For about 5 years, I lived in a one-room apartment on the very edge of the cliffs of Weehawken. It was literally a ROOM, but the location was what made the place special. I walked outside my building, looked to the right, and saw the Manhattan skyline, lined up with the Empire State Building right there. (This was before those teetery thin monstrosities were put up AROUND the Empire State Building, dwarfing it. Nothing gold can stay. Everything is always ruined because human beings are fucking stupid. It’s ruined the skyline.) I have so many pictures of the skyline at the end of my street, in all kinds of weathers and moods. Those were very very bad years that I lived there. I don’t remember much of it. But I remember living near that view, so close I felt like I could touch it, and how it never ceased to amaze me … how different it looked every time I looked at it. This was a freezing cold sunrise, the gold pouring across the Hudson, igniting my street. This was not a digital camera and none of these have been tweaked for color or shading.
It’s funny. Every day there is a sunrise and a sunset. There’s not one of them that isn’t beautiful or memorable. When you take pictures, though, it somehow “nails it down” in your mind, the specifics of that particular sunrise on that particular morning. And this one – the sort of swimming golden mist, shimmering, the low line of clouds – like a roof over the whole thing – and how the Hudson was drowned in darkness beneath all that swimming gold shimmer … I remember it vividly.
Because I took a picture of it?
