Posts tagged “photos” from longer posts

Oh, the things you can find to do to kill time while your loved one is dutifully studying for the bar exam. While I wait out this final week and a half of suffering, my camera and I went on a morning jaunt down to Bensonhurst, heretofore only really known to me as neighborhood where "Welcome Back, Kotter" took place. (For those of you familiar with northern Brooklyn, Bensonhurst looked to me a lot like an Italian Ditmas Park.) New Utrecht Reformed Church is best know for being the site of the only remaining Liberty Pole, which was apparently a mast of some sort stuck in the ground during the American Revolution to fly the U.S. flag. I didn't get a shot of the that because, frankly, it just looks like an old flag pole. But here's one of the front entrance:

A handful of other shots from today's Bensonhurst adventure, as well as a trip to Red Hook yesterday, are newly up at my photo blog Trooantroo.

This is really just a proof of concept that my iPhone can take pictures that can then make their way to the blog. Proof!

I can't take credit for this one. My s.o. Jane took snapped it on her iPhone on her way to class this morning. We've since looked it up and it's indeed true -- people are still getting home deliveries of seltzer in these parts. (See the first story at that link, "Shlepping Seltzer.") I'm guessing that it's just that with so many New Yorkers, there are niche markets for quite a few things that might not have survived elsewhere. As I wrote over on trooantroo, my newish Brooklyn photo blog, it's stuff like a soda-seltzer-beer home delivery truck or the knife-sharpening truck that also rolls through the neighborhood that makes me love living here. As I put it over there, it's "the frequency with which you walk down the street and say to yourself, 'now, what in the the hell is that?'" Makes even walking to the subway a trip. (Photo credit Jane Andersen)

I was sitting around thinking "You know what my life needs? More blog." So I'm happy to introduce trooantroo, my new Brooklyn photo blog. The name comes from the epigraph to Thomas Wolfe's 1935 article in the New Yorker "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn":

Dere's no guy livin' dat knows Brooklyn t'roo an' t'roo, because it'd take a guy a lifetime just to find his way aroun' duh f_____ town.

In Prospect Park this weekend a giant group of both kids and adults were playing parachute with a giant American flag. You know, parachute, right? It's where you pull a big piece of fabric into the air, move underneath it, and then sit on the edge, forming something of a bubble. We used to play parachute about once a year in grade school, which was one of the more exciting days of the year.

This photo was an accident. I was in the process of focusing when I slipped and took a picture, but there's something I like about how the sharpness of the grass contrasts against what almost seems like a mirage in the background.

As the sun was shining for at least some part of this weekend, I decided that it was time to break out the old camera again. Prepare yourself for an onslaught of Brooklyn photos! This first one of the season comes from the side wall of a church in the happening neighborhood of Fort Greene. We walked by while leaving the new Brooklyn Flea, and while the wall was mostly one big expanse of gray, this bit of stain-glassed color caught my eye.

Sundown at Menemsha, originally uploaded by nancyscola.

Part of the Martha's Vineyard set.

This tree outside Theodore Roosevelt's Oyster Bay, New York home looked just like the foot of a giant elephant to me. But that might have been because the decor inside the house was thoroughly early-conservationist -- lion-skin rugs, polar bear-skin rugs, mounted deer heads, mounted buffalo heads, rhino tusk decorative pieces, and the like.

While I certainly agree with Steven Johnson that Park Slope is generally lovely in the springtime, today it happened to be damn cold. So much so that when I went outside this afternoon to practice my new hobby of picture taking, the flowers (tulips? dunno) that were so ready-for-their-closeup yesterday were all curled up into themselves, the petals huddled together for warmth. Still, I thought that the colors turned out nice in this, but the framing and focus need a lot of work.

I'd been wanting to pull together the bunch of pictures I took down in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina that lets me display them on my site but also make use of the magic of Flickr. The MT Hacks FlickrPhotos plugin I discovered today seems to do that quite nicely.

Jane and I had quite the adventure this weekend, with what began as a trip to Coney Island (we've never been and wanted to see what the fuss is about) and ended with eating pizza and drinking hot cocoa in Dumbo, an area of Brooklyn that's evolving from warehouses and industrial space into what seems to me to possibly be an intriguing place to live.

What happened was that we (and by "we" I more mean Jane) missed the exit to Coney Island, ended up going over the Verrazano Bridge to Staten Island, and couldn't turn around, the bridge being closed Brooklyn-bound because of a jack knifed tractor-trailer. It was then that I realized that for all my years growing up amongst the highways and byways of New Jersey, I didn't exactly know what it means to say that a truck has gone and jack knifed. Jane explained it -- it's basically when the back of the truck somehow ends up in front of the front of the truck -- but added, "I just don't know why they keep doing that."

At that point, we decided to head back and explore Brooklyn closer to home, via Jersey. On the way, we drove past Liberty State Park, where the ferry leaves to go to the Statue of Liberty. On a crazy whim and despite the fact that it was now hailing, we decided to pay a visit to Lady Liberty. As it turns out, however, she was closed that day ("Give me your tired, your poor, Monday through Friday between the hours of 9 and 6"). Still, I took this photo of the ferry sign. I tweaked it a bit in Fireworks, gray scaling the background while keeping the sign red a la the little girl's red coat in Schindler's List -- which is a bit funny because I hated that part of the movie.

Took this while doing an audio walking tour of the Lower East Side of Manhattan yesterday. Katz's is famous both for its pastrami and for being the setting of the fake orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally.