New York City, A Summary

NYC Skyline, #1. 2015

A great place to visit–but I wouldn’t want to live there. Too many human beans piled atop one another and crammed into the streets. And too expensive. I’ll stay with the fresh air and the mountains, thank you.

Here is a visit summary, including some photography related points farther down, from my naturally very biased view…

Random, General Stuff

–We never felt unsafe anywhere. That hasn’t always been the case in NYC, so good on them.

–Some areas of the City were pretty filthy–the Theater District and Hell’s Kitchen, for example. With the summer heat, the garbage piled on the sidewalks for pickup certainly assailed the olfactory detectors quite negatively. So many people live there, though, I am sure garbage collection is one of those jobs that just barely keeps up with the flow (12,000 tons a day, they say).

–Speaking of garbage…I was not very impressed with the recycling efforts. An effort did exist, yes, but the amount of plastic that was being thrown in the trash (all those to-go containers) was appalling.

–If you are into theater, or any of the arts for that matter, there is an incredible energy here. No wonder “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere“!

–Just the buildings and the architecture are worth a specific two-week self-researched, self-guided tour.

—Real estate is so insanely expensive it blows the mind into tiny, fragmented and scattered, fragments. Better a 50,000-acre ranch in Montana than a 6,000-square-foot penthouse luxury apartment, I say. But, I suppose those who can afford $70 million for the NY penthouse probably also have the other $50 million (stashed in the kitchen cookie jar) they would need for their Montana ranch summer “get-a-way”.

—The subway…well, at least they have one. And it’s one of the biggest, busiest, and oldest in the world–which explains a few of my complaints. It was very frustrating to use until we learned the difference between express and local trains, where they each stop and don’t stop, which stations have easy crossovers to the opposite track, weekend versus weekday runs, etc. Still, I was cussing it quite often for its confusing or badly placed signage, the many cars with little, no, or confusing route information inside, tickets that don’t tell you how much you have left unless you scan them in a machine, the same tickets that refuse to scan until the third try, underground line construction that will force you to go up one stop, cross, then back two stops to get the train you want, delays due to “switch problems” (euphemism for suicide?) or construction, etc.

If you know the system, I guess you can make it work for you, but they could sure take some cleanliness, simplicity, and efficiency lessons from the Barcelona Metro, or even the subway in Washington, D.C. The NYC system is a huge hodge-podge that has been growing like a blob over eons, so, like the garbage thing, I’m sure it’s a major mayoral task just to keep up with normal maintenance and keep the subway tunnels from flooding.

–The art museums were awesome. Definitely worth the trip to NYC to see. Most require multiple visits to really feast properly on everything. The Museum of Natural History, though, was good but seemed a bit past its prime. Denver could almost hold its own with their equivalent museum.

–This trip we concentrated on the sights and the museums, so no Broadway musicals, opera, theater, or symphony. (The opera and the symphony were on summer break anyway–off in Vail, ironically!) If there is a next trip, we will concentrate on those things.

–Also, next time I would go in the spring or fall. We pushed our comfort limits with the August summer heat and humidity. Winter would just suck. Maybe. I think.

–Why do they crank the air conditioning down so low in the museums and stores that you need a jacket? Even in the United Nations building it was freezing. You’d think with our concern about burning too much carbon, that we would just set those thermostats three or four degrees higher. It would save literally tons of coal and the monthly electric bill for these places could be reduced tremendously. This isn’t just a NYC problem, it is a nationwide cultural problem.

–Gentrification continues…Harlem seems to be the current target. Brooklyn-Williamsburg is already pretty much done, it seems. NYC isn’t the only place where this happens, of course. Here in Colorado, think of all the big ski resort towns like Vail and Aspen…and even in the good ole Boulder Bubble it continues.

–We never seemed to go wrong wherever we ate pizza–awesome! You might avoid the $1 a slice places, though.

–There were six of us in a tiny, tenement-style, Airbnb apartment near 9th Avenue and 47th Street–the only way for your average middle-class tourist to afford being on the island.

–In our two weeks, we only scratched the first atoms of humidity on the coating on the metallic surface of things to do in NYC. You’d need a good year or two of full-time exploring to really get to know this place.

Some Photography Comments

–I brought my tripod but never used it. The only time I might have wanted one was on top of Rockefeller Center (The “Rock”). There, you could NOT use a big tripod, but a small tripod (say, six to ten-inch) for sunset and night shots from the top of the retaining wall would have been helpful. Large tripods are prohibited there and almost everywhere. To compensate for no tripod, I often shot my D800 at anything from ISO400 to ISO3200, depending on the situation, and tried to brace or lean on something whenever I could. There were times when I found myself changing the ISO almost as often as I changed the f-stop.

–During our day hikes around the City, I rarely carried the D800 and all three of my lenses due to the annoying weight. If using the D800, I tended to pick just one lens for the day (sometimes a second lens) and that was it. I carried everything in a daypack rather than in an obvious camera bag.

–The high tech audio-visual event that is the ascent to the One World Observatory was most interesting for the time lapse video they show you on the elevator walls as you zoom up the 100 stories in 40 seconds or so. For photography, though, the viewpoint sucked. You are shooting through Plexiglas. To maximize the possibility of getting any decent images, at least try to get a ticket for a sunset visit–or during a raging storm. As an aside, I had a funny thought when I went: the visit is so audio-visually stimulating and over-the-top high tech, I almost had the impression that the view of the real NYC skyline was sort of an afterthought. A case of the artificial and the digital overwhelming tactile reality.

–Someone had told me that the Empire State Building wasn’t particularly good for photography due to the high retaining wall and the safety bars. Not so, at least for me. There are low points along the wall and the bars–the lens fit easily between them–actually could be used as an aid to hold the camera steady.

—Times Square at any hour is pretty good for candid tourist and people photography, as well as for shooting Las Vegas-meets-Madison Avenue-hurt-the-eyes-LSD-way-too-bright-LED signage. I am guessing there is always something going on at this epicenter, even when it isn’t December 31st.

–The major art museums allowed photography, with the exception of a few individual exhibits.

–In addition to the museums, before you go, Google “photography events NYC” to see what might be happening around town. Then don’t forget the elegant Aperture Gallery and the huge photo-toy store of B&H Photo.

–Anywhere in the City is great for street and people photography. Come with a goal or project in mind for street (I didn’t) and an unobtrusive camera–maybe just your iPhone. Or, hell, just come with your medium-format Yashica. No one seemed to care.

A big thanks to María Rosa, Jaume, Dolors, Roger, and Sara for making it a wonderful and memorable experience!

Adios, Adeu, and Chau, New York!

Pretty Maids, All in a Row. NYC, 2014