9/18/04 Flooded Subway; Nat's Parents in Midtown Hotel; Car to U. Sq. Greenmarket; Double Feature at Empire 35 with views from Balcony; Double Sushi Dinner in Village:

Today, Natalie and I made our way up to Midtown to meet up with her parents, who were staying in a hotel together for a few nights, enjoying the city while her father got some business done.

It was raining heavily all morning, and it was creating pandemonium in the subway as various lines got flooded. This was the scene at Penn Station on the 7th avenue line as the train we just disembarked from got stuck at the station.

On Fifth avenue, right below the Empire State building they were pumping water out of a manhole.

The view from under the building.

We went up into the hotel where Nat's parents where staying to look around. Her dad showed us to a conference room where we were afforded some spectacular views of the surrounding area.

Looking directly across the street, you can see what you can't see from the street: A modern restaurant on top of a much older and more ornate building.

Looking down 5th avenue.

Then we got a tour of their hotel room:

It has the most amazing hotel bathroom I have yet seen.

It had a tub and a shower stall.

The bedroom had a full chandelier.

The TV cabinet was kind of fun.

Mr. Coleman had set up a little office on the desk.

This was the view from their room, looking north.

The fancy phone in the room.

In fact, the phone was so fancy, it controlled all of the lighting in the apartment with a touch of a button.

After a wonderful Brunch at the hotel, we were sent off via a car to wherever we wanted to go. We told the driver to take us to Union Square as we anted to go see a movie, and there is a big theatre there.

We got stopped for a little while by a parade.

Or... not so much a parade, as a parade of people in parade regalia, crossing the street. They looked like they were on their way to or from a parade, actually.

Looking up out of the back window of the car, I got a shot of Empire State once again.

Back at Union Square, we thanked the driver and walked through the green market.

They were selling fish today!

The movie theatre in Union Square had no movie we wanted to see at the time we wanted to see it, to we took the subway back up to Times Square as there are two huge theatres on 8th avenue and 42nd street.

I believe we saw "I Heart Huckabees" and "Garden State" this afternoon, but we only paid for one of them. God bless massive cineplexes on rainy summer weekend afternoons. Eh?

The theatre we went to, my favorite in NYC, was the Empire 35. It's a massively tall theatre complex with 35 screens, and huge unused balconies that one can enjoy on their way up to their picture. It was from one of these balconies that Natalie and I killed some time taking photos:

Looking across the street to the horribly ugly but extremely recognizable facade of the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 8th avenue. 8th Avenue runs diagonally through the photo, and the predominance of busses and taxis are headed in the uptown direction.

The intersection of 42nd street (top to bottom) and 8th avenue (left to right).

Tilting the camera down a little reveals two empty plots of land on 8th avenue that are bound not to stay that way. At least one of them is being readied for a new skyscraper for the new new new new headquarters of the New York Times. This is part of a very long in the making plan to extend "New 42nd Street" as far West as possible.

Looking north and up, across 42nd street, one can see one of the newest skyscrapers in Manhattan... the Weston Hotel building. It stretches from 42nd to 43rd on the east side of 8th avenue, and it is definitely post-post-modern. It's base is a funky angular shape with whimsically drawn parallelograms of color adorning its sides. The windows merely provide a texture to the surface as they are not indented at all, and are placed in a checker pattern. The tower above consists of two major color areas, each with straight lines of deeper color going in opposite directions, separated from each other by a thin, gentle curving arch. I think the brilliance of this building, and the reason that I like it so much, is that the top of the building is not a flat cop-out. Most of the past three decade's worth of architecture ignores the human instinct to inspect a building to it's top, searching for a finish or conclusion to the story of the building's design. This building makes fantastic use of it's top, allowing the blue sky-tone section to arc over a shorter earth tone section. It makes the arch in between an integral part of the design, and it almost feels like an optical illusion, as if the building were truly two parts instead of one tower. At night, they light up the arch by having the light travel from the bottom to the top, and they shoot a high powered beam of light out of the top of the arch at an angle to the sky. I happen to really like it. Natalie... does not.

Looking more towards the west, one can see lots of buildings. On the left, the building with the clock faces and the ball on top is the old Paramount building in Times Square. The clock works well, and I used to have a view of it from my office on the 37th floor of the MTV building across the street when I had an internship at Nickelodeon. The clock's minute had ticks off every other minute, two minutes at a time. When the clock reaches the top of the hour, the white-lit ball at the top of the building flashes red a number of times corresponding to the hour. When I was a freshman in college, working at Nickelodeon, I could see them building the "Reuters" building at Times Square from my perch. As I went in to Nickelodeon every Friday, the Reuters building was getting closer and closer to the height of my window until it overtook my height and blocked my expansive view of downtown. I then quit.

The building with the concrete crown at the top of the middle of the above photo is the MTV building where I worked. My office was right about where the top of the needle on the building in front is located.

Looking down, one can see all of the billboards that grace "New 42nd Street" between 8th and 7th avenues. It's actually written into the city law now that if you put up a new building in the Times Square area, you must cover something like 80 percent of the lower parts of the building with billboards.

Looking down 42nd street to 12th avenue and the Hudson River at Circle Line!

The pink energizer ad across the street above the Duane Reade is kind of interesting.

Looking up to the rest of the movie theatre building.

The huge antenna is atop 4 Times Square, built by Conde Nast. It is the antenna that replaces the one at the World Trade Center, and it is very new.

So, we saw our two movies, didn't like Garden State so much, but really enjoyed I Heard Huckabees. Then we went to a Sushi Bar in the area. What's weird about the photos below is that all of them look like Kura, including the one with Natalie in it, but this photo immediately below, of myself, is taken in the same direction as the one of Natalie, and it's a different sushi bar. How is that possible?

The color of the wood of the bar changes from the above photo to the below. I think we might have done to one place, not really liked it, and went back to Kura which was nearby to finish off our dinner. We're so crazy.

Later, walking back to the subway, I noticed something very wrong on the street:

The Don't Walk sign was operating perfectly... on the ground: