Lost in Yonkers
I read Candace Bushnell's original book "Sex and the City"
a few years ago when the show of the same name was about in its third
season. The book and the show have nothing in common, neither in
content or in spirit, except for a few character names. Today I
finished another book by the same author, "4 Blondes",
which made me admire even more what fancy but empty lives those trendy
and upper crust Manhattanites must lead. For example, in that book one
guy is considered a poor marriage prospect since he only has a net
worth of one million dollars, which doesn't buy him anything better in
Manhattan than a crummy two-bedroom apartment in an area which I
understood from the context to be somehow unfashionable. (Speaking of
which, my favourite fundamentalist Gary North has a new essay "Is There Stealth Outsourcing in Your Future?", which might be relevant here.)
I have some kind of general idea about the geography of New York City and its surroundings, but not that great. While my wife is watching "Lost" and "24" which I am not interested in, I thought that I'd fire up Google Earth, which I haven't touched for a few months now ever since I used it to take a virtual tour around Los Angeles (man, that place sure is huge), along with the Wikipedia page "New York City", and make a virtual tour around the Big Apple, looking up places and neighbourhoods and checking them out with Google Earth as closely as the zooming feature allows. Perhaps if I zoom in close enough, some guy there will look up at me and tell me to take a picture so that it will last longer! All these neighbourhoods come up so often in literature and movies that I guess I'd better learn what is what. Maybe in the future we will even make some kind of a pilgrimage to this citiest of all cities, as much as I hate flying and travelling. It would be interesting to see the city with my own eyes, since my mental model of how the city looks pretty much comes from the 1980's movies, and I would assume that the place has changed a lot since then. I wonder if it is still true that when you are walking around Manhattan, you shouldn't look up to admire a skyscraper because people will think that you are tourist and mug or even kill you? Is it unthinkable for a white man to go to The Bronx, especially after dark?
Manhattan is of course very easy to visualize, but the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn and their famous neighbourhoods are still kind of hazy to me. But then again, it wasn't until a few years ago until I realized that Atlanta and Atlantic City are two separate places. When I saw this magnificient photo for the first time last year, I immediately wondered how come Manhattan is built so high and densely, but the surrounding areas of Joirnsey, Queens and Brooklyn (plus the Manhattan itself above the 110th) are much lower and don't seem to be very dense or populous at all. You might think that when the real estate really is that pricey and all these places are connected with a subway system, free market would produce a large number of new condos and skyscrapers in the surrounding boroughs. But I guess that this does not happen, and I also have a couple of hypotheses why this is so. And maybe it's just a status issue. In that one episode of Futurama when the gang was looking for an apartment for Fry, one place was otherwise great and had no visible flaws to explain why the rent was so low, but then it was revealed to be "technically in Jersey", which I guess is somehow a bad thing, since the story was immediately cut to Fry complaining that it is not possible to find a decent apartment in New York.
I didn't really know anything about Staten Island that apparently there is some kind of a ferry to it where movie characters sometimes try to dodge killers who are chasing them, but fortunately Wikipedia and Google Earth again help and reveal this place to be a suburb. Maybe in the future this borough can become for the New York City something what Mississauga now is for Toronto. Just build a hundred highrise condos there, since there seems to be a lot of room, and you are all set.
The characters depicted in Bushnell's books typically spend their summers in The Hamptons, which is apparently some kind of a fancy and hoity-toity place to be in away from the rabble. When I took a look around that area with Google Earth, along the way I was surprised how large and densely populated the Long Island is. When you start from Brooklyn and just keep moving east, the whole island seems to be nothing but continuous suburbia almost all the way to the Hamptons. Over there the more east you continue, the bigger the houses also seem to get. Going even further east, I'm pretty sure that Montauk Point was in some movie that I saw.
I have some kind of general idea about the geography of New York City and its surroundings, but not that great. While my wife is watching "Lost" and "24" which I am not interested in, I thought that I'd fire up Google Earth, which I haven't touched for a few months now ever since I used it to take a virtual tour around Los Angeles (man, that place sure is huge), along with the Wikipedia page "New York City", and make a virtual tour around the Big Apple, looking up places and neighbourhoods and checking them out with Google Earth as closely as the zooming feature allows. Perhaps if I zoom in close enough, some guy there will look up at me and tell me to take a picture so that it will last longer! All these neighbourhoods come up so often in literature and movies that I guess I'd better learn what is what. Maybe in the future we will even make some kind of a pilgrimage to this citiest of all cities, as much as I hate flying and travelling. It would be interesting to see the city with my own eyes, since my mental model of how the city looks pretty much comes from the 1980's movies, and I would assume that the place has changed a lot since then. I wonder if it is still true that when you are walking around Manhattan, you shouldn't look up to admire a skyscraper because people will think that you are tourist and mug or even kill you? Is it unthinkable for a white man to go to The Bronx, especially after dark?
Manhattan is of course very easy to visualize, but the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn and their famous neighbourhoods are still kind of hazy to me. But then again, it wasn't until a few years ago until I realized that Atlanta and Atlantic City are two separate places. When I saw this magnificient photo for the first time last year, I immediately wondered how come Manhattan is built so high and densely, but the surrounding areas of Joirnsey, Queens and Brooklyn (plus the Manhattan itself above the 110th) are much lower and don't seem to be very dense or populous at all. You might think that when the real estate really is that pricey and all these places are connected with a subway system, free market would produce a large number of new condos and skyscrapers in the surrounding boroughs. But I guess that this does not happen, and I also have a couple of hypotheses why this is so. And maybe it's just a status issue. In that one episode of Futurama when the gang was looking for an apartment for Fry, one place was otherwise great and had no visible flaws to explain why the rent was so low, but then it was revealed to be "technically in Jersey", which I guess is somehow a bad thing, since the story was immediately cut to Fry complaining that it is not possible to find a decent apartment in New York.
I didn't really know anything about Staten Island that apparently there is some kind of a ferry to it where movie characters sometimes try to dodge killers who are chasing them, but fortunately Wikipedia and Google Earth again help and reveal this place to be a suburb. Maybe in the future this borough can become for the New York City something what Mississauga now is for Toronto. Just build a hundred highrise condos there, since there seems to be a lot of room, and you are all set.
The characters depicted in Bushnell's books typically spend their summers in The Hamptons, which is apparently some kind of a fancy and hoity-toity place to be in away from the rabble. When I took a look around that area with Google Earth, along the way I was surprised how large and densely populated the Long Island is. When you start from Brooklyn and just keep moving east, the whole island seems to be nothing but continuous suburbia almost all the way to the Hamptons. Over there the more east you continue, the bigger the houses also seem to get. Going even further east, I'm pretty sure that Montauk Point was in some movie that I saw.
New York is more complex than Google Earth indicates. While highrises are relatively uncommon outside of parts of Manhattan, the population densities in the outer boroughs are nonetheless higher than you'll see almost anywhere else in the United States. Single-family houses are a fairly rare sight until you get into the farthest parts of the boroughs.
Staten Island is mainly suburban, though once again denser than most "true" suburbs, but it has some highly urbanized (and occasionally slum-like) areas, especially north of the Staten Island Expressway (I-278). Much of the island used to be semi-rural prior to the opening of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in the 1960's.
I live on Long Island, about 60 miles east of Manhattan, and indeed it's pretty close to be one continuous suburb. I'm just about at the eastern end of the continuous development, though there aren't too many true rural areas. As for the houses getting larger as you go farther east, that actually isn't true, except for the mansions in the Hamptons. Most of the really large houses are in Nassau County, which is the western part of Long Island near Queens, especially on the North Shore near Long Island Sound.
Peter
Iron Rails & Iron Weights
Posted by Anonymous | 10:06 PM
More than twenty years ago in a Finnish elementary school geography book it was said that the ground on Manhattan is especially hard rock, thus enabling construction of extremely high buildings.
Since then I have lived blindly accepting this sentence as a fact, but thinking about it now, I am not so sure if there really is anything special about the Manhattan bedrock. Should probably do some googling.
Posted by Anonymous | 4:53 AM
http://www.fattypatties.blogspot.com
Enjoy!!! FA is funny
Posted by Anonymous | 9:13 AM
FYI.
http://www.mtv3.fi/suurinpudottaja/
...57kgs less than in the beginning eight months before.
In the final this 47 years old dude looked like some Russian forward in the NHL. This didn't suprise me much, since he trained almost as much as they do, about 14 hours per week.
Some people have mental strength, some end up being fatties for rest of their lives with some silly excuses.
Posted by Anonymous | 10:54 AM