Memorial Day Weekend 2011

We were up in the Rhinebeck area for a wedding during Memorial Day 2011.

Market Street, with its requisite iconic wooden Indian and Doughboy:

The A.L. Stickle store on Market Street is hard to describe — other than totally awesome, that is. It’s a time capsule of sorts what with all those Revell model car kits (do you remember Revell model cars? do kids still sniff model glue?) and vintage display cases. I remember huge zipper displays in our local supermarket — what happened to all that stuff? I haven’t thought about some of these things in years. So wonderful . . .

We bought some herbs and various plants at the Rhinebeck Farmers Market for the backyard.

Mill Street and Montgomery Street both comprise U.S. 9 around Rhinebeck; one is U.S. 9 north of Market Street and the other is U.S. 9 south of Market Street. The Rhinebeck Reformed Church is on Mill Street, just past the Lions Club Eyeglass Drop Box:

The wedding was at Camp Rising Sun in Clinton.

Several Random Things From May 2011

Chief of which is Brooklyn Bridge Park, which was a lot more elegant than I expected, especially considering how ugly/utilitarian the piers used to be:

It’s like, where did all that dirt come from?

There’s a staircase thing-place that overlooks Lower Manhattan, which is just stunning. Propose here:

Grimaldi’s has since moved from its longtime location, just down the street at 1 Old Fulton Street:

I really, really want to start a “I [Heart] Unicorns 4-Eva” meme:

Remember when they thought the world would end on May 21? And people spent their life savings on subway ads? Why did they do that? Not because they weren’t right (they weren’t), but what difference would it make if you saw this ad on the subway beforehand?

One day they’ll finish the East Side Access project. For now, it’s kind of a constant thing:

Vacant spaces are so strange looking, like repeating a word over and over until it sounds completely foreign:

I sat outside a bar one night in May 2011 staring at the bright lights in this space, just sort of pondering how weird it looked. Now I know that it’s a “cursed” spot, only recently occupied by a somewhat stable business.

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: