A Bunch Of Random Updates (Read: Catching Up)

First part of 2011 . . . I’m caught up to about May now . . .

We saw the Supermoon on March 19, 2011 from the Westfield New Jersey Transit station:

Hard to believe how little snow there was this year, especially compared to last year:

One thing I’ll miss/won’t miss about our old neighborhood is how many film shoots there were there:

There’s a sort of park/playground in the old neighborhood that was created from a sliver of land leftover from the Queens-Midtown Tunnel called Old Hickory Park, which the Parks Department seems to have disowned, at least judging by the fact that it’s somehow disappeared from their website. The name is a goof on Jackson Avenue, “Old Hickory” being Andrew Jackson’s nickname. Stupidly esoteric:

Robert Moses did a lot of neat things in the New York City area. He also oversaw a bunch of ridiculous orphan roads. The Prospect Expressway, for example:

Blockbuster closed and some guys eventually took away the sign:

Back when we lived in Astoria we called this passage to the municipal parking lot “Deuce Alley” because it smelled like people took shits back there. Now it’s gussied up all fancy and such:

I love the fact that there are public restrooms at the end of the subway lines. This is graffiti from the Ditmars Boulevard Station on the N/Q line in Queens. The idea of having sex in one of these restrooms boggles my mind; I can’t think of a worse place to do it:

On the other end of the spectrum, Michael Bolton graffiti at Sweet Afton, which is where we celebrated Kawama:

When Theaters Become Duane Reades . . . And Chase Banks And New York Sports Clubs

This Times article about the Millennium Theater in Brighton Beach was interesting — so many theaters have been shuttered over the years that it’s cool to see a theater being used for something approximating what it was meant for — i.e., some performance of some sort.

It’s cool because so many theaters are now Duane Reades or whatnot, to which @RICANROLL tweeted like the theater on 30th Avenue and Steinway is now a Duane Reade. Yup, that’s exactly which one I was thinking. We walked by it yesterday:

In this case, the Astoria Sixplex (which I actually went to once or twice before it closed in 2002) actually became a Duane Reade, a Chase bank and a New York Sports Club.

I’m not even upset that @RICANROLL fucked me by spoiling a Walking Dead plot point.

April 2-3, 2011

Saturday we took the 7 train out to Corona . . .

. . . to the New York Hall of Science, which I had never been to. I love the quirky architecture of the Great Hall, which was originally built as a pavilion for the 1964-65 World’s Fair and which was designed by Wallace K. Harrison (who also designed the Rockefeller Apartments on 54th Street, the Time-Life Building on Sixth Avenue and the master plan for Lincoln Center, and was the lead architect for the United Nations complex):

This is one of the blocks up close:

The Mathematica exhibit (background here) is vintage 1960s — and as quirky and retro as the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History. A really cool treasure:

We also played miniature golf at the Rocket Park Mini Golf course, next to the Mercury-Atlas and Gemini-Titan rockets that were also from the ’64-’65 Fair:

At least one of us loved the cow eye dissection demonstration:

Took the train back via the 103 Street-Corona Plaza Station (with a pit stop for a Mama’s Special).

Sunday we went to Williamsburg to visit the Brooklyn Flea:

Here are some new pages for Bushwick Inlet Park (“inlet” is a horrible sounding word), the Citistorage Records Center (which will have to move if plans for the waterfront move forward), and the Williamsburg Edge (which doesn’t actually have any pictures of the buildings themselves . . . whoops!).

On the way back, we walked by the furrier on Manhattan Avenue, which we had read is going to close soon:

And back over the Pulaski Bridge: