In honor of my pending relocation from NYC back to my hometown of Cincinnati in a couple weeks, I've decided to post all my New York City photos, beginning with my very first visit to the city in August 1998.

 

August 1998 seems like ages ago now, but back then, I was living in Chicago and working as a student intern at a big architecture firm downtown. My best friend from high school was living in New York City, so I decided to take a weekend trip to NYC visit him. This was my first trip to the Big Apple... Little did I know then that the city would become my home in 2004, and then again in 2007. Most of the scenes in these photos are very familiar to me now, a few of these scenes no longer exist now, but in 1998, it was all very fresh and new to me. Most of these photos are from a long walk I took one day from downtown Brooklyn to the Upper West Side.

 

(Apologies for the image quality... These were taken with a $50 camera I bought from K-Mart in middle school, with a minor light leak and off-kilter viewfinder, and were digitally scanned many years later.)

 

Enjoy....

 

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Soon after emerging from the High Street station on the subway, one is greeted with the tangle of approach ramps leading to the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan Bridge. The area is known as "DUMBO", as in Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.

 

 

A view of the Brooklyn Bridge walkway, looking toward the lower Manhattan skyline shrouded in a hazy mist.

 

 

The pedestrian walkway on the bridge is elevated above and between the two roadway sections.

 

 

A view of one of the massive towers from mid-span.

 

 

Looking over toward the Brooklyn Bridge's neighbor to the north.

 

 

Another shot of the Manhattan Bridge.

 

 

Looking from the east tower over towards the west tower, with a great view of the cables that support the bridge.

 

 

A foggy view of the lower Manhattan skyline through the cables.

 

 

Another shot of the tower from near mid-span.

 

 

A view of the South Street Seaport shopping mall and tourist trap from the bridge nearby.

 

 

Looking straight up at one of the towers.

 

 

Looking back towards Brooklyn from the Manhattan side. With the exception of the Golden Gate Bridge, I've been across every suspension bridge in the US that has ever claimed a world's-longest title.

 

 

Looking back up the approach ramp from the Manhattan side.

 

 

Taken on a much sunnier day, a view of the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, and Williamsburg Bridge.

 

 

Another shot of the three suspension bridges over the East River, taken from South Street Seaport.

 

 

A few of the historic tall ships docked at South Street Seaport.

 

 

Where fortunes are made and lost every day. I inadvertently seem to have caught a hapless pedestrian in my shot.

 

 

Departed friends.

 

 

Looking from the south tower over towards the north tower. High wire artist Philippe Petit once walked across this 110-story chasm on a tightrope.

 

 

Down in the haze below is the Brooklyn Bridge, which I had just walked across earlier in the morning.

 

 

Well, there isn't much to see here. The haze was still pretty thick. This was my only visit to the World Trade Center before 9/11, and my memories of the WTC are now similarly foggy.

 

 

Directly below us is Battery Park and the Manhattan entrance to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.

 

 

This complex of buildings was conceived by architect Cesar Pelli as a series of foothills at the base of the mountains of the WTC towers. The absence of the WTC towers makes the composition incomplete.

 

 

Looking northeast towards Broadway. The Woolworth Building is on the right.

 

 

Looking back towards the East River, with the Brooklyn Bridge in center and the Manhattan Bridge in the upper left.

 

 

Unlike the machine-like efficiency of the street grid further uptown, the street pattern in lower Manhattan tends to be delightfully messy and eccentric. Here, we're on the fringes of Chinatown.

 

 

Looking north along Church Street near the WTC.

 

 

Another typical narrow side street tucked away in the canyons of lower Manhattan.

 

 

A quiet pocket park in the Village. This trendier-than-thou neighborhood forms the "valley" of low-rise buildings between the skyscrapers of the Financial District and Midtown.

 

 

The intersection of 86th and Broadway. I stayed at my friend's apartment in this neighborhood during my first couple visits to NYC, so this area naturally felt like my "home" neighborhood for a long time.

 

 

Looking down Broadway from 86th Street.

 

 

I was ostensibly in New York to investigate Columbia University as a possibility for grad school, so I figured I should at least pay a visit to the campus.

 

 

Here's Avery Hall, home of the architecture program. I ended up spending a lot of time in this building in the summer of 2007.

 

St. Paul's Chapel is on the right. Columbia was founded as King's College when New York was still a British colony, and had strong ties to the Church of England. When America gained its independence, the college was renamed Columbia University, but it still retains some informal ties to the Episcopal Church, which is the American branch of the Anglican Communion.

 

 

A shot down the length of Amsterdam Avenue, back towards downtown. The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, seat of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, is a few blocks away on the left. The cathedral would become my church home in 2004.

 

 

This funky little building is Columbia's law library on Amsterdam Avenue.

 

 

This shot is of Amsterdam Avenue stretching northward into Harlem and beyond.

 

 

Low Library, which is neither low nor a library.

 

 

The new student union building by architect Bernard Tschumi, shown here still under construction. The site has since been cleaned up.

 

 

Of Seinfeld fame, Tom's Restaurant also happens to be a block away from the cathedral, and is a great spot to grab a reasonably-priced breakfast.

 

 

(Continued on Part II.)

Lycra! Lycra! I love that stuff :D

 

Regarding WTC, I wish I had a chance to see it pre-September 11. Was only one tower accessible to tourists?

IIRC, the top floor of the south tower had the observation deck, and the top floor of the north tower had the Windows on the World restaurant. I could be wrong about that, though.

 

The cool thing about the observation deck was that it had an indoor part not unlike the Sears Tower or Hancock Center in Chicago, but it also had escalators that went up to an outdoor portion on the roof.

Neat thread.

 

The view from up there was horrorific:

 

St. John the Divine is one of the neatest buildings in New York.  I say that as a fellow Episcopalian and admirer of good architecture.

I say that as a fellow Episcopalian...

 

Now you know where I get my love of gin... from church.

I was "escorted" out of St. John for taking too many photos once.  I lived a block from Columbia for a few months last winter while interning in NYC, it was a great neighborhood.

I say that as a fellow Episcopalian...

 

Now you know where I get my love of gin... from church.

"Wherever three or four Episcopalians are gathered together, there ye shall also find a fifth."

Cheers!