Central Park West Between 96 St and 93rd St

This street is too expensive for me. Of course I'll never afford an apartment here, but even walking down the block I feel like I'm living beyond my means. To give you an idea, a 3-bedroom apartment in the Turin (at 333 CPW), will cost you about $3.5M. Granted, I'm sure it's a nice space, but could you imagine the type of estate you could get anywhere else in the country for that kind of scratch?

Crossing the street and walking on the park side feels slightly more welcoming than staying on the west side of the block. Over there, passing by doorman after doorman, I get nothing but questionable looks as I randomly snap away pictures of the most mundane things. They must think I'm nuts.

Amsterdam Ave Between 94th St and 96th St

Feeling a bit more residential than its neighbor to the east, Amsterdam holds a myriad of architectural styles which reflect and equally diverse number of storefronts and apartments. Off in the distance you can see a mixture of projects, glass condos and classic churches. It certainly makes for an interesting skyline since not many buildings go beyond 20 or so floors.

An old bank on 96th Street, with the dates 1848 and 1926 appears to be currently used by both CVS Pharmacy and Claremont Children's School. And interesting combination to say the least. It's a handsome building, but it's marred by the bright red CVS signage. The Children's School lettering, by comparison, seems rather appropriate, though it's very strange to see the split-level floors through the full-length windows on the south side. I would like to have seen what this bank originally looked like in the early 20th century.

96th St Between Amsterdam Ave and Columbus Ave

   

Wide open, but lacking any other definable characteristics, this segment of 96th street seems like it should be filled with opportunistic retail shops, but instead offers a mixed bag of apartments and offices. With the exception of the bank-turn-CVS on the corner, none of the buildings along the block stand out for any particular reason.

Midway down the street the southern side of the block is dominated by a large apartment building (so big it has two addresses). This is the sort of building that also has dentist offices and parking garages built-in to the ground floor. However the harsh mid-century architecture looked more like a cheap knock-off of the Kips Bay Towers than anything you'd  actually want to live in. 

88th St Between Central Park West and Columbus Ave

This block is filled with brownstones of such intricate detail that it makes otherwise fancy apartments looks positively pedestrian in comparison. The shady street is narrow and claustrophobic, but that doesn't seem to stop the droves of well-to-do families from moving as close to Central Park as possible.

Earlier in the week I saw a great metal address marker above the door of 180 93rd Street, so imagine how thrilled I was to see a nearly-identical one here at 66 West 88th Street. Featuring almost identical letterforms, it wasn't in as good of condition as the previous example, but it still had all the charm and beauty.

Columbus Ave Between 90th St and 92nd St

    

Venturing northward, watching as the Upper West Side very slowly transitions from Juilliard classrooms and Lincoln Center halls to community centers and housing projects, it's actually easy to lose track of just how far north you are. (Speaking of community centers – is there are rule that they all have to be really run-down and missing letters in their signage? It's a nearly universal truth that all community centers are labeled as "C  m  unity   Cen  ers" thanks either to neglect, vandalism or both.) Unlike other neighborhoods around Manhattan, the UWS is far more subtle in its variations. Perhaps this is why there aren't more sub-neighborhoods like those posses by the Upper East Side or downtown regions.

Columbus Avenue is the proud recipient of a recent lane reorganization which has created a protected bike route with a floating parking lane. The past few years has seen an explosion of bikeways, pedestrian plazas and crosswalk islands the likes of which this city has never experienced.

This continued marginalization of the automobile is very much the inverse of what Robert Moses was doing in the middle of the 20th Century. While he arguably ruined many sections of New York with his sweeping plans (Cross Bronx Expressway is a particularly brutal example), Moses saw the city as a car-centric town, pushing pedestrians out to Long Island and the borough's public parks. The results were mixed at best. While segregating people from cars by funneling folks in the city's green spaces wasn't necessarily radical, it did destroy the iconic downtown street life once enjoyed by kids and adults-alike decades earlier. However now we have the opposite problem. Traffic patterns which for decades have run without change now have to maneuver around arbitrarily reorganized lanes which, amongst other things, force delivery trucks to park in the middle of the street, or worse in the fancy new bike lanes. Politicians never seem so happy as when they're randomly changing something. Can't we have a few years of someone who just likes to keep the status quo?

93rd St Between Columbus Ave and Amsterdam Ave

   

While just a few blocks away a street like this would be dominated by brownstones, the slight change in neighborhood results in a change in architecture. A handful of larger apartment buildings line the street with enough construction canopies to make one wonder if they're not in the midst of just tearing everything down.

In the middle of the block the beautifully engraved Joan of Arc Junior High School can be found along with a handful of other less outstanding buildings. The Iglesia Adventista has an unusually large overhang at the top of the building – it nearly covers the entire sidewalk. One of my favorite sights was the lettering above the doorway for 180 93rd Street. Rendered in an elegantly styled semi-script with thin, extruded pieces of metal, the mid-century letterforms are so charming I would gladly steal them if I didn't think the guilt would cripple me.