Thursday morning we headed down to Chelsea to visit the High Line Park and the Chelsea Market. The first picture is a view of the Chelsea neighborhood as we walked down 20th Street; the second picture is of High Line Park…it’s the elevated rail line.
They’ve taken the abandoned rail line and turned it into a trail with wildflower paintings and various art displays. It was really awesome. They’ve finished a portion that runs for about 10 blocks and have plans for Phase 2 and Phase 3….
Views of the city from the park….in the second, if you squint, you can see the Statue of Liberty off in the distance between the buildings.
The first of the art ‘stops’, this one had a viewing station and then this ‘cut out’; look through the hole and the cut out blocks and augments part of the skyline. Tried to capture it with my Iphone. There was another art ‘stop’ that played various bells from throughout New York every minute, and then at the top of the hour played all of them. We got lucky and happened to be there at five ‘til so stopped to wait for the mass ‘sounding’ of the bells. Pretty neat.
We walked through the park to the end and then came back north to go to the Chelsea Market…on the way back, we saw that they were filming ‘something’ and stopped to watch. They were setting up, and then some people sat down in the table and we thought they were getting ready to go. Wrong, those first people were stand-ins and then the real actors showed up in the second picture. Suzanne and I didn’t recognize any of them; they filmed a few snippets of dialogue and we got tired of it and moved on.
Had a quick snack at the Chelsea Market, a bunch of small shops located in an old warehouse. Crepes and Nutella..yumm (we were jealous of Kevin, who we hope had some this week). Bought some rubs for future bbq’ing at home and purchased some incredibly delicious cookies to take to Amy and Lloyd’s house the next evening.
We walked east on 23rd to get to Madison Square Park….stopped at a Home Depot that looked to be housed in an old library, columns everywhere, and we had to walk inside to see what the store looked like (verdict: very different from any HD we’ve ever been in)
Empire State Building from Madison Square Park. We stopped here to have lunch at Shake Shack, famous burger joint.
Flatiron Building
Suzanne noticed these two ‘dudes’ on top of these buildings…there were actually four or five of them that we could see from where I took these two pictures. Didn’t know why they were there but the wonders of the internet tell all…
I didn’t take this one.
“SITTING in his studio here, a converted warehouse north of King’s Cross, on a recent chilly morning, the artist Antony Gormley was talking about the sensation he was hoping to cause with “Event Horizon,” his first public art project in New York. It had been conceived as a shocker: from next Friday through Aug. 15, 31 naked men — or rather 31 slightly different sculptures of the same naked man, Mr. Gormley himself — will be perched on rooftops, standing on the grounds of Madison Square Park and dotting the sidewalks around the Flatiron district.
“When I did it in London” — in 2007 these same figures could be found on bridges, buildings and streets along the South Bank of the Thames River — “the reaction was quite remarkable,” he said. “People would stop. They would notice one; they would immediately stop somebody else on the street, pointing to the thing. Then gatherings of people would result, and quite quickly they would register their environment in a way they hadn’t before.”
In New York the project, not yet fully installed, has already caused a stir, but one Mr. Gormley could hardly have anticipated. Last week the New York City Police Department pre-emptively reassured the public that the figures were not potential jumpers on the verge of committing suicide.”
Obviously, Suzanne and I missed more than a few sculptures of Mr. Gormley.
