47th St Between 8th Ave and 7th Ave

    

After much hemming and hawing on the corner of 47th and 8th, I finally made the bold decision to walk towards Times Square. Anyone who lives in the city knows that making such a choice usually involves either a chore of necessity or some sort of masochistic death wish. Either way, before long I found myself willfully walking towards the most aggravating place in all of New York.

With a handful of Broadway theaters lining the block, this part of the street is mostly dead in the morning (when I visited), but it's safe to assume it's nothing but madness come showtime. The W Hotel near Broadway has an interesting facade, but it stands in stark contrast to some of the more classic buildings in the area. I guess that's the nature of this always-evolving neighborhood, though. The saving grace of taking 47th Street across to 7th Ave is that you're near the northern end of Times Square which isn't nearly as crowded as the middle of southern parts can be. 

Having lived here for several years and walked through this part of town more times than I wish to remember, the spectacle of the billboards and lights numbed me long ago. However, if I step back I can sometimes, for a brief moment, remember the sheer joy the first time I noticed that Hershey's had a gigantic store just for candy.

11th Ave Between 46th St and 48th St

This is a dangerous and lawless part of town. A neighborhood where time stops for no one, tumbleweeds cross your path at every opportunity, and photographers roam free – shooting pictures of seemingly everything. As you can imagine the stakes are high, and nothing less than your presumed privacy is at risk. At least, this is the story I've invented in my head for some of the security guards here on 11th Avenue.

Yes, once again I was approached by overly-ambitious private security personnel and told I wasn't allowed to shoot photos of the outside of their building. I really didn't feel like getting into a whole thing with him, especially since I had many more photos to shoot around here, but I did try my best to explain why he was wrong in his assumption (without coming off as being too much of a pain in the ass) and he seemed to give up – which is the best I could hope for I guess.

I'm not trying to come off as a jerk when complaining about these instances, honest...but there really is something incredibly frustrating about being fed misinformation about my own rights in public, especially from someone who assumes they have jurisdiction over a public space. Plus, this isn't even about individual privacy...most of what I capture are buildings, streets and sidewalks! I rarely take photos which include people and when I do, even though there's no reasonable expectation of privacy when you're out in public, I try to be sensitive to the issue. But I digress...

These blocks really are rather barren. You know you're getting to the edge of the city when you start to see so many car washes and dealerships. The tall and lumbering buildings that dot the landscape here are rather nice with ornate detailing (even if it is several stories up), and grand entrances. The remaining buildings all stay pretty close to the ground - serving either as warehouses or storefronts. 

So come on down to 11th Avenue, where there's not much to see and you too can be hassled for attempting a completely benign activity.

10th Ave Between 43rd St and 45th St

Once again my schedule for shooting photos for this project has given me a completely skewed perspective on a block. What would normally be a busy stretch of 10th Avenue, filled with bars and restaurants, was utterly dead at 9am on a Sunday when I visited. Does this goes against my stated goal of accurate documentation for the site? Perhaps. But there's no way I'd be able to schedule my photo shooting to coincide with the various busy periods of each neighborhood. So that's just too bad.

There's an extreme contrast between the new and old apartments here. They share the same walls yet feature polarized visions of architecture. It's all a bit jarring. The overflow of bars, restaurants and food stores here made it feel like a place I ought to re-visit when the weather is nicer.

48th St Between 10th Ave and 9th Ave

Smack-dab in the middle of nowhere, this neighborhood is mostly all apartments and low-rise buildings. In the distance you can see  the towers of midtown peeking through. Ingrained with a real sense of community of belonging, there's a myriad of corner parks and community gardens dotting the landscape on this block.

Federally subsidized under the Section 8 program, the Terrific Tenements, which sit in the middle of the block, are clearly in the marketing business. Looking like a plain set of regular 4-story buildings, I couldn't quite make out anything that was particularly terrific about them.

46th St Between 10th Ave and 11th Ave

A street with several interesting industrial characteristics, this block is surprisingly dense with residential buildings. Cutting its way down the center of the block is a trench holding what I can only assume is part of the Northeast Corridor Amtrak line (where it goes and where it's coming from, I'm not sure).

The end of the block is dominated by a large building with some limited detailing on the north and the Salvation Army collection center on the south. With large, arched garage doors, it's a rather nice-looking warehouse.

53rd St Between 9th Ave and 10th Ave

Holy contrasting redvelopments Batman! What starts off as pretty typical upper west side block quickly devolves into pandemonium as you approach the dueling redevelopments that dominate the center of the block. While the building on the north side of the street is still under construction, it seems infinitely more interesting than the building of similar size across the street. It's really a study in modern architectural contrasts.

While I wasn't able to figure out the name of the glass-faceted building still under construction, Midwest Court (its doppelganger to the south) was pretty easy to remember. I can't comment on the quality of the apartments within, but with prices starting near $3000/month I would expect a little bit more from the front of the building. It reminds me of college dorms (in every bad way).

Further down the block, once you escape the gravitational pull of these apartments, you'll come to a school and the studio in which Wendy Williams films. I could have sworn that having Wendy Williams that close to an institution of learning would be some zoning code violation, but apparently I was mistaken.

Finally, at the end of the street, with the school's open yard to your left, the skyline is absolutely filled with the parallel lines of AT&T's monolithic building on 10th Avenue. Overall, a very interesting place to walk around. I'll be especially interested to see how it looks in a year or so.