West Coast Move

So after many many years of wondering if it was the right thing to do, I've finally moved to Los Angeles. Why did I decide to make the big west coast move? Well, there were a number of things. I am trying to be a screenwriter, and even though there is a large film industry in New York, LA is still the big league for development. Plus, I really couldn't stand the thought of spending another broke cold winter in the city. I managed to miss about half of this winter, and that was still too much. My poor girlfriend is always working outside in the snow, and I thought a little sunny California was long overdue. So here I am! I'll miss New York a lot. I'm glad i got to live in the same neighborhood my grandfather was born in, and I'll always have a very fond memory of NY. I actually like New York more as a city then LA, but then so do most people. People don't move to LA because they like it, for the most part. They move there because they are trying to get a bite of that California dream. So I'll be starting a new LA blog some time soon, and I'll post the link for it here. Goodbye, New York. You treated me well.

Frozen Hudson

I spent the last two month back in North Carolina on a documentary. I did miss New York, but there's something to be said for not being in the city for the months of December and January. There's a reason why everyone from the North moves to Florida. Because it's cold! I got back just in time for a cold snap. The temperature has been below 20 for like a week. And living on Riverside Drive, the windchill off the Hudson has been brutal. The river has been frozen over for the last couple of morning, and each morning there has been more ice than the last. Scared of freezing our tails off, we didn't go down to the river until today. Just under the water there were sheet of ice that were being crushed against the shore. It was pretty amazing.

I went to Ellis Island with my grandparents and some cousins a few days ago. My grandfathers parents were poor Irish immegrants, and my great grandmother came over after both her parents died of the 1918 spanish flu epidemic. The other side of my family passed through on their trips to Europe, and they went first class, not in steerage with the Irish.

The main waiting hall where millions of new americans waited to be accepted into the country. This is the only room in the world that I know both of my great grandfathers have been in.

A great view on the way to Ellis Island.

The GW on Veterans Day

I've lived in the same place for the last year and a half, and this whole time I've never seen both sides of the George Washington bridge lit up. They've been working on installing the lights for a while, and one side would get lit up but not the other. Veterans Day was the first day that they lit up both sides of the bridge, and it looked pretty amazing! I don't know what the deal with this is going to be. Is the bridge going to be lit up all the time, or just on holidays? Both sides have been turned off since.

A rainy night in brooklyn.

A foggy view of the brooklyn bridge and the city from Brooklyn Heights.

Library Part II

This is a photo of the 42nd Street library that I didn't post before. I don't know why. I think that it really shows off how much the inside of this thing looks like a castle. Blogger has been acting funny lately, and I've been having trouble seeing the html buttons in the posting frame. I've recently posted the link to this site on some travel boards, but I don't think that i have any regular readers yet, besides the few friends that i've sent the link to.

Moonlight on the corner

A warm fall day

Old Times Square still alive on 8th Ave

Old Times Square

I think that this is a very funny time to live in New York. When people talk of "Old New York", they are actually talking about a couple different time periods. The older "Old New York" was a time of gas lamps, Irish and Italian immigrants, and the Five Points. And if you look carefully, you can still see remnants from that era; a patch of exposed cobblestone, the last traces of Lower East Side poverty, tours of Ellis Island and Hell's Kitchen tenements converted into shotgun apartments for the young and single.

But there's another "Old New York", and that's the New York of the 70s and 80s, the broken result of a government's total financial disaster and retreat from social services. And the epicenter of that New York was Times Square, a seedy pit of porno theaters and hustlers. Some look back fondly to this time, before Giuliani and the corporations pushed the scum aside to make room for their homogeneous vision of American culture. But if you look around carefully, you can see a period of history fading away. The abandoned marquee for a grindhouse theater still hangs above a tourist rip-off shop, obscured by skyscrapers and neon.

What a view

Two friends of mine saved so much money by moving to Jersey that they were able to buy a boat. Since I took this picture, they have bought a bigger boat, and now they live on it permanently. Talk about living the dream.

Photo Flashback #3

Sushi bar next to the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo. The fish market opens at 4 in the morning or something like that, so what most people do is spend the night out and then get sushi for breakfast. This place easily had the best sushi I've ever had.

42nd Street Library

So finally after a year and a half of living in New York, I decided that I needed to go inside the huge library at 42nd St. This is the one from "Ghostbusters" where all the books go crazy. I actually went to a beer focus group right before this, and sadly, they didn't want my opinion on how their beer tastes, but what I thought of their commercials. Still, I got a hundred bucks out of it, and I trucked down to the library afterwards. I find it amazing the thought and money that used to go into municipal architecture. Ever been inside a library built in the 1960s with orange carpets and yellow plastic chairs? The 42nd library is basically a temple to the wealth of the Astor family. Now philanthropy is more about creating trust funds to fight disease or celebrities running off to Africa to bring home some babies. It used to be about building huge stone monuments with your family portraits inside.