New York by Gehry

On the recent trip to New York, we were blessed with a beautiful clear - and reasonable warm - day which was our cue to walk the Brooklyn Bridge. We took the subway from mid-town (my first experience on the NYC subway system) and arrived near City Hall at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. 

As we started the walk out onto the bridge, we looked back and got a wonderful view of Frank Gehry's new residential skyscraper - purportedly the tallest residential building in America - which is being marketed as New York by Gehry at 8 Spruce Street.

It was an extremely bright day and the building - especially due to it's organic curves - always seems to be glinting at you. The camera gets very shy with all this light and the aperture squeezes shut in an effort to protect itself. The sky gets dark and the result is an image that evokes a sort of heroic Objectivist feeling in the spirit of Ayn Rand.

Further out on the bridge we were able to capture both Gehry's building and the still under construction Freedom Tower (more formally known as One World Trade Center) in a more rational and approachable light. You can see the cranes still operating on the top of the Freedom Tower as they start construction of the spire.

The Spruce Street building is 76 stories tall while the Freedom Tower has already topped out at 105 stories. The perspective from this point makes them look of similar size but they definitely are not.

These buildings make me feel very small.

Grand Central Terminal

On a recent trip to NYC, we passed through Grand Central Station a couple times. It's a very cool space - very austere yet commercial (Apple Store) and of course there are people rushing from place to place actually using it as a train station to boot. 

The slow shutter speed (I think the image above was about a second and a half) renders those with places to go as ghosts quickly passing through.

This longer exposure (six seconds) below thinned the crowd even further as those on the move became just dark spots moving across the floor with only tourists and observers remaining. The longer exposure of course did manage to catch a couple of folks taking pictures of me taking pictures of them and so on.