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rabbitcruiser · 4 years

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Lower Manhattan (No. 11)

The Corbin Building (also known as 13 John Street and 192 Broadway) is a historic office building at the northeast corner of John Street and Broadway in the Financial District of Manhattan, New York City. It was built in 1888–1889 as a speculative development and was designed by Francis H. Kimball in the Romanesque Revival style with French Gothic detailing. The building was named for Austin Corbin, a president of the Long Island Rail Road who also founded several banks.

The Corbin Building has a polychrome exterior of brick, brownstone and terracotta featuring rounded arches with terracotta detailing, while its interior vaulted ceilings employ a Guastavino tile system. Structurally, it preceded the use of steel skeletons for skyscrapers, utilizing cast-iron beams and masonry walls that were load-bearing. The Corbin Building sits on a narrow trapezoidal lot with 160 feet (49 m) of frontage on John Street and 20 feet (6.1 m) on Broadway. The Corbin Building was significantly taller than others around at the time it was built.

The Corbin Building was erected as a speculative venture for use as office space or housing. The building was rehabilitated by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) as part of its Fulton Center project, which comprised improvements to the New York City Subway's adjoining Fulton Street station. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 18, 2003, and designated a New York City Landmark on June 23, 2015.

Francis H. Kimball designed the Corbin Building. Most of the building is eight stories high, but there are two single-story towers with pyramidal roofs on the extreme western and eastern ends.

The Corbin Building is considered to be a "transitional" building in the history of early skyscrapers: it was developed after the elevator had been introduced but before skeleton-framed skyscrapers were built. There are wrought iron horizontal beams and cast iron columns in the internal structure, although the building was also supported by brick, concrete, terracotta, and tile, which also served to fireproof the structure. The internal structure was supported on masonry walls that were load-bearing. The Corbin Building utilized "cage construction" in which the steel structure supported the floors, but not the outer walls. Guastavino tile was utilized on the ceilings, roof, and floors to provide extra fireproofing, and the Corbin Building was supposedly the first structure to use such technology.

The Corbin Building is 135 feet (41 m) tall. Because the internal structure was not completely made of steel, skyscrapers of the 1880s such as the Corbin Building were generally limited to ten stories. As such, it was significantly taller than others around at the time it was built. It was reported to be the tallest commercial building in New York City at the time of its completion, but both the New York Tribune and Western Union buildings of 1873 far exceeded the Corbin Building's height, at 260 and 230 feet (79 and 70 m), respectively. Architectural writer Robert A. M. Stern stated that "smaller infill buildings" such as the Corbin Building had tended "to experiment with new forms and unusual compositions" since 1880.

The building has facades on Broadway and John Street, with one bay on Broadway and eight on John Street. The facades are horizontally divided into the ground story, two midsections of three stories each, and an attic. The lowest three stories on both sides are made of Long Meadow brownstone, while the upper stories are clad with light brick surrounded by red-brown terracotta trim. On both of the visible facades, there are belt courses above the first four stories, as well as above the seventh story. A terracotta cornice resembling an arcade runs above the eighth story, while a smaller terracotta cornice runs above the ninth story. The decorations of the Corbin Building resemble those used on other nearby structures like the Potter Building and Temple Court Building.

An identical fenestration pattern is used on the Broadway facade and on either of the outermost bays on John Street, collectively known as the end bays. These bays form the facades of the "end pavilions", the only parts of the building that are nine stories high. The ground floor of the Broadway facade and the westernmost bay on John Street has stone arches supported by stone piers, while in the easternmost bay on John Street, the ground floor has a service entrance. The cornice above the first story of the end bays is supported by brackets and doubles as the second-story window sill. The second to fourth floors of the end bays are located within triple-story round arches.The fifth and sixth floors of the end bays consist of a pair of double arches with ornate terracotta surrounds and spandrels. The fifth story has four sash windows on each bay, while the sixth story has four sash windows under a transom bar with two arched windows. The seventh story of each end bay is composed of two pairs of single-height arched windows in each bay, with terracotta surrounds. On each end bay, the eighth story has three segmental arch windows with four terracotta pilasters, while the ninth story has five narrow round arches, two of which are filled with brick.

The six center bays on John Street also use an identical fenestration pattern to each other.[18] At ground level, the main entrance to the building is on the second bay from the east, and is recessed within a decorative round arch. The interior of the arch contains ornate details, while the exterior is supported by heavy stone piers and is topped by a keystone, a Gothic molding, and a small blind arcade of four pairs of arches. The other bays contain a steel-and-glass enclosure with doors leading inside to a set of escalators, which in turn connect to the Fulton Center. On the second through fourth floors, the six center bays contain 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, and 2 windows per floor from west to east. The second- and third-story windows are rectangular, with sills projecting from the third-story windows, while the fourth-story windows are arched with terracotta surrounds. The fifth through seventh stories of the center bays contain triple-story round arches. On the eighth story, each of the center bays has three segmental arch windows with terracotta pilasters, similar to in the end bays.

The windows in the triple-height arches (the second through fourth floors on the end bays, and the fifth through seventh floors on the center bays) have cast-iron surrounds with Gothic foliate decorative elements. Each floor of the triple arches is separated by decorative spandrels. The lower two stories of each triple arches contain a grid of three panes by three panes on each floor. Decorative vertical mullions separate the panes in each bay, which are angled slightly outward, while the horizontal transoms are not decorated. The uppermost story of each triple arch has five window panes: two below the sides of the triple-height arch and three underneath the center with horizontal transoms.

Source: Wikipedia

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smokeycemetery · 4 years

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JA ONE XTC

JA • • •

KEVIN HELDMAN lives in New York. This is his first piece for "Rolling Stone." (ROLLING STONE,FEB 9,1995)

THE FIRST TIME I meet JA, he skates up to me wearing Rollerblades, his cap played backward, on a street corner in Manhattan at around midnight. He's white, 24 years old, with a short, muscular build and a blond crew cut. He has been writing graffiti off and on in New York for almost 10 years and is the founder of a loosely affiliated crew called XTC. His hands, arms, legs and scalp show a variety of scars from nightsticks, razor wire, fists and sharp, jagged things he has climbed up, on or over. He has been beaten by the police -- a "wood shampoo," he calls it -- has been shot at, has fallen off a highway sign into moving traffic, has run naked through train yards tagging, has been chased down highways by rival writers wielding golf clubs and has risked his life innumerable times writing graffiti -- bombing, getting up.

JA lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment. There's graffiti on a wall-length mirror, a weight bench, a Lava lamp to bug out on, cans of paint stacked in the corner, a large Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) sticker on the side of the refrigerator. The buzzer to his apartment lists a false name; his phone number is unlisted to avoid law-enforcement representatives as well as conflicts with other writers. While JA and one of his writing partners, JD, and I are discussing their apprehension about this story, JD, offering up a maxim from the graffiti life, tells me matter-of-factly, "You wouldn't fuck us over, we know where you live."

At JA's apartment we look through photos. There are hundreds of pictures of writers inside out-of-service subway cars that they've just covered completely with their tags, pictures of writers wearing orange safety vests -- to impersonate transit workers -- and walking subway tracks, pictures of detectives and transit workers inspecting graffiti that JA and crew put up the previous night, pictures of stylized JA 'throw-ups' large, bubble-lettered logos written 15 feet up and 50 times across a highway retaining wall. Picture after picture of JA's on trains, JA's on trucks, on store gates, bridges, rooftops, billboards -- all labeled, claimed and recorded on film.

JA comes from a well-to-do family; his parents are divorced; his father holds a high-profile position in the entertainment industry. JA is aware that in some people's minds this last fact calls into question his street legitimacy, and he has put a great deal of effort into resisting the correlation between privileged and soft. He estimates he has been arrested 15 times for various crimes. He doesn't have a job, and it's unclear how he supports himself. Every time we've been together, he's been high or going to get high. Once he called me from Rikers Island prison, where he was serving a couple of months for disorderly conduct and a probation violation. He said some of the inmates saw him tagging in a notebook and asked him to do tattoos for them.

It sounds right. Wherever he is, JA dominates his surroundings. With his crew, he picks the spots to hit, the stores to rack from; he controls the mission. He gives directions in the car, plans the activities, sets the mood. And he takes everything a step further than the people he's with. He climbs higher, stays awake longer, sucks deepest on the blunt, writes the most graffiti. And though he's respected by other writers for testing the limits -- he has been described to me by other writers as a king and, by way of compliment, as "the sickest guy I ever met" -- that same recklessness sometimes alienates him from the majority who don't have such a huge appetite for chaos, adrenaline, self-destruction.

When I ask a city detective who specializes in combating graffiti if there are any particularly well-known writers, he immediately mentions JA and adds with a bit of pride in his voice, "We know each other." He calls JA the "biggest graffiti writer of all time" (though the detective would prefer that I didn't mention that, because it'll only encourage JA). "He's probably got the most throw-ups in the city, in the country, in the world," the detective says. "If the average big-time graffiti vandal has 10,000 tags, JA's got 100,000. He's probably done -- in New York City alone -- at least $5 million worth of damage."

AT ABOUT 3 A.M., JA AND TWO OTHER WRITERS go out to hit a billboard off the West Side Highway in Harlem. Tonight there are SET, a 21-year-old white writer from Queens, N.Y., and JD, a black Latino writer the same age, also from Queens. They load their backpacks with racked cans of Rustoleum, fat cap nozzles, heavy 2-foot industrial bolt cutters and surgical gloves. We pile into a car and start driving, Schooly D blasting on the radio. First a stop at a deli where JA and SET go in and steal beer. Then we drive around Harlem trying a number of different dope spots, keeping an eye out for "berries" -- police cars. JA tosses a finished 40-ounce out the window in a high arc, and it smashes on the street.

At different points, JA gets out of the car and casually walks the streets and into buildings, looking for dealers. A good part of the graffiti life involves walking anywhere in the city, at any time, and not being afraid -- or being afraid and doing it anyway.

We arrive at a spot where JA has tagged the dealer's name on a wall in his territory. The three writers buy a vial of crack and a vial of angel dust and combine them ("spacebase") in a hollowed-out Phillies blunt. JD tells me that "certain drugs will enhance your bombing," citing dust for courage and strength ("bionics"). They've also bombed on mescaline, Valium, marijuana, crack and malt liquor. SET tells a story of climbing highway poles with a spray can at 6 a.m., "all Xanaxed out."

While JD is preparing the blunt, JA walks across the street with a spray can and throws up all three of their tags in 4-foot-high bubbled, connected letters. In the corner, he writes my name.

We then drive to a waterfront area at the edge of the city -- a deserted site with warehouses, railroad tracks and patches of urban wilderness dotted with high-rise billboards. All three writers are now high, and we sit on a curb outside the car smoking cigarettes. From a distance we can see a group of men milling around a parked car near a loading dock that we have to pass. This provokes 30 minutes of obsessive speculation, a stoned stakeout with play by play:

"Dude, they're writers," says SET. "Let's go down and check them out," says JD. "Wait, let's see what they write," says JA. "Yo -- they're going into the trunk," says SET. "Cans, dude, they're going for their cans. Dude, they're writers. "There could be beef, possible beef," says JA. "Can we confirm cans, do we see cans?" SET wants to know. Yes, they do have cans," SET answers for himself. "There are cans. They are writers." It turns out that the men are thieves, part of a group robbing a nearby truck. In a few moments guards appear with flashlights and at least one drawn gun. The thieves scatter as guard dogs fan out around the area, barking crazily.

We wait this out a bit until JA announces, "It's on." Hood pulled up on his head, he leads us creeping through the woods (which for JA has become the cinematic jungles of Nam). It's stop and go, JA crawling on his stomach, unnecessarily close to one of the guards who's searching nearby. We pass through graffiti-covered tunnels (with the requisite cinematic drip drip), over crumbling stairs overgrown with weeds and brush, along dark, heavily littered trails used by crackheads.

We get near the billboard, and JA uses the bolt cutters to cut holes in two chain-link fences. We crawl through and walk along the railroad tracks until we get to the base of the sign. JA, with his backpack on, climbs about 40 feet on a thin piece of metal pipe attached to the main pillar. JD, after a few failed attempts, follows with the bolt cutters shoved down his pants and passes them to JA. Hanging in midair, his legs wrapped around a small piece of ladder, JA cuts the padlock and opens up the hatch to the catwalk. He then lowers his arm to JD, who is wrapped around the pole just below him, struggling. "J, give me your hand, "I'll pull you up," JA tells him. JD hesitates. He is reluctant to let go and continues treadmilling on the pole, trying to make it up. JD, give me your hand." JD doesn't want to refuse, but he's uncomfortable entrusting his life to JA. He won't let go of the pole. JA says it again, firmly, calmly, utterly confident: "J give me your hand." JD's arm reaches up, and JA pulls JD up onto the catwalk. Next, SET, the frailest of the three, follows unsteadily. They've called down and offered to put up his tag, but he insists on going up. "Dude, fuck that, I'm down," he says. I look away while he makes his way up, sure that he's going to fall (he almost does twice). The three have developed a set pattern for dividing the labor when they're "blowing up," one writer outlining, another working behind him, filling in. For 40 minutes I watch them working furiously, throwing shadows as they cover ads for Parliament and Amtrak with large multicolored throw-ups SET and JD bickering about space, JA scolding them, tossing down empty cans.

They risk their lives again climbing down. Parts of their faces are covered in paint, and their eyes beam as all three stare at the billboard, asking, "Isn't it beautiful?' And there is something intoxicating about seeing such an inaccessible, clean object gotten to and made gaudy. We get in the car and drive the West Side Highway northbound and then southbound so they can critique their work. "Damn, I should've used the white," JD says.

The next day both billboards are newly re-covered, all the graffiti gone. JA tells me the three went back earlier to get pictures and made small talk with the workers who were cleaning it off.

GRAFFITI HAS BEEN THROUGH A NUMBER OF incarnations since it surfaced in New York in the early 70s with a Greek teen-ager named Taki 183. It developed from the straightforward writing of a name to highly stylized, seemingly illegible tags (a kind of penmanship slang) to wild-style throw-ups and elaborate (master) "pieces" and character art. There has been racist graffiti political writing, drug advertising, gang graffiti. There is an art-graf scene from which Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiac, LEE, Futura 2000, Lady Pink and others emerged; aerosol advertising; techno graffiti written into computer programs; anti-billboard graffiti; stickers; and stencil writing. There are art students doing street work in San Francisco ("nonpermissional public art"); mural work in underground tunnels in New York; gallery shows from Colorado to New Jersey; all-day Graffiti-a-Thons; and there are graffiti artists lecturing art classes at universities. Graffiti has become part of urban culture, hip-hop culture and commercial culture, has spread to the suburbs and can be found in the backwoods of California's national forests. There are graffiti magazines, graffiti stores, commissioned walls, walls of fame and a video series available (Out to bomb) documenting writers going out on graffiti missions, complete with soundtrack. Graffiti was celebrated as a metaphor in the 70s (Norman Mailer's "The Faith of Graffiti"); it went Hollywood in the '80s (Beat Street, Turk 182!, Wild Style); and in the '90s it has been increasingly used to memorialize the inner-city dead.

But as much as graffiti has found acceptance, it has been vilified a hundred times more. Writers are now being charged with felonies and given lengthy jail terms -- a 15-year-old in California was recently sentenced to eight years in a juvenile detention center. Writers have been given up to 1000 hours of community service and forced to undergo years of psychological counseling; their parents have been hit with civil suits. In California a graffiti writer's driver's license can be revoked for a year; high-school diplomas and transcripts can also be withheld until parents make restitution. In some cities property owners who fail to remove graffiti from their property are subject to fines and possible jail time. Last spring in St. Louis, Cincinnati, San Antonio and Sacramento, Calif., politicians proposed legislation to cane graffiti writers (four to 10 hits with a wooden paddle, administered by parents or by a bailiff in a public courtroom). Across the nation, legislation has been passed making it illegal to sell spray paint and wide-tipped markers to anyone under 18, and often the materials must be kept locked up in the stores. Several cities have tried to ban the sales altogether, license sellers of spray paint and require customers to give their name and address when purchasing paint. In New York some hardware-store owners will give a surveillance photo of anyone buying a large quantity of spray cans to the police. In Chicago people have been charged with possession of paint. In San Jose, Calif., undercover police officers ran a sting operation -- posing as filmmakers working on a graffiti documentary -- and arrested 31 writers.

Hidden cameras, motion detectors, laser removal, specially developed chemical coatings, night goggles, razor wire, guard dogs, a National Graffiti Information Network, graffiti hot lines, bounties paid to informers -- one estimate is that it costs $4 billion a year nationally to clean graffiti -- all in an effort to stop those who "visually laugh in the face of communities," as a Wall Street Journal editorial raged.

The popular perception is that since the late 1980s when New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority adopted a zero tolerance toward subway graffiti (the MTA either cleaned or destroyed more than 6,000 graffiti-covered subway cars, immediately pulling a train out of service if any graffiti appeared on it), graffiti culture had died in the place of its birth. According to many graffiti writers, however, the MTA, in its attempt to kill graffiti, only succeeded in bringing it out of the tunnels and train yards and making it angry. Or as Jeff Ferrell, a criminologist who has chronicled the Denver graffiti scene, theorizes, the authorities' crackdown moved graffiti writing from subculture to counterculture. The work on the trains no longer ran, so writers started hitting the streets. Out in the open they had to work faster and more often. The artistry started to matter less and less. Throw-ups, small cryptic tags done in marker and even the straightforward writing of a name became the dominant imagery. What mattered was quantity ("making noise"), whether the writer had heart, was true to the game, was "real." And the graffiti world started to attract more and more people who weren't looking for an alternative art canvas but simply wanted to be connected to an outlaw community, to a venerable street tradition that allowed the opportunity to advertise their defiance. "It's that I'm doing it that I get my rush, not by everyone seeing it," says JA. "Yeah, that's nice, but if that's all that's gonna motivate you to do it, you're gonna stop writing. That's what happened to a lot of writers." JD tells me: "We're just putting it in their faces; it's like 'Yo, you gotta put up with it.'"

Newspapers have now settled on the term "graffiti vandal" rather than "artist" or "writer." Graffiti writers casually refer to their work as doing destruction." In recent years graffiti has become more and more about beefs and wars, about "fucking up the MTA," "fucking up the city."

Writers started taking a jock attitude toward getting up frequently and tagging in hard-to-reach places, adopting a machismo toward going over other writers' work and defending their own ("If you can write, you can fight"). Whereas graffiti writing was once considered an alternative to the street, now it imports drugs, violence, weapons and theft from that world -- the romance of the criminal deviant rather than the artistic deviant. In New York today, one police source estimates there are approximately 100,000 people involved in a variety of types of graffiti writing. The police have caught writers as young as 8 and as old as 42. And there's a small group of hard-core writers who are getting older who either wrote when graffiti was in its prime or long for the days when it was, those who write out of compulsion, for each other and for the authorities who try to combat graffiti, writers who haven't found anything in their lives substantial or hype enough to replace graffiti writing.

The writers in their 20s come mostly from working-class families and have limited prospects and ambitions for the future. SET works in a drugstore and has taken lithium and Prozac for occasional depression; JD dropped out of high school and is unemployed, last working as a messenger, where he met JA. They spend their nights driving 80 miles an hour down city highways, balancing 40-ounce bottles of Old English 800 between their legs, smoking blunts and crack-laced cigarettes called coolies, always playing with the radio. They reminisce endlessly about the past, when graf was real, when graf ran on the trains, and they swap stories about who's doing what on the scene. The talk is a combo platter of Spicoli, homeboy, New Age jock and eighth grade: The dude is a fuckin' total turd. . . . I definitely would've gotten waxed. . . . It's like some bogus job. . . . I'm amped, I'm Audi, you buggin . . . You gotta be there fully, go all out, focus. . . . Dudes have bitten off SET, he's got toys jockin' him. . . .

They carry beepers, sometimes guns, go upstate or to Long Island to "prey on the hicks" and to rack cans of spray paint. They talk about upcoming court cases and probation, about quitting, getting their lives together, even as they plan new spots to hit, practice their style by writing on the walls of their apartments, on boxes of food, on any stray piece of paper (younger writers practice on school notebooks that teachers have been known to confiscate and turn over to the police). They call graffiti a "social tool" and "some kind of ill form of communication," refer to every writer no matter his age as "kid." Talk in the graffiti life vacillates between banality and mythology, much like the activity itself: hours of drudgery, hanging out, waiting, interrupted by brief episodes of exhilaration. JD, echoing a common refrain, says, "Graffiti writers are like bitches: a lot of lying, a lot of talking, a lot of gossip." They don't like tagging with girls ("cuties," or if they use drugs, "zooties") around because all they say is (in a whiny voice), You're crazy. . . . Write my name."

WHEN JA TALKS ABOUT GRAFFITI, HE'S reluctant to offer up any of the media-ready cliches about the culture (and he knows most of them). He's more inclined to say, "Fuck the graffiti world," and scoff at graf shops, videos, conventions and 'zines. But he can be sentimental about how he began -- riding the No. 1, 2 and 3 trains when he was young, bugging out on the graffiti-covered cars, asking himself, "How did they do that? Who are they?" And he'll respectfully invoke the names of long-gone writers he admired when he was just starting out: SKEME, ZEPHYR, REVOLT, MIN.

JA, typical of the new school, primarily bombs, covering wide areas with throw-ups. He treats graffiti less as an art form than as an athletic competition, concentrating on getting his tag in difficult-to-reach places, focusing on quantity and working in defiance of an aesthetic that demands that public property be kept clean. (Writers almost exclusively hit public or commercial property.)

And when JA is not being cynical, he can talk for hours about the technique, the plotting, the logistics of the game like "motion bombing" by clockwork a carefully scoped subway train that he knows has to stop for a set time, at a set place, when it gets a certain signal in the tunnels. He says, "To me, the challenge that graffiti poses, there's something very invigorating and freeing about it, something almost spiritual. There's a kind of euphoria, more than any kind of drug or sex can give you, give me . . . for real."

JA says he wants to quit, and he talks about doing it as if he were in a 12-step program. "How a person in recovery takes it one day a time, that's how I gotta take it," he says. You get burnt out. There's pretty much nothing more the city can throw at me; it's all been done." But then he'll hear about a yard full of clean sanitation trucks, the upcoming Puerto Rican Day Parade (a reason to bomb Fifth Avenue) or a billboard in an isolated area; or it'll be 3 a.m., he'll be stoned, driving around or sitting in the living room, playing NBA Jam, and someone will say it: "Yo, I got a couple of cans in the trunk. . . ." REAS, an old-school writer of 12 years who, after a struggle and a number of relapses, eventually quit the life, says, "Graffiti can become like a hole you're stuck in; it can just keep on going and going, there's always another spot to write on."

SAST is in his late 20s and calls himself semiretired after 13 years in the graf scene. He still carries around a marker with him wherever he goes and cops little STONE tags (when he's high, he writes, STONED). He's driving JA and me around the city one night, showing me different objects they've tagged, returning again and again to drug spots to buy dust and crack, smoking, with the radio blasting; he's telling war stories about JA jumping onto moving trains, JA hanging off the outside of a speeding four-wheel drive. SAST is driving at top speed, cutting in between cars, tailgating, swerving. A number of times as we're racing down the highway, I ask him if he could slow down. He smiles, asks if I'm scared, tells me not to worry, that he's a more cautious driver when he's dusted. At one point on the FDR, a car cuts in front of us. JA decides to have some fun.

"Yo, he burnt you, SAST," JA says. We start to pick up speed. Yo, SAST, he dissed you, he cold dissed you, SAST." SAST is buying it, the look on his face becoming more determined as we go 70, 80, 90 miles an hour, hugging the divider, flying between cars. I turn to JA, who's in the back seat, and I try to get him to stop. JA ignores me, sitting back perfectly relaxed, smiling, urging SAST to go faster and faster, getting off, my fear adding to his rush.

At around 4 a.m., SAST drops us off on the middle of the Manhattan Bridge and leaves. JA wants to show me a throw-up he did the week before. We climb over the divider from the roadway to the subway tracks. JA explains that we have to cross the north and the southbound tracks to get to the outer part of the bridge. In between there are a number of large gaps and two electrified third rails, and we're 135 feet above the East River. As we're standing on the tracks, we hear the sound of an oncoming train. JA tells me to hide, to crouch down in the V where two diagonal braces meet just beside the tracks.

I climb into position, holding on to the metal beams, head down, looking at the water as the train slams by the side of my body. This happens twice more. Eventually, I cross over to the outer edge of the bridge, which is under construction, and JA points out his tag about 40 feet above on what looks like a crow's-nest on a support pillar. After a few moments of admiring the view, stepping carefully around the many opportunities to fall, JA hands me his cigarettes and keys. He starts crawling up one of the braces on the side of the bridge, disappears within the structure for a moment, emerges and makes his way to an electrical box on a pillar. Then he snakes his way up the piping and grabs on to a curved support. Using only his hands he starts to shimmy up; at one point he's hanging almost completely upside down. If he falls now, he'll land backward onto one of the tiers and drop into the river below. He continues to pull himself up, the old paint breaking off in his hands, and finally he flips his body over a railing to get to the spot where he tagged. He doesn't have a can or a marker with him, and at this point graffiti seems incidental. He comes down and tells me that when he did the original tag he was with two writers; one he half carried up, the other stopped at a certain point and later told JA that watching him do that tag made him appreciate life, being alive.

We walk for 10 minutes along a narrow, grooved catwalk on the side of the tracks; a thin wire cable prevents a fall into the river. A few times, looking down through the grooves, I have to stop, force myself to take the next step straight ahead, shake off the vertigo. JA is practically jogging ahead of me. We exit the bridge into Chinatown as the sun comes up and go to eat breakfast. JA tells me he's a vegetarian.

IF YOU TALK TO SERIOUS GRAFFITI writers, most of them will echo the same themes; they decry the commercialization of graf, condemn the toys and poseurs and alternately hate and feel attached to the authorities who try to stop them. They say with equal parts bravado and self-deprecation that a graffiti writer is a bum, a criminal, a vandal, slick, sick, obsessed, sneaky, street-smart, living on edges figurative and literal. They show and catalog cuts and scars on their bodies from razor wire, pieces of metal, knives, box cutters. I once casually asked a writer named GHOST if he knew another writer whose work I had seen in a graf'zine. "Yeah, I know him, he stabbed me," GHOST replies matter-of-factly. "We've still got beef." SET tells me he was caught by two DTs (detectives) who assaulted him, took his cans of paint and sprayed his body and face. JA tells similar stories of police beatings for his making officers run after him, of cops making him empty his spray cans on his sneakers or on the back of a fellow writer's jacket. JD has had 48 stitches in his back and 18 in his head over "graffiti-related beef." JA's best friend and writing partner, SANE SMITH, a legendary all-city writer who was sued by the city and the MTA for graffiti, was found dead, floating in Jamaica Bay. There's endless speculation in the grafworld as to whether he was pushed, fell or jumped off a bridge. SANE is so respected, there are some writers today who spend time in public libraries reading and rereading the newspaper microfilm about his death, his arrests, his career. According to JA, after SANE's death, his brother, SMiTH, also a respected graffiti artist, found a piece of paper on which SANE had written his and JA's tag and off to the side, FLYING HIGH THE XTC WAY. It now hangs on JA's apartment wall.

One morning, JA and I jump off the end of a subway platform and head into the tunnels. He shows me hidden rooms, emergency hatches that open to the sidewalk, where to stand when the trains come by. He tells me about the time SANE lay face down in a shallow drainage ditch on the tracks as an express train ran inches above him. JA says anytime he was being chased by the police he would run into a nearby subway station, jump off the platform and run into the tunnels. The police would never follow. KET, a veteran graffiti writer, tells me how in the tunnels he would accidentally step on homeless people sleeping. They'd see him tagging and would occasionally ask that he "throw them up," write their names on the wall. He usually would. Walking in the darkness between the electrified rails as trains race by, JA tells me the story of two writers he had beef with who came into the tunnels to cross out his tags. Where the cross-outs stop is where they were killed by an approaching train.

The last time I go out with JA, SET and JD, they pick me up at around 2 am. We drive down to the Lower East Side to hit a yard where about 60 trucks and vans are parked next to one another. Every vehicle is already covered with throw-ups and tags, but the three start to write anyway, JA in a near frenzy. They're running in between the rows, crawling under trucks, jumping from roof to roof, wedged down in between the trailers, engulfed in nauseating clouds of paint fumes (the writers sometimes blow multicolored mucous out of their noses), going over some writers' tags, respecting others, JA throwing up SANE's name, searching for any little piece of clean space to write on. JA, who had once again been talking about retirement, is now hungry to write and wants to hit another spot. But JD doesn't have any paint, SET needs gas money for his car, and they have to drive upstate the next morning to appear in court for a paint-theft charge.

During the ride back uptown the car is mostly quiet, the mood depressed. And even when the three were in the truck yard, even when JA was at his most intense, it seemed closer to work, routine, habit. There are moments like this when they seem genuinely worn out by the constant stress, the danger, the legal problems, the drugging, the fighting, the obligation to always hit another spot. And it's usually when the day is starting.

About a week later I get a call from another writer whom JA had told I was writing an article on graffiti. He tells me he has never been king, never gone all city, but now he is making a comeback, coming out of retirement with a new tag. He says he could do it easily today because there is no real competition. He says he was thinking about trying to make some money off of graffiti -- galleries. canvases, whatever . . . to get paid.

"I gotta do something," the writer says. "I can't rap, I can't dance, I got this silly little job." We talk more, and he tells me he appreciates that I'm writing about writers, trying to get inside the head of a vandal, telling the real deal. He also tells me that graffiti is dying, that the city is buffing it, that new writers are all toys and are letting it die, but it's still worth it to write.

I ask why, and then comes the inevitable justification that every writer has to believe and take pleasure in, the idea that order will always have to play catch-up with them. "It takes me seconds to do a quick throw-up; it takes them like 10 minutes to clean it," he says. "Who's coming out on top?"

#graffiti #ja #ja one #ja nyc #ja one nyc #new york graffiti #xtc crew #xtc #graff nyc #ja graffiti #ja one graffiti

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stagenurse52 · 2 years

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Here is Why 1 Million Clients In the US Are Statue Of Liberty

In all, the FAA has documented 16 accidents or incidents involving Liberty Helicopters since 1995. The 2009 crash was the one earlier incident with fatalities. The corporate has "a fleet of 10 state-of-the-art Airbus helicopters (previously American Eurocopter)," based on the web site. Liberty Helicopters posted a press release on its web site, saying it is "centered on supporting the families affected by this tragic accident and on totally cooperating with the FAA and NTSB investigations." It mentioned it was referring all press inquiries to federal businesses. As soon as they get by the galleries, visitors are lastly whisked into the air, where they're going to "soar" around NYC's landmarks (a rendering shows the Statue of Liberty) to a soundtrack with songs like Taylor Swift’s "Welcome to New York" and Frank Sinatra’s "Theme From New York." The full movement seats will dip, turn and soar while wind, mist and scents are blown at riders' faces. You'll most likely should make subway or bus transfers so this option is time consuming (up to 2 hours of travel), but it surely only prices $4.Seventy five whole. It’s a disgrace and mismanagement of available taxis, time, airport disruption as a consequence of interminable lines and disgruntled passengers and further gas since the driver needs to journey fighting visitors to reach the terminal Once more.

The Q70 runs between the airport and two Queens subway stations-Jackson Heights-Roosevelt Avenue/74th Street, and 61st Street-Woodside-providing connections to seven different subway traces. As soon as the pilot starts, you will be able to use Google Pay to board all Staten Island buses and subway stations along the 4-5-6 traces between Grand Central and Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Heart. MetroCard merchants are close to entance/exit to stations of Jamica & Howard Seaside. After years of heavy-handed, ego-driven interference with MTA operations from Cuomo, New Yorkers are searching for indicators from Hochul that change is on the way, and so far, the brand new governor has been saying all the correct issues. Once more, she’s saying the suitable things. The oldest present theater in Minneapolis, Minn., has been many issues because it opened in 1910. It was a vaudeville stage that attracted the likes of Mae West and the Marx Brothers, a burlesque theater, a film theater and even an evangelistic auditorium. He could possibly be counted on to struggle even when others wouldn't. I put together a list of all the individuals to function both MTA head or New York City Transit President throughout the ten years, seven months and 23 days of Cuomo Administration, and you may see why leadership continuity and righting the MTA’s ship have typically felt inconceivable over the previous decade.

She’ll be in office for under 12 months earlier than facing a wide-open major subsequent 12 months, and the jockeying for a four-12 months term might limit her power. Primarily based on the video of the crash, Robb speculated that one of the floats on the helicopter didn't activate, which can have precipitated it to turn sideways in the water. The NTSB will probably have a look at three issues: the pilot's coaching, expertise and rapid response during the crash; what, if something, on the helicopter caused the crash; and what environmental components may have contributed to the crash, stated Gary C. Robb, an aviation legal professional based in Missouri. It may be uber cheesy or classically touristy to take a dinner cruise on your first visit to New York however there's a purpose so many individuals guide a ticket. Possibility 3: Take a LIRR practice to Queens. GoShuttle will not be a nasty possibility. The mayor rode into Pier 1 at Brooklyn Bridge Park on the "Lunch Field" with Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen, Department of Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg, Economic Growth Company President James Patchett and a slew of other officials. The expertise begins with a film by documentarians Ric Burns and James Sanders-narrated by everyone's fave actor Jeff Goldblum-that touches on NYC’s historical past, specifically Instances Square and its global impression.

Whereas on the subway car, riders see NYC’s vibrant pop-cultural evolution by means of seven themed galleries- "Finance," "Skyline," "Television/Radio," "Fashion," "Music," "Broadway" and "Movie"-that show off historic artifacts, star-studded memorabilia. Want to see some more deals like this? “The MTA is going to be way more liberated,” Hochul mentioned to NY1’s Errol Louis during Thursday’s Inside Metropolis Hall. June 7, 2021 - A second Statue of Liberty, nicknamed the "little sister," leaves Paris for brand new York City as a present from France to America. In 2024, the Statue of Liberty had undergone intensive renovation, with its oxidization eliminated in order to restore its coloration back to copper. nyc to lga transportation than that, in July 2007, a Liberty sightseeing chopper carrying eight individuals suffered a rotor blade separation midflight and crashed into the Hudson River. First responders carry a person to an ambulance after the helicopter crashed into the East River. That is the corporate's third crash since 2007. In August 2009, nine folks have been killed after a helicopter and a small, personal plane crashed into one another over the Hudson River. On June 1, the South Brooklyn route will start, the Astoria route will launch in August, and NYC Ferry can even take over operations of the East River Ferry.

#nyc to lga transportation

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freevoidman · 6 years

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NINTENDO DIRECT 9.13.18 REACTION

alright since it’s been a couple hours and i’m free from my 6 pm class, let’s have some fun watching this bitch!

Before reading: I don’t want a lot of smash news. The hype for the game is high enough, but we need to learn about other titles coming out between now and december for both the switch AND the 3DS (if they’re still making big-name titles for that) and after SSBU that would grab my attention. I haven’t looked at any leaks, just speculation vids, so I’m going in blind!

3DS NEWS:

LUIGI’S MANSION 3 FOR THE SWITCH YES!!!!

Kirby’s Yarn re-release for the 3DS???? FUCK YEAH! That was one of my favorite games for the Wii!

Bowser’s Inside Story + Bowser’s Jr. Journey seems... okay? Isn’t this the third release for BIS?

I don’t really like the mandatory game ownership for Luigi’s Mansion 2p... mainly the fact there isn’t online play...

Never really cared about Yo-Kai watch so... good job for those who care about yo-kai for the new stuff?

DAMN they’re really killin off the 3DS huh? that was pretty much it and we’re only 5 mins into the Direct.....

SWITCH NEWS:

MORE SPLATOON 2 FUCK YEAH!!!! THIS MUSIC IS HYPE AF!!! SO MANY NEW CLOTHES! WTF is this new game mode?????? (if it’s about spraypainting stuff Imma scream I’m super hyped)

Ay, Megaman! Congrats guys (again, never really cared, but I wouldn’t mind trying it out)

I’m kinda mad the characters in MTA had to be DLC (i think?). I’m happy to see a co-op mode tho!

I.... really... don’t like this re-released Super Mario Bros. U..... It doesn’t look like it’s adding a lot of new stuff, and the Wii U version is much cheaper.

KATAMARI DAMACY?!?!?!?! NO ONE SAW THIS COMING!!!!!! I never got to play this game, so I’m really happy to see a good port/re-release coming to Switch

oh PLEASE don’t let this nintendo online shit be mandatory to play online.... i don’t want to have to pay to play online for Splatoon 2, especially with the shitty broken app they have on the phone....

Damn, original NES designed Switch controllers! that’s pretty cool!

God I hate this Let’s Go shit for the switch. I really don’t like the game, I want to see a classic core styled game.

MARIO PARTY!!!! AND THERE’S A GOOD SINGLE PLAYER MODE! AND AN ONLINE MODE! COMING OCTOBER 5TH!

Daemon X Machina looks sick af! Man, I really hope we get a definitive release date besides “2019″

Uuuuugh i do not give a fuck for the board games. If I wanted to play a board/tabletop game, I’d do it in reality, not through my console/pc

WHAT IS THIS NEW CIVILIZATION GAME?????? DAMN WE’RE GETTING CIV VI ON SWITCH??

Daaaaaaaaaamn new Starfox game! Starlink looks pretty good!

Fuckin hell I don’t care about FFCC! I GOT SO HYPED MAN I THOUGHT IT WAS THE VII REMAKE! OR XV POCKET EDITION!

WAIT THERE IS POCKET EDITION COMING TO THE SWITCH WHAT THE FUCK IT’S COMING OUT TODAY!!!!! THE FANDOM’S ALIVE!

AND WORLD OF FINAL FANTASY

AND FINAL FANTASY XII?!?!?!

WHAT IS HAPPENING WHY IS THERE SO MANY GOOD FF GAMES COMING TO SWITCH???

DAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN THAT SSBU BUNDLE LOOKS SEXY

ANIMAL CROSSING!!!!!!!!

WAIT SHE’S IN SMASH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!????????????

Wow they duped all of us

WAIT NO THERE IS A NEW GAME COMING IN 2019!!!!!!!!

DAMMIT NINTENDO STOP FAKING US OUT

well damn, that was a good direct! didn’t have everything I wanted, but it was good information nonetheless! we’ll probably get more confirmed dates for the stuff coming in 2019 once SSBU is released (or close to releasing, anyways).

#nintendo #nintendo direct

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theharlotofferelden · 1 year

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So I wrote this bit of meta/speculation regarding Pen back in February but hesitated on posting it for a variety of reasons. I figured I'd post it after playing the recent update because some of my suspicions were correct. I haven't edited any of it because, frankly, I don't want to because I messed with it so much that I honestly wouldn't know where to start on fixing things.

Anyway here's some stuff I've noticed about Pen. Spoilers for the The Secrets Behind The Mask update of MTAS and Major Spoilers for My Time At Portia.

So a couple days ago I went down a rabbit hole pertaining to Pen. It started with a character from Portia and then snowballed into a loose analysis of the game events and possibly where they might take the story. It's very inconclusive, and I'm not really dedicated to any one idea of where the story will go or how certain characters will develop. I'm simply speculating here because speculating is fun.

Y'all are free to disagree as I know I'm not good at knowing where the story is going at all (I guessed wrong about who the spy for Logan was :')). I'd appreciate input or other theories though. At the very least, some of this might be entertaining muse fuel or a headcanon.

So one thing I stumbled upon while looking at Pen's wiki is under the Trivia section:

[Image ID: A screenshot of the Trivia section of Pen's wiki page. It reads as follows:

The word on his chest armor is "Justice" (正义, zhèng-yì).

According to Chinese version his full name is Péng Hǔ (彭虎) . Pen (彭) is his family name.

Hu (虎) means tiger. /.End ID]

After we meet with Logan and find out that Grace has been working with him (and that Grace is a secret agent for the Ataran government) we find out that there's a Duvos spy in Sandrock. Grace's people intercepted a message under the code name "Tiger" that they were targeting the water tower.

Other folks have pointed this out on the Steam discussion forums and believe that Pen's name translating to "Tiger" is a misdirect. Others think it might mean he's the Duvos spy due to the fact that a lot of the character's (Chinese) names pertain to aspects of their personality.

I'm personally on the fence about it. There's a lot I don't know about Pen, and I'm not sure if anything is really revealed about his past in some dialogue I missed (started a new save specifically to take a better look at things again since it's been a couple months). But currently, I really don't know anything about Pen's background.

All that aside, I find it very interesting that this game takes place shortly before the events of Portia. If you've played Portia, you'll know that they also have a Duvos agent in their midst called the Rogue Knight. After defeating the Rogue Knight, it was strongly suggested that he was Aadit; a resident of Portia that was a refugee from the border between Duvos and Elthea.

I'm not going to get into whether or not Aadit was actually the Rogue Knight just because both of their wikis explain there's contradictory information. But it's more commonly accepted by ppl in fandom that he was (from what I've noticed anyway).

I'm bringing this up mainly because.... isn't it kinda weird that both Portia and Sandrock are having issues with a Duvos agent almost around the same time?

One of the things I find interesting about Sandrock is how they flipped a lot of character's personalities compared to Portia. Example: Gale is very confident as a mayor compared to Trudy. Higgins is such a hard working builder that he's standing outside the door of the commissions office just so he can get first pickings of the commissions on the board, and you can often see him at the furnace stations next to his workshop. Meanwhile, Yan implies not so subtly that he barely even works, and most of the time you find him in the office with his feet kicked up on the table; never at the worktable next to his house.

Let's say that Aadit is the Rogue Knight and that Pen is a Duvos spy. Aadit is a soft spoken, polite pacifist that you can lose friendship with if you challenge him one too many times to a fight. Meanwhile Pen is loud, rude, confident, and loves to fight.

The contradictions in characterization are there, but do they mean anything? Probably not. Even if Pen was designed to contrast Aadit, it doesn't necessarily mean he's aligned with Duvos.

There's much we don't know about Aadit, and the fact that Pathea has been so cagey about him kind of makes me think that if he doesn't make a cameo in Sandrock, we're probably going to see him further along the line. They said as much in the FAQ of their kickstarter for Sandrock:

What’s happened to Aadit? Is he ever coming back to Portia?

Aadit’s story is left open so that we may be able to explore it down the road. Hopefully we’ll see him return to Portia one day.

(Tho them saying "Portia" makes me wonder if they're interested in making a sequel to Portia?)

And as I mentioned earlier, there's a lot we don't know about Pen either.

One thing worth pointing out is that it's very interesting Pen has a relic weapon on him considering the Rogue Knight himself uses a relic weapon.

After The Perfect Trap mission in My Time At Portia, Django asks you what it was like fighting the Rogue Knight. When you answer "He was using ancient weapons" he replies:

Oh was he now, most knights these days use some type of relic. It's like their calling card. The real knights though, they don't need these corrupted things.

And when you ask him "What exactly is a knight?" He answers:

Didn't you have knights in Barnorock? Anyway, if you're lookin' for a history lesson, it's best you talk with Isaac. But knights are highly skilled warriors that defend the weak and balance the strong. Or that's how it's supposed to be. But nowadays…

What's interesting about these responses: Modern knights tend to use relic weapons, and that knights are highly skilled warriors that "defend the weak and balance the strong".

Pen's entire thing is that he's the Defender of Sandrock. And he has a relic weapon on him. Does this mean Pen is a knight?

Oddly enough, it's likely as Pen says as much when you speak to him once a day:

[Image ID: A screenshot of Pen with the caption of him saying: "Aren't you clad we have a knight in this town? Saving damsels and delivering justice. Of course, I'm talking about me. I'm the Protector of Sandrock." /.End ID]

Assuming Pen isn't just claiming or masquerading as a knight (considering he owns a relic weapon) could this mean he's actually working for Duvos similarly to the Rogue Knight in Portia?

I'm really on the fence about this. Pen's entire personality feels like a facade; a spy that hides in plain sight by being an egotistical windbag. A useful egotistical windbag, but a windbag nonetheless. I feel this is at least partially supported by the fact that some people write him off immediately because "he's too dumb to be a spy".

Yet at the same time.....If Grace is in Sandrock and is specifically there to help Logan find the Duvos spy, could there potentially be a third party who's also interested in helping. And if so, could that party potentially be Pen?

Probably the only bit of dialogue I've been able to find (so far) on Pen's background and why he's in Sandrock is what he says here:

[Image ID: A screenshot of Pen with the caption of him saying: "I bet you're wondering how did someone so awesome, me, end up in this unsavory place. Well, the Light told me to look after the weak, and guided me here. That's the short version." /.End ID]

Pen could be lying here considering he lies to you (almost unnecessarily) about why he wasn't present to stop Logan from destroying the water tower. Logan not only says he was there, but he was also the one responsible for destroying the water tower.

It's possible it could be just as Grace says; that he lied to avoid being blamed for destroying the water tower. But I also think if he was being honest about it, he would have to explain how he destroyed the water tower. Yes, he's a very good fighter, but the water tower literally exploded.

But let's consider he's being honest about his reasons for being in Sandrock. Judging by the way he's speaking, the "Light" he's speaking of is related to The Church of Light..... Could it be possible that he was sent by a church to Sandrock to find the Duvos spy? More specifically, could he have been sent by the High Temple in Meidi, seeing as how Meidi literally borders Duvos, making it likely that they would have easier access to information on what Duvos is doing?

I personally don't think this is likely due to the fact that Pen is intent on going after Logan. Pen alleged that he only saw Logan flee after the church collapsed while attempting to rescue Howlett. But what if he didn't? Perhaps he's going after Logan because he thinks he knows something more (particularly that there's a Duvos spy in Sandrock, and that's something that could potentially compromise him). Because the alternative in this situation is him going after Logan under the suspicion that he's the spy, which makes no sense given he's a native of Sandrock and just lost his father.

I'll end on the last thing I noticed about Pen's concept art. The pose is very similar to that of the Rogue Knight's concept art:

I was pretty reluctant to point this out because it's just a pose and this particular thing feels a bit too much like "reading too deeply into things. Especially since Arlo and Justice share similar poses, and even Logan's pose is reminiscent of the above pose. I just thought I would mention it because it threw me when I noticed how similar they were when I was looking at the thumbnails on my phone.

Just to be clear: I don't think Pen is the Rogue Knight or Aadit. I mean, I would be interested in them proving me wrong. But due to the fact that these games take place closely around the same time, I don't think it's feasible that the two are the same person.

I would, however, be interested to know if there's indeed a connection considering how some of Pen's facial characteristics are reminiscent of Aadit's, but I'd rather not speculate that far. Especially considering it hasn't been canonically confirmed that Aadit is the Rogue Knight (and we don't know where Pen grew up).

Anyway these are all my thoughts for now. Like I said, I'm not really dedicated to one line of thought. It just tickles my brain. I would like to talk more about the stories Pen, Burgess, and the others gave about the night Howlett died and compare it to Logan's. But for now I'll just end on this.

#my time at sandrock #my time at sandrock spoilers #mtas spoilers #mtas meta #mtas speculation #mtas pen #mainly posting this for myself bc it's been languishing in my drafts for months #and i don't want to delete it because i spent too much time on it

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trash-can-sam · 1 year

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now I may be cornplating here but. One interesting thing I noticed about MTAS and MTAP is the difference in how the research is structured in terms of the roles the characters have in the system.

in the My Time Universe (MTU for short ig) its notable that the seperation between research and archeology is a lot less clear, with archeology informing researchers on how to view the machines theyre studying and what exactly to look for, and research informing archeology about the purpose of what they find. They are very much close together, as being a researcher is less about discovering new solutions and more about discovering how old solutions worked and how to reappropiate them in a world where they’ve backslid in knowlege. Archeology is still very much about the stories and history of locations where research is still very much about the science, but the line dividing what those two things mean is a lot more blurry.

Now, you can see this seperation a bit in MTAP, with Petra being more archeology focused and Merlin being more research focused, but both are still interested in the other fields, both of them wanting to discover both the how of the science and the why of the archeology. Merlin and Petra work closely together, overall united in their goal of discovery for the sake of discovery.

However, MTAS takes this more cooperative approach and splits it, into Qi and Grace, showing you both sides seperately through two people who do not get along, using their fields to say something about how they think as well, and I think thats an interesting change. It sort of shows you both parts seperately, but brings attention to how they are still closely intertwined.

Qi has no real interest in people or individuals, and doesnt really care about how stuff got there. He does still speculate, like when you find the equitorial mount and hes like “there was probably an observatory here” and he still has a lot of knowlege of old world stuff, obviously. But his focus is very much on the innerworkings of the technology, how he can use it and how he can improve it (and how he can make silly things that cater to his specific interests,) hes also not really interested in it for discovery itself most of the time and will just straight up avoid things he has no interest in (Rosy) despite the fact they would probably further knowlege.

Grace, although she also is interested in how the tech works and knows a lot (both because of her actual job and interest in archeology), is more interested in the personal side. I dont know if she was actually writing a research paper on the Breach or if that was a hoax, but I feel like regardless of if shes an actual archeology student on the side or not, she did take a class on it and it is an interest of hers, because I cant think of any other reason she would want the thing’s she asked you to get. Grace is more interested in what objects say about people than how they work. She also has a goal other than discovery itself, she wants to use this knowlege to help her discover how people themselves tick.

This makes them sort of at odds with eachother, and although their actual fields dont really come up, its more of a symbollic type of battle. Is efficency more important or is the human experience? Do we focus more on the human component, truly understanding and engaging with the past, or do we focus on the best way to optimize and improve past technologies? And really, its a false dichotomy. Both exist, and they exist together and inform eachother, as shown with Merlin and Petra.

I just find it interesting the approach they both take, MTAS taking the system shown in MTAP and elaborating on it with stronger personalities both interested for more selfish reasons. I dont really know if I worded this correctly but I tried I hope you see my vision.

#my time at sandrock #mtas #mtas qi #mtap #mtas grace #mtas spoilers #minor but theyre still kind of there? its not really in detail but I do talk about grace #my time at portia #mtap merlin #mtap petra #a little bit I dont discuss them as much as I would like because I cant find that much on merlin :(#I think all of the characters are very silly and idk #I like looking at the sort of philosophy of the MTU #I rly feel like I couldve worded this better but idk how #Its fun tho #for the record qi and merlin would hate eachother she would drive him insane #will probably draw smthn like that sometime #innane ramblings

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nebris · 4 years

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The Corbin Building (also known as 13 John Street and 192 Broadway) is a historic office building at the northeast corner of John Street and Broadway in the Financial District of Manhattan in New York City. It was built in 1888–1889 as a speculative development and was designed by Francis H. Kimball in the Romanesque Revival style with French Gothic detailing. The building was named for Austin Corbin, a president of the Long Island Rail Road who also founded several banks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corbin_Building

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irrationalityi · 6 years

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a few of my favorite books from 2017 (alphabetized).

behold the dreamers, imbolo mbue

I cannot imagine a book that better captures the very 2017 pain of loving a country that will never love you back than this one, about a young cameroonian family fighting to stay in this country. (fiction)

brother, I'm dying, edwidge danticat

I’m ashamed to say I've read very little of danticat, but what I have read of her lingers on the experience of raising children, and allowing space for hope, in a context where black and brown and immigrant lives are destroyed so casually. her account of the lives and deaths of the men who raised her, during her first pregnancy, is the finest example. (memoir)

the color of law, richard rothstein

towards the end of this volume, rothstein makes a critical point: much like students taught about “states’ rights” in southern states, most of us were taught in our public schools and through our cultural assumptions that the residential segregation were the result of individual preferences (implying that regulation would be a significant contravention of our freedoms). rothstein makes a convincing case that is simply untrue: in our recent history and even today, our federal policies legally rewarded and enforced residential segregation. (nonfiction)

evicted, matthew desmond

you may know matthew desmond as the guy who wants to repeal the mortgage interest deduction. he’s right about that, as he is about most everything in this immensely well-researched book, but what struck me most about evicted was his empathy, its depth and its discernment. sometimes, what certain leftist writers mean by empathy is a kind of excusal of bad behavior. what desmond does is something else entirely: he lets them tell their own stories, and takes them at their word. and his conclusion is more than deserved: structural injustice is not faceless, alien force with no beneficiaries or responsible parties. just because we all see ourselves as the heroes in our own stories doesn’t mean it’s true. (nonfiction)

fates and furies, lauren groff

fates, a decades-long examination of a marriage, is the sort of volume that makes you feel like your world is expanding, even as you look to the personal, the microcosmic. (fiction)

her body and other parties, carmen maria machado

if speculative fiction is meant to make the figurative literal, her body and other parties gives shape and, and well, body to the conceptual. machado’s magnificent collection reminds me of perverse fairy tales, the kind of horror stories you may tell over the fire where the villains are patriarchy and heteronormativity and fatism. (short stories)

hunger, roxane gay

I can’t believe this book had not already been written. I spend much of my life in a state of mild dissociation, and as a consequence, the moments when I am keenly aware of my body are all the more jarring and startling. This is the rarest sort of book--one that puts words to what you experience but cannot express. I wish we lived in the sort of world where a book like hunger had always existed, but I am glad gay was the one to write it. (memoir, nonfiction)

lower ed, tressie mcmillan cottom

cottom is such a social media superstar that I began this book with a likely unfair amount of skepticism. i was so very wrong. ostensibly about the for-profit higher education sector, lower ed is really about how contemporary market conditions and our disintegrating social safety net has left all of us, whether we attended for-profit colleges or not, in more tenuous professional and financial position. this is an essential read for our time. (nonfiction)

marlena, julie buntin

some part of me is perpetually fifteen, full of ultimatums, and especially for myself. either i have always been the person I wanted, or i won’t be a person at all. in many ways, marlena walks well-trod territory, the story of a girl dead before the possibilities started getting sealed off, before you had to confront the person your rage congealed into. much ink has been spilled about the dangers of romanticizing beautiful dead girls, but i think marlena walks the fine line. buntin’s story is not a romantic one, but told through the perspective of the best friend who has a whole life left to live, it also doesn't scold girls like me for holding on to the part of us that wishes our own stories ended with such narrative force. (fiction)

the moor’s account, laila lalami

I don’t usually like books set before the twentieth century or thereabouts. I am not quite sure why but motives and reasoning always seemed to me less understandable than even the extreme psychological pull of modern ideologies. set mostly in the wilds of...um, florida, the moor’s account of an enslaved man in an ill-fated spanish expedition makes even the most exotic of contexts feel reachable. (fiction)

pachinko, min jin lee

I am an immigrant in this country, but I was never an immigrant when I was a child in japan. no one is an immigrant in japan, not even those who were brought to their shores as workers from their colonies. immigrants at least have a chance of claiming their country of choice as their own, if at great cost; koreans in Japan, even second and third generation korean-japanese folks, do not.

pachinko is an epic in the grandest sense, bridging the story between a US-educated stock broker in high-rise contemporary tokyo and an intellectually disabled farmer in what was not yet a japanese colony, not yet south korea. it's about poverty and faith and marginalization and especially, about the women who so many of us know, who have survived the most brutal circumstances, whose stories feel so difficult to understand though they were of a world not so distant from ours. It's a story that felt to me so familiar, yet that I had not heard all my life. (fiction)

the paper menagerie and other stories, ken liu

I was told this was sci fi. I do not really read sci fi, but I certainly did not know sci fi could be like this. yes, there is space travel and humans that may rightly be described as bionic, but liu’s brightest gems have to do with history and memory: the stories you hope to pass on to your child, the uncovering of histories we may rather forget, and in the volume’s final, haunting story, the literal discovery and destruction of history. this volume made me cry on a international flight (to be fair, I cry chronically at 20,000 feet), and on the mta (somewhat more embarrassing). liu reminds us that in a time and place that emphasizes self-determination, sometimes, remembrance is the most radical act of all. (short stories)

a tale for the time being, ruth ozeki

vast sections of this book, and its best parts, are told in a rather specific, first-person voice, but I like it for giving voice to a girl of the type (a literal japanese(-american) schoolgirl) easily exoticized, and her experience of a culture that’s too often window-dressing for affluent westerners. ozeki’s attention to these distinctions of outsider/insider-ness gives this novel a deftness and a capacity for holding darkness that I didn’t quite expect. (fiction)

the warmth of other suns, isabel wilkerson

I read this in the midst of one of the many moments in our history when it seemed that monuments to slavers and war criminals might finally come down, when I always wonder not about the stories that are debated but the ones that are lost: the ones wilkerson tells, about people who risked life and limb to migrate within their own country, and about how the greatest mass migration within our own borders shaped our modern human geography, foremost among them. (nonfiction)

what it means when a man falls from the sky, lesley nneka arimah

I read a lot of very hyped books this year, and yet, if I had to choose, this debut collection of short stories from a nigerian-british author is my favorite. arimah tells stories that live close to home, with simple uses of genre elements. each is a full meal. (short stories)

really hyped books that are indeed very good but you probably don’t need to take my word for it: between the world and me, ta-nehisi coates; homegoing, yaa gyasi; lincoln in the bardo, george saunders; little fires everywhere, celeste ng; the mothers, brit bennett; sing, unburied, sing, jesmyn ward

#reading list

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critwits · 4 years

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Stipan Tadic studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and Columbia University’s MFA Visual Arts program. He currently resides in New York City and works primarily in painting and producing comic books.

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Fontaine Capel (born 1990, New York) studied at Columbia University (2020). She has used performance, video, monumental drawing, sculpture, installation and speculative proposals to consider our present roles and to imagine our possible futures. Capel has performed and exhibited works at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2015), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (2017) and the Jewish Museum (2019); has attended residencies at Residencia Corazón Argentina, ACRE and the Chicago Artist Coalition; and has been awarded fellowships at Socrates Sculpture Park and the Tu Cuba foundation. Fontaine currently works in New York City.

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kevinclerk11-blog · 5 years

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Cuomo’s L-Train Bombshell: All (OK, Not ALL) Your Questions Answered!

No need for a long, windy intro. We all know that Gov. Cuomo torpedoed the MTA’s longstanding plans to completely shut the L-train tunnel between Manhattan and Williamsburg in favor of a less-intensive proposal that raises a million questions. So here goes…

Wait, so what’s the plan?

Even though the MTA has been working on fixing the Hurricane Sandy-damaged tunnel for three years, Cuomo has jettisoned the full 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week shutdown in favor of a partial plan that would close only one of the two tunnels on nights and weekends and merely patch damaged portions of the tunnel, and mount new cables on the walls rather than painstakingly replace them inside the walls.

For years, the MTA said it needed to replace 302,000 feet of cable, 14,000 feet of rail, plus 15,000 feet of third rail, reconstruct 30,000 feet of concrete ducts, install new tunnel lights, replace pumping equipment, build a substation, replace circuit breakers, repair a fire-protection system, and repair 7,100 feet of concrete that lines the tunnel [PDF]. It is unclear what, if any, of that work will be done.

Cuomo’s engineering consultant, Mary Boyce, dean of the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University, told reporters that an easier plan is possible here because it had been tried in London and Riyadh.

Forgive us if we don’t think much of the Riyadh subway system, which hasn’t even opened yet.

Why did he do it?

There’s lots of speculation, including some that Cuomo wanted to impress 2020 or 2024 presidential voters (which is complete hogwash, given that no Democratic primary voter in Iowa or New Hampshire would ever have said the words, “I was leaning towards Cuomo until I heard that some commuters in Canarsie had been inconvenienced by his decision to repair vital infrastructure”).

Obviously, this is all about Cuomo, as the Times far-from-subtly pointed out: “Mr. Cuomo appeared pleased to have stepped in to save the day,” reporter Emma Fitzsimmons wrote.

Indeed, Cuomo said he believes that straphangers favor a partial shutdown rather than a full one, though polls indicate just the opposite, as the Post mentioned in its editorial.

And Cuomo will definitely see an “L train bump,” judging by the Post’s gushing front page.

Tomorrow’s cover: Brooklyn residents thrilled after L-train shutdown nixed https://t.co/CE6DPkkZWz pic.twitter.com/EvlNQqEoGW

— New York Post (@nypost) January 3, 2019

Who is credible — Cuomo or the MTA?

Cuomo says the Canarsie Tunnel does not need to be shut because all that’s needed is fiber-reinforced polymer to patch it. (Hmm, patching it doesn’t sound very comprehensive.) This decision comes just a few days after Cuomo toured the tunnel with a hand-picked engineering team — and three years after the MTA said the repairs were absolutely essential. Indeed, the agency issued this dire statement two months ago:

The L tunnel – also known as the Canarsie Tunnel – was one of nine underwater tunnels that flooded during Superstorm Sandy in 2012. … The tunnel was flooded with enough water to fill 11 Olympic-sized swimming pools and suffered extensive damage to tracks, signals, switches, power cables, signal cables, communication cables, lighting, cable ducts and bench walls throughout a 7,100-foot-long flooded section of both tubes. Bench walls throughout those sections must be rehabilitated to protect the structural integrity of the tubes.

The MTA and city DOT said the L train tunnel looks really bad. But Gov. Cuomo doesn’t think so. Photo: MTA/DOT

Protect the structural integrity — sounds important, right?

And the MTA’s plan was very detailed because, it said, the repairs were so urgent (see one page of the agency’s handout left).

Independent analysts seemed to side with the MTA. “The repairs are necessary because saltwater inundation in 2012 caused by hurricane Sandy accelerated deterioration within the tunnel,” Crain’s reported. “Temporary work allowed the tunnel to reopen soon after the storm, but conditions continued to worsen.” (Continued to worsen sounds bad, right?)

Meanwhile, Dan Rivoli of the Daily News pointed out that the very part of the tunnel that Cuomo will patch rather than replace caused a subway derailment when it collapsed one time.

A crumbling bench wall in the G train tunnel once caused a derailment.https://t.co/MtwQiZ08EN

Those are the stakes facing L train commuters now that the repairs are a patch job instead of a full renovation.

Here's the exchange with me and the governor on this today: pic.twitter.com/zzzL92ew8Y

— Dan Rivoli (@danrivoli) January 3, 2019

And MTA board member Veronica Vanterpool was stunned to find out about Cuomo’s announcement shortly before it was made, given the supposedly dire condition of the tunnel.

“What are the long-term implications of this decision? Are we just essentially putting a Band-Aid on a problem that has been well documented?” she said, according to amNY.

Riders Alliance Executive Director John Raskin pointed out that the emperor is the one with no clothes in this debate.

“At the end of the day, what riders care about is whether the L train is repaired for the long term, and how much disruption it will take to get there,” he said. “The governor’s plan may or may not work, but you’ll pardon transit riders for being skeptical that a last-minute Hail Mary idea cooked up over Christmas is better than what the MTA came up with over three years of extensive public input.”

And interim MTA board chairman Freddy Ferrer didn’t help Cuomo sound very credible when he told reporters, “You might ask, ‘Well why wasn’t this approach considered earlier?’ The answer is that the integration of these approaches — there are several — and the technology had not previously been applied in the context of a rehabilitation project. It’s innovative, creative and we deem it a sound plan.” (A sound plan? Cooked up in a couple of weeks?)

Who does this help?

Cuomo wants us to believe it helps all commuters.

“You would have roughly 250,000 people who would need a different way to get to work,” he said of the shutdown. Closing the tunnels only on nights and weekends will “be a phenomenal benefit to the people of New York City,” he added.

Judging by the coverage — from NY1’s report of blissful residents of 14th Street to New York Times Metro Editor Clifford Levy’s horrendous tweet — NIMBYs along 14th Street are pleased, as are selfish inter-borough subway riders.

But aren’t we forgetting something…

Who does it hurt?

Almost everyone:

One of the government’s basic tasks is to maintain infrastructure. If, indeed, the Canarsie Tunnel is damaged as badly as the MTA said, failing to fix it now will bring much more pain (and expense) later.

The biggest losers, of course, are the L-train riders who use the train on nights and weekends — which may not sound like a lot of people to daytime commuters, but the L train is one of the busiest lines on nights and weekends. There’s also a class issue, as nighttime riders tend to be working people, as Erwin Figueroa of TransAlt and others pointed out.

As always, poor and POC New Yorkers will bear the brunt of this new "plan" for the L train, as shutdowns during nights and weekends will impact them the most. The bike lanes, busways and longer G trains need to remain as planned. #CuomosL

— Erwin Figueroa (@TransitErwin) January 3, 2019

People who were already using the new protected and on-street bike lanes — and were looking forward to HOV3 lanes on the Williamsburg Bridge — all which may soon be erased because of the “sea change” of Cuomo’s announcement, Mayor de Blasio said. “We’re going to evaluate what [the announcement] means and if we’re going to look at these things in another light.”

People who wanted to reclaim our roadways from car commuters, who will likely again be able to drive over the Williamsburg Bridge in their single-occupancy vehicles and Ubers.

Most important, the MTA’s credibility has now been completely undermined by Cuomo, which is a problem because…

Wait, doesn’t Cuomo need the MTA to look good right now?

The timing of the announcement is a horrendous public relations disaster for Cuomo, who is about to head back to Albany to push congestion pricing to a less-than-enthusiastic legislature. In many interviews with Assembly and Senate lawmakers, Streetsblog has found intense ambivalence among outer-borough legislators, who wrongly believe that many of their constituents regularly drive into the city (very few do, statistics show) and that congestion pricing would hurt working-class people (car commuters tend to be wealthier overall).

So just as he’s about to counter that hemming and hawing with a bold plan to raise $1 billion per year for the MTA, Cuomo basically undermines the MTA’s credibility as a steward of the transit system. Even the spokesman for Mayor de Blasio — who has also waivered on congestion pricing — pointed that out.

“Like everyone else, the mayor thinks the MTA has some real explaining to do about how it has handled this for the last few years,” spokesman Eric Phillips said in a statement that also questioned the MTA’s abilities.

Aaron Gordon of Signal Problems also raised these questions on Friday morning:

I don’t know how the MTA, as an agency, recovers whatever credibility it had left. What happens the next time the MTA determines a major public works project must be undertaken? Who is going to take them seriously? Who is going to defer to their expertise? What does this mean for Byford’s upcoming appeals to the state legislature to give him some $60 billion? Are elected officials going to say “we believed you about the L shutdown being necessary, why should we believe you now?” I suspect Byford will try to spin it as a sign of the agency’s nimbleness and willing to accept best ideas, but I don’t know how that will play.

Will Mayor de Blasio keep the good parts of the L shutdown?

As noted above, the mayor is skeptical that he needs to keep the good stuff like the sort-of protected bike lanes on 12th and 13th streets — which NIMBY groups oppose because they removed on-street car storage — and dedicated bus lanes. Advocates are demanding that the street safety and transit improvements remain, but NYC Transit President Andy Byford said new ferry service would certainly be eliminated.

“Smart transportation plans have been laid in concert with community and elected leaders that should still go into effect, including the transit way on 14th Street, which would serve as a model for improving bus travel throughout the city; experimentation with HOV restrictions on East River crossings; and accessibility and station circulation upgrades at First Avenue, Sixth Avenue, Union Square, and Bedford Avenue,” the Regional Plan Association said in a statement. “Changes like these would improve the commutes of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers and visitors to our city and help our city address pressing transportation challenges.”

Should Andy Byford resign in protest?

Of course he should. Byford was informed of Cuomo’s decision shortly before it was announced publicly, putting him in the position of having to answer for a governor who had just bigfooted him worse than a raging Sasquatch. If Cuomo’s plan succeeds, Cuomo gets the credit. If it fails, Byford will have to clean up the mess.

Poor guy sounds sick and tired. https://t.co/GeCdok9NyE

— Interim MTA Chair David 'Amazon Cuomo' Meyer (@dahvnyc) January 3, 2019

Meanwhile, Byford looks like an ineffective leader just when he’s trying to restore faith in the system he oversees.

He should consider resigning in protest, as Travis Eby, a member of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign pointed out in a tweet.

Everybody working for Cuomo should resign in protest, starting with Andy Byford https://t.co/D6bsv7fsPV

— Travis R. Eby (@travis_robert) January 3, 2019

Oh, and what’s with Clifford Levy’s New York Times Metro section lately?

Before anyone could digest the ramifications of Cuomo announcement, Levy, the editor of the Metro section of the supposedly sober Gray Lady, tweeted, “Brooklynites, rejoice! Cuomo plans to cancel the full shutdown of the L train between Brooklyn and Manhattan.”

It was a weird take from an important opinion-maker — and transit advocates let him have it all day.

You are the head of the metro section and you don’t know this is a Cuomo ham job?

— Cameron O'Leary (@CamtrakAcela) January 3, 2019

“Metro Editor at New York Times” clueless. Makes you wonder how a person gets that job title while not comprehending the issues related to it.

— Thomas (@thomstern) January 3, 2019

Worse, Levy’s Twittergate comes just one day after his Metro section published a story questioning why the Port Authority should continue running the PATH train — which serves 82 million rides a year — because it loses money. The implication that Levy allowed into print is that transit and other infrastructure exists to raise money rather than fulfill its actual purpose: to foster the regional economy. Levy’s Metro section also recently reported on the need for adult crossing guards in Tribeca without even mentioning congestion pricing or holding any politician accountable for allowing suburban commuters to terrorize city pedestrians.

Source: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/01/03/cuomos-l-train-bombshell-all-your-questions-answered/

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