Little Chuckle, Big Hole. Two pix today that I took this week in Manhattan. The first shows an alteration — call it "defacement", if you will — of a poster in a subway car that urges riders (the MTA curiously calls them "customers" rather than "passengers") to be alert to unattended packages of any kind. The original tells people to "be suspicious of anything unattended". I like this version better. The MTA's* version smacks of paranoia. The altered state warns people of a real danger.

(The picture is of a poster in place in the less-than-brilliantly-lited interior of a subway car. The version on the MTA's website is of the poster as it appears in the best of lite, when you can take a crisp picture at a high shutter speed. It's very hard to get a crisp picture with a handheld camera in poor lite, so please pardon the slite fuzziness.)
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The second foto is a nite view of the big hole in the ground that persists at Ground Zero, the former World Trade Center site, which New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin rightly called attention to not long ago. This is not a halftone rendering. The criss-cross pattern superimposed upon the worksite is a mat of some kind that has been placed between the worksite and onlookers. I don't know if it's to protect onlookers from any debris that might issue from the site (tho there isn't any dynamiting going on as might throw off debris) or just to protect some unwarranted privacy of a public project. Puzzling. Still, one might feel that what it takes away from clarity of view, it adds in textural interest.
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I work nites and am usually so rushed, going in to work, that I cannot take pix of that gaping hole in the daytime. Should I manage to get myself out early enuf to show that site in Downtown Manhattan, you can see that foto here.

For now, suffice it to say that day or nite, Manhattan still has a huge hole in its Downtown heart five years after 9/11. New York may be the city that never sleeps, but should it also be the city that never fills in that hole?
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Local Cooling. While I was writing this, the steam heat in my house went on for the first time this season. Due to the high cost of oil heat (thank you, Republicans), I hadn't even put water into my boiler until tonite, but the forecast was for temperatures to drop into the 50s, so I set the thermostat to about 63 and put water in the furnace so if the interior of my house should get that cold it would get no colder. My state, New Jersey, is tiny, but we have what passes for mountains around here, in the northwest of the state (Sussex County),** and the forecast there was for temps to drop into the upper 30s — less than two weeks after the formal end of SUMMER.
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* MTA = Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a New York State agency that controls City subways and commuter trains into the suburbs and exurbs (since the Long Island Railroad, an MTA unit, goes as far as Montauk, about 110 miles from New York Penn Station. I say "New York Penn Station" to distinguish from my own city's magnificent art-deco version, Newark Penn Station).

** Placenames in New Jersey, as in many older states of the eastern United States, alternate among three main categories: names from England (and, in lesser measure, other countries of the Old World), names from Indians, and names for distinguished personages. My county is Essex, which is also the name of a county in England. We also have a Middlesex, Somerset, Gloucester, and Monmouth County. And of course the name of the state derives from Jersey, a little island off the coast of France, part of Britain's Channel Islands Dependency.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:40 PM