Month: October 2004

Madness Non-Stop

OMG, is it Wednesday already? The 20th? This is normally the point where I would apologize for being lazy or depressed or listless or something, but for over a week now I have been a machine, folks. I’ve barely taken the time to watch Star Trek, let alone order my thoughts enough to do the blog thang.

Last Friday was my final day at the old job (except that I’m now on temporary part-time off-site status while I finish documenting everything I did while I was there), so there was the expected flurry of vital details to wrap up, and the lunches, and the errands, and the paperwork, etc. I’ve had a pile of lessons and grading for class. (Did I mention that I’m teaching a college design class this semester? I am.) Lots of WYSIWYG stuff to wrap up before tonight’s big show, and then a few freelance projects to dive into. This week I started working on a full-time freelance gig that’s had me going like gangbusters, but deleriously happy about it. Lordy! Thank goodness for Halloween-candy-induced warp speed. (Geez, and Halloween is almost here already, isn’t it? I better get started on my stressing out about a costume and eventually procrastinating and then doing nothing and feeling boring about the whole mess.)

But enough about me. Here are some things that you should be doing during the next few days:

Tax Photographs

New York City has been so built up for so long that for all the development that goes on here, it’s common to live in, work in, or visit buildings with a colorful history of use and reuse and reinvention that can stretch back for decades. It’s usually cheaper and speedier to fix up an old building than go through the hassle and expense of tearing it down and building another on the lot, so even in the years since I’ve returned here I’ve seen places almost completely transformed yet still retain some sense of their past. As Luc Sante (who went to my high school, which has its own 90-year-old building) writes in the introduction to one of my all-time favorite books, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, this is a city of ghosts where the old is always showing up among the new.

So I’m totally giddy about a new program that I read about on Gothamist yesterday: the city is selling reproductions of archival photographs of old buildings around the city. Between 1939 and 1941, the city photographed every building in New York City to help with tax appraisal, and now they making prints made from the microfilms of those records available to the public. You need to know the official block and lot number of the property when you order a photograph, but for a 5-buck extra fee they’ll even research that for you. This kicks so much ass I can hardly stand it!

I wish the house I grew up in had been around then, but there are still a few buildings I’d consider ordering:

  • 29 Whitney Ave., in Staten Island

  • 55 East 84th St.

  • 356 West 58th St.

  • 884 Targee St., in Staten Island

  • 1055 Targee St., in Staten Island

  • 82 East 4th St.

  • 87 Clermont Ave., in Brooklyn

  • 222 Varet St., in Brooklyn