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NY As It Was
NY As It Was
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NY As It Was
For The Soul
21w
NY As It Was
Solo beach day
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One of the greatest forms of therapy known to womankind. Mankind too I guess. I have been doing this since I was a teenager. Then it was Brighton Beach with a $1.50 poppy seed pastry from the Russian woman snapping her tongs at you, a couple of apricots and raspberries for $2. Now it’s the Rockaways or any place I find myself. Always a book and fruit in the bag. There is nothing that can fulfill the soul quite like a beach day, on or off season. Embracing some solitude in this way, unencumbered, gazing, swimming, drawing, dreaming up ideas and abandoning your phone in the bag feels like ultimate freedom. The best is running into your best friend, also having her solo beach day, and then having it all everything everywhere all at once.
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21w
NY As It Was
Feeling seen by the eyes of Chambers Street
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When you’re done staring at a screen, they are there for you. They have seen it all. The peepers were created by Kristin Jones & Andrew Ginzel in 1998 from photographs of New Yorkers moving through their days. Early mornings, late nights, shelter from the rain and witness to the sweaty, tired, grocery hauling people of our city. Through all stages of life I love them, they always make me feel…seen
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19w
NY As It Was
The old mta subway map
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Any native New Yorker I talk to about this feels the same way — the new one gives everything an app icon feel, a simplified video game simulation of the hard earned hustling we do to navigate this crazy place. We all suddenly exist in a box, Central Park is at once a box, Queens and Brooklyn — an uptight Pac Man with a tail, Manhattan — an upside down worm, the Bronx — a shape that tried to escape, Staten Island — a glitch in the system. The old Tauranac-Hertz map was warm, human, and relatable like its city. And it worked! Since 1979…
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21w
NY As It Was
I miss Pearl Paint
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Pearl Paint was everything. A labyrinthine library of pastels and clays and canvas you could reach only by ascending the impossibly steep stairs to each floor after floor after floor, where hand written signs drawn with markers by art students would guide you to the goods. Each floor and attendant had its own personality, the color pencil man was always very serious, which meant he must be a very good artist. Nothing was shiny but everything glowed with possibility. There was a beauty to everything it offered, and a beauty too to its limits. The materials were there to be claimed like teddy bears waiting to be loved. It was my first Mecca.
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21w
NY As It Was
NY as it was
•••
This piece by Sadie Stein on the Gem Room in the Museum of Natural History is everything. “The lack of self-consciousness, the superiority, the complicity. New York was more of a nerd’s town back then, or at least felt like it: cheaper and weirder and crummier. Nerds—real nerds—are not associated with great wealth; we don’t thrive in shiny new places. We were creatures of libraries and thrift stores and were not strangers to the whiff of mildew.” Do you remember? Like I remember?
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