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Author
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Topic: Your today in pictures..
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted August 21, 2016 03:00 PM
Thanks all!
So you see, Janice is from San Francisco and SHE’S been to the Statue of Liberty! Melvin is from the UK and so has he! I was born here, but haven’t been there even once, and I didn’t buy the T-shirt either! If somebody from here wore an “I Love New York” T-shirt their friends would say “Yeah, well if you love it so much, stop griping about your taxes and stop threatening to move to South Carolina!”
NOTE to Janice: I enjoyed San Francisco and hope to again!
Northbound up the East River
Here we meet one of the classic suspension bridges in the history of the world: the Brooklyn Bridge. Long Island, my home, was actually anywhere from rural to downright wilderness before it was built: forests, rivers, deer: the whole deal, even bears, moose and wolves if you look back far enough. In the 1800s, a stubborn little colony of people had houses on the Brooklyn side and commuted to jobs in Manhattan by boat every day, weather and tides allowing (-not always, especially before the age of steam.). Then they built the Bridge and the modern American style suburb sprung up.
The Brooklyn Bridge has a younger neighbor, the Manhattan Bridge. I can’t help but feel the Manhattan Bridge has to cope with some kind of inferiority complex! It does exactly the same job and just as well, but have you ever heard of the Manhattan Bridge? Has anybody ever made fun of somebody who is extremely gullible by offering to “sell them the Manhattan Bridge”? Has anybody asked "-and if they dared you to jump off the Manhattan Bridge, would you?!".
-No, I say!
You have to admire the Golden Gate Bridge in this respect: it works alone! (The San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge is really TWO bridges and everybody knows that’s just showing off!)
This of course is the Empire State Building. I’ve been there….once!
(It’s very tall, but you probably already know that!)
Then we went past the United Nations:
When I was in second year Spanish in High School, We did a field trip to the UN. We even stood in the visitor’s balcony and saw the General Assembly! They weren’t Generally Assembling anything that day, though!
(-What a great room to show movies!)
There was a band of showers running East to West across Manhattan while we were there, so being that we went around the Island we were actually rained on twice by the same storm!
Here it is again!
(You would think with what we paid for these tickets, they’d figure out some way to prevent this!)
-Tell you what. Let’s wait until it stops and then we’ll continue up the Harlem River!
(Stay dry, Stay tuned!)
[ August 21, 2016, 04:11 PM: Message edited by: Steve Klare ]
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted August 22, 2016 07:09 PM
The Harlem River and mobile Marble Hill!
The Harlem River is kind of what makes Manhattan what it is. It is bound on two sides by large bodies of water, the Hudson and East Rivers. The Harlem is what makes Manhattan an Island unto itself and not just a peninsula along with the Bronx. It was once a shallow tidal creek that people waded across, but since it’s a shortcut between the East and the Hudson, it’s been dredged beyond all recognition and rerouted in interesting ways.
After a few minutes the rain stopped, and we turned west into the Harlem River.
Yankee Stadium on our right! (Never been there either: grew up a Mets fan!)
Here’s the Broadway Bridge. Every other bridge across the Harlem River goes from Manhattan to the Bronx, but this one goes from Manhattan to Manhattan, because it goes to Marble Hill, which is in Manhattan even though it’s in the Bronx.
You see, Marble Hill started out in Manhattan, but it moved to the Bronx: not just the people, but the buildings and even the land…even though it’s legally still in Manhattan, nobody wanted to move to the Bronx and none of it actually moved an inch!
I’m sorry…is this confusing? Let me start over…
One day long before yours or mine, Marble Hill was a bump in the northern end of Manhattan, and the Harlem river made a tight loop around it. Ships navigating the river kept crashing into each other so they decided to cut a canal straight across the bottom. Now Marble hill was its own island, with a stagnant marsh to the North, which they eventually filled in. People in the Bronx thought they’d gained a neighborhood, but the Marble Hillsters decided they were staying Manhattanites! Then the Bronx Borough President literally climbed to the highest point in Marble Hill, planted the Bronx flag, and declared his dominion to the locals!
–but in the end it was settled the way everything is settled in New York: they hired lawyers and lobbyists! Not very long ago the New York Legislature proclaimed Marble Hill legally part of Manhattan and everyone thought we were done with this!
-YET…
When The Phone Company introduced the 718 area code in the Bronx the people in Marble Hill decided they wanted to keep Manhattan’s 212. It was decided that rewiring the place would be such a production they had to accept the Bronx’s 718, because even the law of the land needs to yield to the laws of electronics!
Kind of a nice water tower…it’s in Manhattan…Let’s hope it stays there!
We had come far, all the way to the very northernmost point of Manhattan, it was time to turn south into the Hudson and head for the dock,
-but not today!
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted August 23, 2016 03:45 PM
We were now in the home stretch!
I’m kind of grateful the Harlem River is there. If not for that the Circle Line would need to go through Canada!
(-we’d need to pack a lunch!)
-But we’re back in the Hudson River now.
These are the Palisades:
This is a dramatic rock cliff, over a hundred feet tall (-just scope out that flag pole for scale…), which stretches along the New Jersey shore of the Hudson River for many miles. When Billy Joel sings about life going on beyond the Palisades, this is exactly what he is talking about!
-Although most probably haven’t bought Cadillacs and are still exactly where they are supposed to be. (Can anyone from New Jersey please verify?)
Ahead is the George Washington Bridge. Interstate 95 crosses the Hudson here: 300 miles one way you’re in Maine, 900 miles the other you’re in Florida. Interstate 80 begins nearby. It’s 3,000 miles West to the Bay Bridge and San Francisco.
There’s a new Tom Hanks movie about the pilot that made what the airlines like to call a…”water landing” in the Hudson. We are now getting into where the last tense minutes of that flight occurred.
Here we make our final turn to dock and debark! Right next door is the US Navy Aircraft Carrier Intrepid, living out her honorable retirement as a museum of naval aviation.
Since we were still in Tourist Mode we rifled through the brochures for the area attractions. Steven found a nice one for Wildwood, New Jersey!
-Unlike a great many of these places, I’ve been there many times! (…Have you?)
PS:
-It turns out that there is a Hofbrau Haus in New York, too (-It’s a little smaller than the one in Munich!), so we decided to treat ourselves for dinner that night!
Auf wiedersehen!
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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Mitchell Dvoskin
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 128
From: West Milford, NJ
Registered: Jun 2008
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posted August 30, 2016 10:53 AM
> Can anyone from New Jersey please verify?
Yes, everything in NJ is exactly where it belongs, however, contrary to what Billy Joel thinks, we no longer all drive Cadillac, most of us drive Ferraris, Maseratis and Lamborghinis.
The NJ side of the George Washington Bridge land in the town of Fort Lee, where the motion picture business got started here in the USA. At one time there were over 20 major studios there, before they all moved sunny California. The Fort Lee Film Commission has a web site dedicated to the towns motion picture history.
Further into New Jersey, in the town of West Orange, the National Park Service runs the Edison National Laboratories, where you can tour the research buildings where Edison's team invented the light bulb, sound recording and motion pictures.
From the 1890's up until the early 1970's, Palisades Amusement Park sat on the edge of the cliffs. They had a rollercoaster with the big drop that ended right at the edge of the cliffs before the track bent sharply to the right. It was quite a thrill going down that first drop.
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted September 14, 2016 03:31 PM
Springy Dog on a Stick!
So, we have a little Canada Goose problem out at the Lab. You see: Canada Geese are supposed to summer way up North and winter way down South.
-but many of ours don’t!
A couple of decades back, some Geese who were way ahead of their time decided Long Island was the place to be a Goose! You can’t half blame them: our weather is usually moderate, there are plenty of wetlands for them to paddle about in, and there are all these lawns. You see, Canada Geese love lawns: all those blades of grass, kind of a Canada Goose buffet! There are also very few predators here.
So, Goose Traditionalists are heading up and down the coast every Fall and Spring, but the Modernists stay here year round and fatten themselves eating our lawns and (…ummm) fertilizing them too!
This gets nasty sometimes. Suffice it to say the lawns out here have plenty of nitrogen in the soil, but unfortunately so our sidewalks, parking lots and sometimes even the carpeting in the buildings too.
Something had to be done! This is a place for Geeks, not Geese!
So I’m sure some task force did all sorts of research, maybe even some computer simulations, and this is what they came up with:
-a springy dog on a stick!
Now, seriously folks! –You’re talking about people who could have produced drones with computer guided lasers or some hypersonic…death beam!
-and the best they could come up with is a springy dog on a stick?!!
It would be absolutely scandalous other than the fact that springy dogs on sticks are doing a pretty respectable job scaring the geese away!
-Who’da thought?
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted September 16, 2016 09:21 AM
Physics Building, State University of New York at Stony Brook
So there I was again last night! I’m signed up for an adult-ed. course, and it just happened to land…there!
Back in a time before time, when I was still a teenager, I sat down in a lecture hall in this building for Physics 101, my very first college course. I was 18 years old and had done a summer at an electronics company doing production test. It was September, 1980 and I was a brand new college student, -an engineering major no less.
Now, this wasn’t college like in the movies: there were no cheerleaders or hay-rides. We didn’t burn our rival school in effigy at the pep-rally because we didn’t have a football team, or a pep rally, or time to make an effigy either! This was work! This was homework and projects and exams without Mom or Dad watching over my shoulder in a place where the teachers not only didn’t care if I passed or not, they may not even have known my name! We studied Science and Math that must have been invented by people on some kind of drugs and generally lost contact with our youth during semesters. After I graduated, my Dad bought me a beer and I found I'd lost my taste for it since I finished high school. I got it back quickly, but it goes to show how little I got out in those years!
I learned lots of stuff, but most of all I grew up! (The Boss doesn’t want to hear the dog ate your homework!)
A lot of water has passed under my bridge since the first time I walked up that path. It’s strange to stand there with gray in my temples and a family and a full time job off-campus.
-but trust me, being an adult rules! Your life is a lot more your own.
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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