I wrote a couple of posts several years ago about New York’s Penn Station, and that various other Penn Stations that existed along the East Coast (1, 2). I’m still thinking about Penn Station, particularly now that I work just around the corner from its gravesite.

This is a post from Greg Wasserstrom’s Blog About Photography.

Still Thinking About Penn Station

Trying to find the name of a particular bike shop on Google Maps just now, I stumbled across WYNC’s map of halted development projects. Whoa. Take a look. This is like being handing a photo project.

This is a post from Greg Wasserstrom’s Blog About Photography.

Zombie New York

On reading my prior Penn Station post, my sister in law told me about a professor she had who spoke of Penn Station this way:

You used to stroll through it like a Roman and now you scuttle below it like a rat. That’s it, I can’t speak of this more today.

I’m paraphrasing, but I that’s pretty much the idea, I would say. What was his name again?

Also, just generally on the topic of real estate developers. I’ve been reading Gotham, which is the history of New York City, which is, more or less, the history of real estate developers. I’m not switching sides on this issue, but they’re more important to our economic eco-system than I think we give them credit for. Not that don’t totally destroy some pretty priceless stuff.

This is a post from Greg Wasserstrom’s Blog About Photography.

Re: Penn Station, Real Estate Developers

wetnurse (http://www. myspace. com/wetnursenyc)
the jonbenet (http://www. myspace. com/thejonbenet)
welcome home (http://www. myspace. com/welcomearewelcomehome)
pollution (http://www. myspace. com/pollutionpollutionpollution)

This is a post from Greg Wasserstrom’s Blog About Photography.

Tomorrow: Tour Comes to Brooklyn

This is a post from Greg Wasserstrom’s Blog About Photography.

McGinley

My loft apartment in scenic Bushwick, Brooklyn is available for the summer. The dates are flexible so long as you’re in by June 1. Stay a month, two months, or until the lease expires on August 30. You can use our furniture if you don’t want to bring your own or we can throw all our crap in the basement and leave you with a big empty space. Wireless DSL, utilities included all for a mere $2000/mo.  

The place is located on the Dekalb Ave stop on the L or the Central Ave stop on the M. It’s a rad building full of painters and drummers and the like.  The block is full of kids who play wiffle ball in the street and crack open the fire hydrants when its warm out. There is a massive basement only accessible thru this unit and roof access, perfect for cookouts. Just a quick walk to Life Café, the organic market and the other shops and galleries at Morgan Ave, grocery store and Kickerbocker Ave shops just around the corner. Maria Hernandez Park two blocks away.

It’s a great spot. Bring your partner, bring your pet. Here are some snaps:

This is a post from Greg Wasserstrom’s Blog About Photography.

Hey New York: Sublet My Apartment?

Today was a beautiful day, the first real “winter day” of the winter – cold and white, with huge snowflakes drifting down from a gray sky. Today is disgusting. It’s about 20º warmer, which means all the snow on the ground has turned into disgusting slush and it’s raining. It makes me realize how much I love the summer. I’ve been thinking a lot about this past summer, my last in DC and getting nostalgic. I didn’t actually think I would miss anything about that place once I got to Brooklyn, but it turns out I miss everything. I wouldn’t want to live their again — it’s way too small — but I definitely miss the people, the scenery, and, this summer, the weather.

DC’s got horrible summers. It gets to be about 95º, it’s unbelievably muggy and the mosquitoes are like a scourge — they’re everywhere, and I happened to get these disgusting, enormous welts when they bite me. But I love it. It’s just like Houston, where I grew up; a town that gets even hotter and muggier and has even worse mosquitoes than DC. Now, for the first time, I’m living in a city that wasn’t built in a swamp. Houston and Washington were both built on land nobody wanted; DC because it was donated to by Maryland to be the Capital, and Houston because it was essentially where Galveston picked up and moved after being devastated by a Hurricane in 1900.

My point is this. I was walking down Flushing Ave in Brooklyn on a freezing night a couple weeks ago, wishing it was summer. And it hit me, as so many things have since moving here, that a lot of the atmospheric things I associate with the summer — the humidity, giant oak trees full with leaves and breeding mosquitoes, my friends standing around in somebody’s overgrown backyard wearing cutoffs and drinking beer, secadas chirping so loudly you almost can’t hear anything else — those things are all going to be different here, for the first time ever. Twenty-three years having one kind of experience is a long time. It’s a big change.

The hottest summer I’ve ever experienced was the one spent in New York in 2005. Even though Houston gets to be 108º at the peak of the heat in August, everywhere you actually go is so heavily air conditioned that you pretty much have to wear a hoodie indoors. Here, there’s no escaping the heat most of the time. There are parties on rooftops, bands playing in Prospect Park, trips to Brighton Beach and Coney Island. It’s great, but obviously there’s nothing Southern it. It’s a whole new way of living.

This is a funny thing to be thinking about on such a slushy day in February. In Houston, I would complain about living in such a boring place that doesn’t have seasons. Now that I am, I can’t wait for them to change.

This is a post from Greg Wasserstrom’s Blog About Photography.

There’s Bad Weather I Enjoy But It’s Not This

I was in Houston almost a week before I bothered to see what was going on there in terms of art. It happened that Nan Goldin has a large show up at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. I went to see it with Bryan Schutmaat and it was terrific. The Ballad was there, playing every hour on the hour, along with galleries full of grids of Goldin photographs, classic and recent.

Goldin is perhaps enjoying a second Golden Age. Her influence can be seen everywhere from a Wolfgang Tillmans show to an American Apparel ad. Bryan noted at one point that Goldin’s work, a highly auto-biographical document of the seedy Downtown scene of the 1980s, comes across in the Ballad as something of a cautionary tale. Conversely, much of the contemporary work it has inspired is far more celebratory of the lifestyle depicted. I seem to remember reading something about Dash Snow that described his work as “Nan Goldin hit with a happy wand.”

And when you’re doing a line of coke of somebody’s dick, why would you want to stop to think about what that actually means? These are the times we live in. Goldin’s New York was a much more menacing place than ours. For all the camaraderie and intimacy on display in her work, danger, death, were lurking everywhere. AIDS claimed many of her closest friends and she struggled with addiction, all fully documented in here work and on display in the Houston exhibition. These themes are largely absent from the work of her twenty-something disciples. We live in a low-risk environment and we know how to have a good time.

Early New Years resolution: more dick in my pictures.

This is a post from Greg Wasserstrom’s Blog About Photography.

Some things about Nan Goldin

Another time I fell in love on the subway, I was coming up out of the station in a part of town I only visit when I need to buy something for the apartment. A girl was walking ahead of me, there was a certain something to her stride, and again those black canvass shoes. It was still warm then, or I should say, much warmer than it is now, and her skin shimmered slightly. On the street we went different directions. I turned around to watch her round the corner. How pleasant that she’d done the same.

Back on the platform, the girl in the white coat she steps forward, peering down the track, checking for the train. It’s coming, and then it arrives. I loose sight of her. I write about her from memory.

This is a post from Greg Wasserstrom’s Blog About Photography.

Some words about a girl on the subway

Another reason why I’ve been so slow to blog — I’m still working for Wonkette and I picked up another blogging gig for Raw Story, which is about 30 hours per week. That’s a lot of blogging! So after I’ve done that for 8 or 9 hours, it’s tough to sit down and write my own blog, but I’ll try to get better at it. This, after all, is important.

Anyway, more will trickle out about my life soo, I’m sure, but for now I have a couple of other posts to write!

This is a post from Greg Wasserstrom’s Blog About Photography.

Oh, hey, I’m back.