Dusk In Lower Manhattan

The streets seemed semi-deserted, and there were times when I could almost believe I was strolling around in 1910. It was a cloudy dusk, turning cloudy night, with smattering of rain …I later found myself in what amounts to a dungeon -and I took pictures there too – but that’ll be in the next post.

For now … the beauty of a cloudy night in lower Manhattan. I was alone (during my walk anyway) but not lonely.

This is the AT & T building and I just thought it looked spectacular. Like something out of Brazil or Metropolis.

Street scene. Maybe it’s just my sensibility but I look at that and feel a deep ache of aesthetic satisfaction. It just has so much in it … it’s night, you can feel the history of that street – and then just as an image … the huge windows, the dusk, the fire escapes crawling diagonally, the beam of the street lamp … Get ready, there are gonna be a million more like this one. It’s a photo where you could conceivably be in another century.

It was getting a bit too dark to be shooting without a flash – hence the blurriness of this photo. A lot of these came out too blurry and I deleted most of them but this one for some reason appealed to me. Again, with the feeling of an early industrial city … it seems to be from another time.

And then. A near-death experience caught on camera.

Ahhhh. I love to see mountain ranges, and forests, and crashing waves. But this is just as beautiful to me.

This struck me as kind of eerie and poetic. It’s light – which means life – which means: “there are people behind this door” – but somehow this seems uninhabited … like maybe it’s an ALIEN behind the door, or something like that. Somethng alive but not quite human.

More urban poetry. The glowing of lamps through windows. This is not a residential area – it’s a mix of industrial (old dusty fabric shops, garment stores) and cavernous art galleries, with 2 or 3 paintings hanging on otherwise empty walls. One side of the street is grimy, gritty (the ones I took above) and the other side gleams with stark whitness. Here’s a glimpse from the gritty side.

The glare of this pirate totally stopped me in my tracks.

This image was glued onto a battered service entrance-door. I have no idea what it is but I love it.

Basquiat? Is that you?

The “clean” side of the street. Spectacular in its own way … staring calmly across the narrow road at the early 20th century garment district shops.

As night fell, random lit windows gleamed. Like I said, this is not a residential area – so most of the windows were dark. The contrast struck me as so beautiful.

This might be my favorite photo of the batch. It’s a lamp store – but with no signage, no Home Depot stamp, no corporate environment. This is a rough area. Completely functional. But poetic because of that.

Yet another “ahhhh” view of the street.

And let’s end it with this guy. He called to me from his remote corner of the wall, in a gruff burbly voice, saying, “Hey. You wid da camera. Check me out, bitch!”

Next up? MY time in the dungeon … a space right out of “Silence of the Lambs”.