One of my hobbies is snapping photos as I take long walks around New York City … and this year, in Chicago, Philadelphia, Memphis, and Florida as well. These are my favorites from the past year. All are copyright © 2019 Dianne L. Durante.
New York: Hudson Yards
Hudson Yards is a huge development on the West Side in Midtown Manhattan. It’s now almost completed. Photos of its progress from 2017 are here, from 2018 here. (Search “Hudson” on those pages to find them.) The Vessel, one of the main tourist draws, is the honeycomb-shaped six-story structure just right of center.
New York: Needle Buildings on Central Park South
“Needle buildings” are very tall and very narrow. This pic of several new ones under construction was taken from Columbus Circle (Broadway / 59th St. / 8th Ave.).
This view of the needle buildings was taken from Bethesda Terrace in Central Park. Olmsted would not be pleased … but I love to see new construction in New York City. The building front and center in the photo above are at the far right in the photo below.
New York City: Bridges and Harbor
And because I adore that color of bluish-purple, one more from the same day, same time.
New York: Architectural Details
The amount of thought that went into the details of Central Park is amazing. I was reminded of that when I noticed that in Lincoln Park in Chicago, the underpasses were just cast concrete. In Central Park, every bridge has a different ceiling.
Here be dragons: vegetarian dragons, apparently, since they’re dining on fruit swags above this Sixth Avenue facade.
An exact replica of Alexander Hamilton’s desk, at the Grange. The original is owned by the Museum of the City of New York. As a writer, I like to see other writers’ workspaces, and I particularly like to imagine the number of pages Hamilton must have penned at his desk.
Parlor at Hamilton Grange. You could open the windows and walk out onto the porch. Such a lovely space.
Zipping back downtown: a decorative flagpole base from in front of New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Such elegant figures! They honor New York’s “Boy Mayor,” John Purroy Mitchel, who died in a plane crash in 1918, while training for the military.
Column on the outside of the former home of Charles Scribner’s Sons on Fifth Avenue. Gorgeous design.
The Wanderlust door at 20 Exchange Place (Hanover / Beaver Streets), originally home of the City Bank-Farmers Trust Building [now Citibank] and the Canadian Bank of Commerce.
Speaking of Wanderlust: this carving is over the entrance of the original home of the American Geographical Society on Audubon Terrace (Broadway at 155th St.). “Ubique” is Latin for “everywhere”: hence our “ubiquitous” and the French ubiquiste, a person who’s everywhere. In one of the early incarnations of my first website, ForgottenDelights.com, I used this as the home-page illustration.
New York City: Queens
Pouring white-hot bronze from a glowing crucible at Modern Art Foundry in Queens. From a visit in September 2019.
Chicago
Helluva town: my favorite next to NYC.
Philadelphia
New Jersey
I probably took a thousand photos of sculpture last year, in preparation for putting up a chronological series of pics of NYC’s outdoor sculpture on Instagram. This is one I hadn’t seen before and particularly like: that rabble-rouser Thomas Paine, in Morristown.
Memphis
From the museum of Elvis’s cars at Graceland. How can you not love a man who used “TCB” (taking care of business) as his logo?
And who said this? Admittedly, this is more a favorite for the words than the photography.
At Marlowe’s BBQ in Memphis, they decorated their Airstream pig for Halloween.
Florida
From Tampa, on the Gulf Coast: formerly the Plant Hotel, now University of Tampa, with a small museum to railroad tycoon Henry Bradley Plant in a corner. When it was built in the 1890s, the minarets were simply exotic: radical Islam wasn’t in any American’s wildest nightmares.
The Plant Museum includes placards with gems of Victorian-era advice to guests, for example: “None but a low-bred clown will ever carry bon-bons away from the table.”
From a Buddhist Temple in Tampa that has remarkable breakfasts once a month.
The World’s Weirdest Fig Tree, made Even Weirder by being lit up for Xmas. At the Florida Botanical Garden.
Sand carving at St Petersburg. This piece didn’t even win!
This photo made the cut for my favorites because the picture tells the whole story: the cowboy single-handedly rolled the 8×20 foot shed off the trailer, onto that two-wheeled gizmo, and into place on our lot.
And further south … sunrise in Fort Myers, waiting to catch the ferry to Key West.
If you want to get a really blank look, ask someone in Key West where to go to see the sun rise … They’re not morning people in Key West. So a sunset from a sailboat closes out the favorite photos of 2019.
More
Favorite photos from 2018 are here; from 2017, here; from 2016, here. Favorite photos from previous years are on Facebook: