the 19th Century on Lispenard
June 10th, 2011 · 8 Comments · Explore New York
Every once in a while I turn down a street in New York and suddenly think, “How have the bulldozers and the glass towers not obliterated this one?” Lispenard Street is one such place, a quiet street of a few blocks that is seemingly forgotten just one block south of the crazy, hustle-bustle free-for-all of [...]
Tags: architecture·historic preservation·manhattan·new york·Tribeca
Details, Details: Greenwich Street
April 27th, 2011 · 2 Comments · Columns and Features, Explore New York
“Manhattan” and “quiet” are two words that many people do not associate with each other and put together in the same sentence. Yet many pockets of Manhattan offer quiet, especially when we calm the mind enough to find the inner peace that allows it. As one of those Manhattan walkers whose mind often can be [...]
A Tree Grows in Chain Link
April 15th, 2011 · 9 Comments · Explore New York
New York City has 5.2 million trees, and each one of them has a life story. For a very long time, a lovely European larch has marked the seasons for those walking in Central Park. It is a deciduous conifer whose needle-like leaves turn yellow in the autumn and fall off. A tulip tree in [...]
Tags: manhattan·meditations·nature·new york
Honoring Triangle’s Victims in the Streets
March 24th, 2011 · 4 Comments · Be a Mindful Activist, Explore New York
A year after the tragic Triangle shirtwaist factory fire in 1911, sculptor Evelyn Beatrice Longman created a memorial, commissioned by the City of New York, to the seven female victims whose remains could not be identified. The city installed the sculpture with little public attention in the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn. This memorial [...]
New York Recalls the Triangle Factory Fire
March 10th, 2011 · 8 Comments · Be a Mindful Activist, Explore New York
“Rose Mehl – 15 years old.” The words jump out from the flip side of a business card on which they are imprinted. Rose was a Jewish girl who lived on East 7th Street in New York, and she had a job as a factory worker. Her name and age are printed on the back [...]
A Riveting Blue in the Lower East Side
January 21st, 2011 · No Comments · Explore New York
Sometimes a building just says “look at me” before you know it and your eyes are captivated in curiosity and wonder. It was an icy cold January afternoon with a brisk breeze, on a walk south of Grand Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The brick storefronts of the 19th century tenement buildings beckoned warmly, [...]
Tags: architecture·manhattan·new york
Lost and Found in the West 40s
January 7th, 2011 · 16 Comments · Explore New York
Walking and loving a New York street is akin to a long-term relationship. It’s an experience of both exhilaration and dejection, of losses and gains, times of discovery and times of pain. Sometimes you feel all is lost, and during others you can’t believe your good fortune. New Yorkers who love the streets know this [...]
Tags: architecture·manhattan·midtown·new york
Order Unheeded at Underground RR Home
December 13th, 2010 · 6 Comments · Be a Mindful Activist, Explore New York
One hundred and fifty years ago, escaping slaves found a safe shelter at the home of Quaker abolitionists who lived at 339 West 29th St. in New York City. The family risked their lives in harboring the slaves. During the Draft Riots that erupted in the city in 1863, the family came under attack for [...]
Tags: architecture·historic preservation·landmarks·manhattan·new york·women
In Our Midst: The Prison Ship Martyrs
September 30th, 2010 · 25 Comments · Explore New York
To walk thoughtfully around the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park is to be asked to delve into a story of unspeakable horror that took place right in New York City’s waters during the Revolutionary War. It’s a story that many of us in the 21st century do not know or one [...]
The Place Where the Draft Riots Erupted
July 16th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Explore New York
Only 10 days after the Union won a decisive victory in the Battle of Gettysburg in July, 1863, the city of New York suffered through its own brutal and bloody violence, amid the streets and buildings. Class, racial, and ethnic tensions had been brewing in New York for decades, finally brought to a head by [...]
The Free View Near Riverview Terrace
July 1st, 2010 · 7 Comments · Explore New York
In New York City, even two words can set off an intriguing exploration. An old guidebook I was perusing cited a “private street” on the far eastern side of Manhattan, where Midtown meets the Upper East Side, at Sutton Place. A private street in this city filled with hundreds of public streets? Yes, it’s a [...]
Transported Back at 20 Exchange Place
May 14th, 2010 · 9 Comments · Explore New York
Buildings are like stories, marked by scenery, time and place, and plot. They often have a rise and decline, and maybe a rise again. Buildings evoke an era, and characters conceive, design, build, and inhabit them. Like the times when we read only a few pages or a chapter of a story, we may see [...]
New York Places of Women Trailblazers
March 22nd, 2010 · 1 Comment · Be a Mindful Activist, Explore New York
Traveling in a horse-drawn buggy in the 1880s, Alice Austen carried cameras, a tripod, huge glass plates to record images, and other camera equipment with her so that she could photograph scenes on Staten Island. Sometimes the equipment weighed as much as 50 pounds. During the following decade, Austen ventured farther into New York City [...]
Tags: architecture·Brooklyn·manhattan·new york·staten island·women
NYC’s Great Sunset Spots: Gantry Plaza
January 23rd, 2010 · 8 Comments · Explore New York
Many associate the term “big sky” with America’s West, Montana especially, where you can stand in the middle of a vast, unspoiled land, breathe deeply, and take in the wide-open sky. Who would think of New York City in this context? Believe it or not, New Yorkers have their own places to search out “big [...]
Seven Joys Amid NYC’s Holiday Mayhem
December 22nd, 2009 · 7 Comments · Explore New York
“Children laughing, people passing, meeting smile after smile”…so go the lyrics of “Silver Bells,” the classic Christmas song from the 1950s that paints an idyllic scene of the holidays in the city. This picture of New York City at the holidays lives within many of us. Its images are of softly falling snow, carolers, bright [...]
Lamartine Place: Saved for Posterity
October 16th, 2009 · 7 Comments · Explore New York
One hundred years from now, most of those who walk on West 29th Street in Manhattan may not know what Fern Luskin, Julie Finch, and a small group of local citizens did to preserve the block between Eighth and Ninth avenues. But in all likelihood they will see, largely intact, the mid-19th century row houses [...]
Tags: architecture·historic preservation·landmarks·new york·women
Summer Day’s Meditation at the Ashokan
August 25th, 2009 · 4 Comments · Beyond Gotham
It’s the very essence of calm, a still surface of blue-silver water reflecting billowy cumulus clouds above. Large shafts of light pour down through the clouds at angles on the shoreline, creating swaths of light-green trees in the middle of darker pines and bejeweled light on the water. On a 90-degree humid day, I can [...]
Taking In the Subway’s Old Powerhouse
August 10th, 2009 · 4 Comments · Be a Mindful Activist, Explore New York
It was on the perimeter of a legendary slum that back then fit its name, Hell’s Kitchen. Yet it was conceived and designed by men in suits who believed that fine, grand civic buildings served to reflect the great accomplishments and ambitious aims of a city crossing a threshold. The Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) [...]
Tags: architecture·cities·historic preservation·manhattan·midtown·new york·terra cotta
