Training Day

New York City police officers, including members of the Emergency Services Unit, training by walking up the main suspension cables of the Brooklyn Bridge - Ramin Talaie/Corbis via Getty Images

Sum dood was climbing on the cables and the cops were sent to get him down. Just another day in the big city, but we get this cool pic from a no crazy-people-involved event. I mean, other than walking up those cables in the first place. It might have been exciting when I was younger, but not now.

Bannerman Castle

Bannerman's Island Arsenal on the Hudson

Europe isn't the only place with castles on islands. New York has one as well.

Bannerman started a military surplus business after the the American Civil War. He bought the island in 1900 to use as a place to store his growing inventory of munitions. He built the castle to use as a warehouse. Wikipedia has the story. Bannerman Castle Trust offers tours of the place.

Bannerman Castle

Forgotten Weapons got me started.

There is an I-84 that runs north of the castle. It goes west as far as Scranton, New York. There is also an I-84 that runs east out of Portland, Oregon to Salt Lake City, Utah. The two are separated by 1900 miles.

New York Vessel Tower

Vessel Tower New York

Funny little tourist attraction stuck in the middle of a bunch of skyscrapers making it look tiny.

Vessel Tower New York

Interior View

Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo House

Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo House

Summary from Wikipedia: 

The Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo House (also 867 Madison Avenue and the Rhinelander Mansion) is a French Renaissance Revival mansion at the southeastern corner of Madison Avenue and 72nd Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, New York, U.S. Built between 1894 and 1898, it was designed by Alexander Mackintosh of the architectural firm of Kimball & Thompson. Though the house was constructed for the heiress Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo, she never moved in. The mansion was converted to a commercial building in the 20th century, becoming the New York City flagship store of the Ralph Lauren accessory and clothing company in the 1980s. The mansion is a New York City designated landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places.

American Aristocracy has a page about this building. They give a couple of prices, so I thought I would compare the increase in the price of the house to what gold did in the same time frame. The house did much better.

Relative Inflation

Year	Price of Gold (USD per ounce)	House Price (millions of USD)
2005	500	80.0
1984	360	6.4
Percent Increase	39%	1150%

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery - Netflix Movie

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Kind of a goofball movie. Catholic church meets social media in small town New York. We've got James Bond/Daniel Craig reprising his role as detective Benoit Blanc, including the odd voice. Very similar vibe to The Residence.

Cast:

Actor	Surname	Character	Surname	Role
Daniel	Craig	Benoit	Blanc	a private detective
Josh	O'Connor	Jud	Duplenticy	a young priest and former boxer who killed a man in a match
Glenn	Close	Martha	Delacroix	a devout church lady and Wicks' right-hand woman
Josh	Brolin	Jefferson	Wicks	firebrand preacher
Mila	Kunis	Geraldine	Scott	local police chief
Jeremy	Renner	Nat	Sharp	divorced, alcoholic town doctor
Kerry	Washington	Vera	Draven	Cy's adoptive mother, a tightly wound lawyer
Andrew	Scott	Lee	Ross	best-selling author trying to recover his career
Cailee	Spaeny	Simone	Vivane	disabled concert cellist hoping to be cured by a miracle
Daryl	McCormack	Cy	Draven	Vera's adoptive son, an aspiring politician and conservative influencer
Thomas Haden	Church	Samson	Holt	circumspect groundskeeper and Martha's lover
Jeffrey	Wright		Langstrom	a bishop who assigns Duplenticy to Wicks' church
Annie	Hamilton	Grace	Wicks	Jefferson's mother, the 'harlot whore'
James	Faulkner	Prentice	Wicks	Jefferson's grandfather and founder of the local church
Bridget	Everett	Louise		a construction company employee
Noah	Segan	Nikolai		a bar owner
Joseph	Gordon-Levitt			a baseball announcer

SS Normandie

SS Normandie lies capsized at Pier 88
February 8, 1942

Wikipedia:

SS Normandie was a French ocean liner built in Saint-Nazaire, France, for the French Line Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (CGT). She entered service in 1935 as the largest and fastest passenger ship afloat, crossing the Atlantic in a record 4.14 days, and remains the most powerful steam turbo-electric-propelled passenger ship ever built.

Normandie's novel design and lavish interiors led many to consider her the greatest of ocean liners. During service as the flagship of the CGT, she made 139 westbound transatlantic crossings from her home port of Le Havre to New York City. Normandie held the Blue Riband for the fastest transatlantic crossing at several points during her service career, during which RMS Queen Mary was her main rival.

During the Second World War, Normandie was seized by U.S. authorities at New York and renamed USS Lafayette. In 1942, while being converted to a troopship, the liner caught fire and capsized onto her port side and came to rest, half submerged, on the bottom of the Hudson River at Pier 88 (the site of the current Manhattan Cruise Terminal). Although salvaged at great expense, restoration was deemed too costly and she was scrapped in October 1946.

BLACK RABBIT - Netflix Series

BLACK RABBIT | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

What a horrible show, horrible like a train wreck, and train wreck that doesn't just crash but keeps on crashing. The train comes off the rails and smashes through one building and you think, well, that was bad, but we'll recover. But no, the train isn't done, it keeps going, smashing the next building and the next and the next.

The story is about two brothers Jake and Vince. Jake runs a very trendy, expensive restaurant in Manhattan and he is doing well. He's having to hustle to keep this operation running smoothly but he is managing, until his brother shows up. His brother is a gambler. At one point he was flying high and developed a line of credit with a local mobster, but then his luck turned, the mobster wanted his money and Vince high-tailed it for the west Coast. Two years later he has gotten himself in another jam and calls Jake for help. He could have gone to Florida or really anywhere, but he didn't. He comes back to NYC where he is quickly identified by the mob thugs.

Now we go through one ridiculous scheme to pay off the mob guys, every one of which turns into a train wreck, but if Vince has one thing going for him, he has the gift of gab, and so in every case he manages to delay his day of reckoning for another few days while he schemes to come up with an even larger payday. Vince is a fucking disaster. Don't like swear words? The F-word is used about a zillion times in this show.

How many people die in this show? Let me count them for you:

• fat west coast thief steals coin collection from Vince, but fails to get out of the way when Vince backs across the parking lot and runs him over.
• young woman, former bartender at Jake's restaurant, when a couple of thugs break into her apartment and she slips and falls and hits her head on the tub.
• at the robbery we get three dead: one thug, one celebrity, and one good citizen with a gun.
• bartender at another bar during the showdown.

Jack & Vince got off to a bad start because they had a bad father. One night when the boys were young, their father lost his temper with his wife and started beating her. Vince took exception to this behavior. Looking over the railing from the third floor, he dropped a bowling ball on the old man's head, killing him. The mobster, same one who is after Vince, 'cleaned up' the mess by taking the body to a bar and pushing sent if falling down the stairs to the basement. Looks like another drunk slipped and fell. All cleaned up.

Orangery

Orangery in The Warren Street Hotel in New York City

Haute Living has a bunch of photos.

New York

World Trade Center, New York City

Cool picture, but what is that skyscraper in the center? Google's image search delivers me to 124 Fulton Street where we find this Streetview:

133 Fulton Street, New York City

It took some fiddling to get the One World Trade Center to line up. Using the 3D View, the OWTC appears as a black obelisk. It's only when you get down to street level and get positioned exactly do you get this view.

Manhattan Dome

Buckminster Fuller's dome over Manhattan

From Wikipedia:

The Dome over Manhattan was a 1959 proposal for a 3-kilometer-diameter geodesic domed city covering Midtown Manhattan by the architects Buckminster Fuller and Thomas C. Howard of Synergetics, Inc.

Fuller expanded on his earlier work designing geodesic domes and advocating for decreased use of resources, and made a variety of claims to support the "Dome Over Manhattan," such as that it would reduce energy usage in NYC to 20% of what it was in 1960.

The concept inspired the science fiction writer Ben Bova's story "Manhattan Dome" in the September 1968 issue of Amazing Stories, subsequently expanded into the 1976 novella City of Darkness. A Fuller dome over Manhattan also appeared in John Brunner's 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar.

Via Construction Physics

Uptown

Manhattan Uptown - Jan Folwarczny

This puzzle was pretty tough. There is so much detail and the pieces are so small, I was only able to group about 20% of the pieces going by colors and patterns. For the rest of the puzzle, I resorted to sorting the pieces by shape and then checking each piece that had the correct number of bumps and indents. Cool picture though. Six megabyte wallpaper available here.

People Just Like To Argue

The flapjack king and the archaeologist and his army. Photo: Stefan Ruiz

Older son turned me on to this story about a New York restaurant mogul's eight year war with a volunteer outfit in Fishkill New York. The fight is over a plot of land that may, or may not, be a revolution era graveyard for soldiers. It doesn't sound like anyone cared about the land until the mogul announced plan's to build an IHOP restaurant there. Of course, in a backwoods like Fishkill they might have thought they had all the time in world to work on their plans and it wasn't until Mr. Mogul came up with his plan that they got motivated to do something about it. Or maybe they were just nursing a grudge against the world because their dream of a historic national monument had not come to fruition and Mr. Mogul just provided a target for their pent up rage. The whole thing sounds stupid, a whole like the war of words being fought by the Democrats and Republicans. The issues don't matter so much as they want someone to argue with. People suck.

Reading this story I came across a couple bits of information.

I-84 East, Fishkill is dead center

• There are two sections to I-84. I'm looking at a map of Fishkill and there's I-84. Wait a minute, I-84 runs east from downtown Portland out to somewhere. Does it go as far as New York? No, it doesn't. The western section of I-84 was called I-80N until the naming convention was changed in 1980.

I-84 West

• President Trump was born in Queens.
• Catskills looks a lot like Fishkill, I mean they both contain the name of an animal and the word 'kill'. Are the Catskills where they killed cats? Kill is Dutch for creek so it's more likely it was derived from Kat's creek, Kat being some Dutch dude.

Revolution Books

Revolution Books

I order a used copy of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, a Russian. I ordered it cause it was banned by the Soviet government back in the 1920's and I'm thinking anything banned by the Soviets might be worth reading. Anyway it shows up a couple of days ago and it included a little note thanking me for supporting 'a small, independent bookseller'. Really? I thought all these used book dealers who list their stuff on Amazon were like giant warehouse kind of operations. They sell their books for next to nothing, often less that a dollar, but the standard Amazon shipping fee is four bucks. You're not going to make any money selling a handful of books a day at those prices, but if you can sell a thousand books a day, you might be able to make a living. However, to sell a thousand books a day you are going to need a warehouse with a zillion volumes and a well trained staff who can snatch that book off the shelf, wrap it and have it out the door in under two minutes.

So, 'a small, independent bookseller'? Let's take a look, shall we. There is a return address on the shipping label: 437 Malcolm X Boulevard, New York NY. Feed that to Google Maps and, lo and behold: Revolution Books. Wow, this place is like a visit to the 1960's when Revolution filled the air.

Steely Dan - My Old School (HQ Audio)

Somehow this song got into my 2023 playlist even though I hadn't posted it here before. Must be Google watching out over me. In any case, I'm listening to this song and I start wondering if there is some kind backstory here. Turns out there is. From Stuart Resnick on Quora we have this story:

Fagan's high school girlfriend, Dorothy White, gives Fagan (ahem, half of "69") or "35 sweet goodbyes" before she sends him off on a bus called the "Wolverine" to Annandale-on-the-Hudson, NY where Fagan would attend Bard College, sometimes referred to as "The William & Mary of the North". Bard's dean of students, (the girl who "could be so cruel") worked with the district attorney, G Gordon Liddy (Daddy G) and the local police to snitch and to drug-bust Fagan's dorm and arrest about 50 kids. The bust happens on a weekend that Dorothy is visiting and so Dorothy also gets arrested, as does Fagan who is "smoking with the boys upstairs" at 5AM.

Bard bails out the students, but not Dorothy since she's not a student, so her daddy has to bail her of jail (full of "working girls"). Fagan offers to take his increasingly bohemian girlfriend, Dorothy, to Guadalajara to avoid prosecution but she doesn't want to go.

Fagan was angry at Bard for its complicity in the bust and so he didn't attend graduation (when the whistle blows) and Fagan swears that he'd never going back to his old school. He also thinks that Bard doesn't deserve to be called "The William & Mary of the North". (So "William & Mary won't do".) Oleanders can't grow in New York's climate and apparently refer to cannabis (perhaps growing under UV lights).

Fagan did go back to Bard 16 years later, in 1985, to accept an honorary doctorate.

Ask Google about Bard Colled and G Gordon Liddy and we get this story from the Poughkeepsie Journal:

Poughkeepsie Journal Apr 6, 1968
Click to embiggenate

Gordon Liddy has appeared here before.

 

Kaleidoscope - Netflix Series

Kaleidoscope Season 1 Trailer
Rotten Tomatoes TV

This series is being promoted as one where the episodes can be viewed in any order. We tried the 'first' one just to see if we could watch it. It was okay, so we started on the second. Then we got into a disagreement about the timeline. The first episode was seven weeks ago, wasn't it? Couldn't be, that wouldn't make any sense, so we go back and check and it turns out that its place in the timeline was seven years ago, so now we look over all the episodes, and we find one from 24 years ago and decide that that's where we want to start.

Jumping around in time is something we have seen in several series. In some cases the shifts in the timeline are clear and well defined and those in shows the time shifts are tolerable. In others the shifts are not obvious and it gets to be a lot of work to keep things sorted out. I am not sure there is any benefit to these jumbled timelines. If the characters and the story are interesting, I don't think jumbling the timeline adds anything. It just makes it harder to figure out what's going on. I think we can blame this all on Momento where the whole movie was a set of scenes shown in reverse order.

Back to our show. What we have is a pair of thieves. One is a handsome white man who dresses in suits and ties (Rufus Sewell as Roger Salas / Graham Davies), walks in the front door and charms the pants off the mark, so to speak. The other is technically competent black man (Giancarlo Esposito as Leo Pap / Ray Vernon) who sneaks in the back door while his partner is oozing charm and makes off with goodies. Naturally, when you have both operations (front door and back door) going on at the same time the whole operation is fraught with tension, and then there are the cock-ups when they come with a hairsbreadth of getting caught. Exciting stuff!

Exciting stuff! That's kind of important, because these guys are now middle aged and doing well enough that they really don't need to be putting it all on the line, but . . . it's in their blood and they just can't give up their thieving ways.

The technical details are a little sketchy in some places, and there is some slop, but I suspect this show is mostly about motivation. 

Technically it's not bad, and the ideas are pretty good, but the details aren't perfect. For example, our black man sneaks out of prison by hiding in the trunk of the doctor's giant Cadillac. He's tucked into the space behind the rear seat, above the rear axle, with a fake panel covering him. The doctor is a regular visitor to the prison and the guards check the trunk every time he leaves. An observant guard would have noticed something different in the layout of the trunk. This guard didn't, this time and that was all our man needed. Of course I noticed, but I'm a car guy. Most people aren't, so maybe I'm just picking nits.

IMDB has this little blurb:

Spanning 24 years, Kaleidoscope centers around the largest heist ever attempted, and the vengeance, scheming, loyalties, and betrayals that surround it. It's loosely inspired by the real-life story where seventy billion dollars in bonds went missing in downtown Manhattan during Hurricane Sandy.

New York Post has the original story that doesn't seem to involve any thieves, but that doesn't really exclude them does it?

P.S. In this show, seven (not seventy) billion dollars of bearer bonds have been deposited in an underground vault in Manhattan. They have been deposited by The Triplets, a righteous trio of big wheels. They make their appearance at the 10 minute mark in the Yellow episode. Since they went to all this trouble to invent these three characters, I got to wondering if there was any basis in fact. Short answer is no, but me being me, I had to poke around and this is what I found:

• Cho-Young Woo lead shareholder of Jongo, Korea's biggest private bank. He is Kim Jong-Un's nephew or cousin. In reality, Cho-Young Woo is a South Korean actor. Kim Jong-Un does have a nephew named Kim Han-sol, but he is hiding out from his uncle who is apparently trying to kill him. Jongo is a dance and musical genre from southeast Brazil. The largest private bank in South Korea is KB Financial Group.
• Suzanne Grosvenor, Lead Banker at Duncan-Welsh. The King has her on speed dial. In reality there is no Duncan-Welsh bank and Suzanne Grosvenor is an American pianist.
• Stephan Thiele, Swiss CEO of Banque Brunner, started by his great-great-grandfather in 1898. Nazi gold. In reality there is a Stephan Thiele at Deutsche Bank in Germany and there is an old Bank Brunner building in Belgium.

In 1982 the US Government made a rule that all bonds must be registered.

The Pale Blue Eye - Netflix Movie

THE PALE BLUE EYE Trailer (2023) Gillian Anderson, Christian Bale
Movie Coverage

A very cool film. We've got Edgar Allen Poe (Harry Melling) as a cadet at the West Point Military Academy and we have an old, retired New York City detective (Christian Bale) called in to investigate the death of one of these cadets. The plot is very clever. It all seems very plausible until we get to the last scene when everything you thought you knew is revealed to be a lie. 

Poe (1809 - 1849) did attend West Point. West Point opened in 1802, so that part of the story is plausible.

It is winter, 1830, so all interior illumination is done with candles or kerosene lamps, and at least some of the time the lighting is realistic, as in very dim. Many period pieces are too brightly illuminated, and I'm grateful, otherwise I would be left in the dark, heh. But this one was more realistic.

But looking at all the snow makes me wonder why did people ever go north in the first place? I suppose more game animals which meant easier hunting, and the harsher climate would discourage most people, so fewer neighbors bothering you might be a plus. I suspect there would be fewer diseases in colder regions. The tropics seem to be riddled all kinds of deadly diseases. So moving north would have some benefits. You just have to be able to chop wood.

Wikipedia page about the film.

Chelsea Hotel

Chelsea Hotel

Variety has a review of a movie about the Chelea Hotel. It starts with a bit of history:

There are many layers to the mystique of the Chelsea Hotel. Long before it became a hipster hangout, the 12-story, 250-room fortress, built in the 1880s, was home to Mark Twain (though come to think of it, maybe he was the original hipster). In the ’50s, the Chelsea played host to assorted literary figures, the first of whom to lend it a dissolute aura was Dylan Thomas, who was living the lush life in room 205 when he became ill and died in 1953. The beats moved in (Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac), and so did Arthur Miller after he divorced Marilyn Monroe and Arthur C. Clarke while he was writing “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

But it was Andy Warhol who put the stamp of underground cachet on the Chelsea when he shot his three-and-a-half-hour multi-screen ramble “The Chelsea Girls” there in 1966. By the time that Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe took up residence in 1969, they already saw themselves as the next generation in the Chelsea tradition of bohemian squalor. The coolest musicians on the planet lived at the Chelsea (Joplin, Dylan, Hendrix, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Dee Dee Ramone), often doing the coolest drugs, a trend that culminated, and imploded, in 1978, when Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen used the place as their own personal heroin den, and Nancy Spungen died there, probably as the result of a botched suicide pact.

I've heard of most of the people mentioned, all except Nancy Spungen. Wikipedia has a page about her and it's a bit of a horror story.

The review calls describes the building as "drop dead gorgeous". Um, I don't think so.

Chelsea Hotel

I would describe it as a gothic horror. I will grant that it does have character, something the modern glass walled buildings don't have.

The Chelsea Hotel in 1884. (Cornelia Santomenna archives)

The place has been there a long time.

 

New York City Blog Posts Map

New York City Blog Posts

The story about the Chelsea Hotel got me to wondering just where it was in New York City, which got me to wondering how many other posts I had made about New York City. As you can see from the map, there have been several.

Big City

Hidden City 2 - Navid Baraty
252 piece jigsaw puzzle

From Navid's website:

Over the years I’ve photographed various reflections of NYC seen in the windows of skyscrapers from high atop buildings in Manhattan. I couldn't believe my eyes the first time I saw how much of the city can be seen reflected along the sides of glass skyscrapers from on high. It felt as if I'd discovered a sort of hidden dimension that had always been there, waiting to be noticed.

The left half of the image is a reflection of the right half seen in the windows of a skyscraper. You might notice several thin vertical lines just to the left of center. Those are seams between adjacent sheets of glass. Likewise, the diagonal line that sort of looks like it could be a highway is also a seam, albeit more prominent.

Why New York’s Billionaires’ Row Is Half Empty

Why New York’s Billionaires’ Row Is Half Empty
The B1M
I've got a few things I could say about this but it's late and I'm tired, so I'm just going to give you a couple of links to things that are mentioned in the video:

• Hudson Yards (development)
• Accidental Skyline

I suspect many of the houses in west hills above Portland are vacant. You can drive through some of these neighborhoods and never see any signs of life. Could be they are all at work, but it's still very weird.