A New York State of Mind

Before I forget to post something about it and get into my parents visit and all the places we covered i must make a few comments on this amazing tour i went on of the old City Hall subway station in lower Manhattan that is now closed and only open for special tours. it closed for many reasons one interesting one is that with the arrival of larger longer subway cars the platform at the old city hall stop was not long enough.

In addition to the old stop with all it's architectural historical interest a small group of us from grimshaw were taken on the most amazing guided tour of all the underground tunnels and spaces that exist in and around this closed subway stop. there were even old bunkers for storing ammunition that dated back to the 1800's. the stop is also very near the water and one edge/end of the Brooklyn bridge, so we saw some of the very massive footings that anchor the bridge deep into the ground.

Unfortunately my lame battery failing camera could not photograph all this so i only have a few good pictures from the excursion.

this rare opportunity to see these underground spaces was made possible by the fact that i am working on the transit center downtown and the MTA being our client has special privileges such as all access to all parts of the subway system, well i know i am a nerd but it was pretty cool stuff so i just thought i would share....there are some perks to working for the MTA : ) among the headaches.

well i am on vacation in the city and it's wonderful after the long weeks of being in the office and not being able to do any wandering! my parents are in town so i am also enjoying being able to see and appreciate the city all over again with them. here is a frosty nose pic of me in the subway with my dad and his Indiana Jones hat : P

I wish I was in Paris to see this, the Pantheon freqently has installations like this that really utilize the huge spaces in the antheon in the most amazing way.

you can find more on Neto and the exhibit at the Kultureflash website.

Oh yeah, not sure if I mentioned my other favorite city besides NY of course :) is Paris (at least so far).

This is a cool little image a co-worker sent me that compares the Fulton Street Transit Center project i am working on to some of the tallest building in the world.

As you can see ours is considerably smaller :) in comparison but it's always cool to understand the scale of things when you see them compared to other familiar towering pieces of architecture. Double click on image to see it larger.

W O R K I N G ! ! ! !

i am very happy for my wonderful job here at grimshaw but these long weeks and weekends in the office are definitely cutting into my blog post worthy activities :)

work is good but i don't think images of my stair and escalator drawings that i am slaving away on at the moment are very exciting to anyone but me...and not even that exciting to me for that matter. ahhhhh

today was particularly trying as the weather was beautiful! a bit chilly but nice enough for a stroll in central park. well my parents are coming at x-mas so i hope to get in some good wondering about the city then.

ok have to get back to my drawings here.....i mean the night is young, it's only 11:30pm :P (just hit 74 hours for this week on my timesheet! yikes...)

maybe i should change my blog name to "working" in nyc instead of "wondering" in nyc ; P

well all of my roomies and neighbors back at 64 morton welcomed me back last night from h-town. we got together to send off sammy (4th from left in pic), a short time resident of the guys in 1c. first time in a while we are all at home and no one is traveling for work/ family etc. so we took a few silly pix to mark the rare moment. some times i really feel like we are on an episode of friends......except fortunately much more diverse :)

“New York is a granite beehive, where people jostle and whir like molecules in an overheated jar. Houston is six suburbs in search of a center.”

Well it's been a while since i managed to find time to do a bit of blogging but now that i am on vacation i have a free moment. however, i am going to go outside my usual nyc finds to post a few pix of me hanging out with my familia here in tejas : )

it's quite the different slow pace here in Houston compared to Manhattan. not to mention the weather is perfect! i know god gave me these warm days here (70 and sunny) before the freeze back in nyc.

earlier this week i felt like a fish out of water driving in my parent's SUV on the 16 lane freeway :P rather than hopping on the subway. i met a friend for dinner at a restaurant here so big you could have fit all 5 of my favorite restaurants in the west village in it! needless to say i am having some good times here catching up with family and friends but i had forgotten how different the south is from the BIG diverse apple :)

hmm well i switched over to this new beta format for blogging and it seems i messed up my blog a bit in an attempt to improve it.

that is why you should not mess with your blog while you are at work and can't take the proper time to work on it :) well maybe on my upcoming vacation i'll have time to use all the new features to improve my nearly year old template!

until then sorry for the annoying archive that now show up first on the side bar. more changes to come........yeah and what happened to my map?? guess i'll have to re-insert that in my template :(

i did not do a whole lot this past weekend, mostly tried to catch up one my rest and hang out at home :) with my roomies......not much exciting blog stuff to post or write about.

but i did want to post a link to this great list of cool websites for all you graphic web design lovers out there. i already sent it to some of you but here is the link if you missed it. Grimshaw is #37. enjoy....

CLICK HERE for links to cool websites and graphics

Well it's the usual deadline fervor and there is no time to blog or do anything else but think of getting back to my machine here at 100 Reade :) I know it sounds like the same old story....and it is

hopefully this weekend post deadline I will be able to get back out into the city to do some wandering as the weather is getting so cold now the days for walking about are becoming less and less. However, I have to say despite my Texas thermostat the fall here is so beautiful with crisp cool days and multi-colored leaves falling everywhere.

Ok have to get back to my drawings here…………………………………

My good friend Karla was in town from Mexico city this weekend and we had a great time catching up. It was also very interesting to chat with her new husband Jesus, who works in Vincente Fox's cabinet. I always like a good political chat especially about a government I don't know much about except from the media. He was also full of very interesting facts about Mexicans living in the US and numbers of Spanish speakers.

Also for those of you who know Karla it was great to see her because she is now nearly 5 months pregnant with a baby boy!!!! She is as slim as ever though and you would hardly know she was expecting. Here is a rather red picture of us enjoying dinner here in nyc.

at my mother's request for more pix of where i live i thought i would put up this collage of pix i made for a card for one of my roomies when she moved out. hope it's not too blurred and photoshopped for you mom! :) don't forget to click on the images to see them larger. man i wish i knew more about how to mess with my template and the code for this thing so i could make the pic spread further out of the margins that are currently set...oh well maybe i better just add a more "normal" shot too.

This is my roommate’s fiancé’s company. pretty cool stuff : ) Webber actually left his programming job (i think or something like that with Merrill lynch or one of those guys) to start this company with his long time friend. just thought i would share! check out their site YoYoNation.com

Over the weekend I went with most of 64 Morton (my apt. + all my neighbors) to a wedding for one of our friends who comes to our small group. The wedding was out in Long Island followed by a great reception at East Manor in Flushing Queens. East Manor is a HUGE Chinese food restaurant that is known for hosting large weddings. There was so much food.....maybe 10 courses!!! but we could all handle it since there was lotsof dancing!! my favorite. I think I probably shocked my new nyc friends with all my dancing but guess they had to find out sometime ;)

Unfortunately I did not get many good pix of the bride, i was helping out with greeting the guest and doing some stuff for post wedding, so i even missed part of the ceremony.

however, here are a few of me and the guest (and a blurry bride one)! the group shot is of my room mates and neighbors that live below me. Check out this fish...it was sooo big and yummy!

I forgot to mention in the last post that the whole reason for going over the Bridge was actually not just for the amazing views but we were heading to a local favorite pizzeria called Grimaldi's. It's located just under the Brooklyn Bridge and is so good that you have to wait in line a minimum of 30+ minutes outside the place before you get a seat, and the line has been known to run around the block! But the atmosphere inside is great and so is the pizza, very homey (is that a real word? oh well who cares :) So this is jo and i pigging out as well as chimeister and jake my fellow grimshaw buddies enjoying some good ny pie!

as my laptop is dying a slow death i have neglected my blogging because i just can't keep my connection: ( anyway i'll try and remedy that soon : ) seems i have done a lot of wanderings these last few weeks and don't know where to start. i promise though this post won't just have pix of buildings :)

well one of the best things i did recently was walk over the Brooklyn bridge. it's defn the best free thing to do in new york (that i have discovered so far), much better than going on the staten island ferry (formerly my favorite free new york thing to do). it was amazing. my friend jo from paris was visiting last week and i thought we should do some touristy stuff, so a walk over the brooklyn bridge was a must! : )

i have not had much time to blog these days, or write of my random thoughts in the city but every once in a while an image comes my way and i like to throw it on here for your viewing pleasure :)

someone at grimshaw sent me this image of this cool car park in germany. if all car parks were like this is would be great! imagine how it would transform the houston landscape!! : )

I had the amazing opportunity to visit the Times building again last week. My old colleague Serge from (RPBW) took me and few other former interns around the site. We actually walked up 14 flights of stairs at one point because the elevator had already stopped running : ) that was not the highlight of the trip but I thought I would comment on it anyway.

The spaces are so amazing and the play of light with the tubes or "baguettes" on the facade create amazing shadows.

Although I don't have any pix form the last week I did just get some from one of the former residents of 64 Morton (the girls whose place I took in my new apartment). These are my room mates/ neighbors/ friends :)

this was about a month ago we had a bar-b-q in their little backyard patio behind our building.

So actually I have a new room mate that just moved in to take the place of my other room mate gennie that moved out about a month ago. I know, it's complicated. it's funny I feel like in 7 months in New York I have made up for all the years I lived at home during school and never had room mates. I think Lillian (the sister who moved in this past Saturday) makes my 5th roomie since moving here not to mention all the girls at the women's residence! That was like having 20 room mates!

Well it's been a while since I made a post as I have been working like a CRAZY woman :) and on top of that I had a friend staying with me from Richmond so as soon as I came up for breath I was out with her and still neglecting to write . Unfortunately in all these days of wandering about with visitors I have neglected my camera: ( so though a lot has happened and I have enjoyed some great new things in the city I have no interesting pix to share, well maybe a few :)

I just have to mention before I go (since i am yet again at work : 0) that last night I went to this great concert in the middle of central park at the Naumburg Bandshell as it is known. it was an amazing performance by the Naumburg orchestra. Very good classical music accompanied by an opera singer in one part and a classical guitarist in another. And to top it off the event was FREE!!! Now who ever said you have to be rich to live and enjoy New York City. I have seen and visited more interesting things here for FREE than I can list on this blog. Another great thing about it was that the weather was amazing! About 70+ degrees and it's august! It was also great fun because I went with my room mates and their cousins and auntie who brought us a yummy picnic dinner to eat while we watched.

ok this is getting to be a lot like a diary entry so I’ll leave it at that and try to work on collecting a few photos to post later.

This is a rendering of a competition entry the office recently won in Italy for a Fashion and Design Events Building in Milan. It looks kind of like a shark will gills to me : ) most of the shape and form comes from environmental drivers.

Some friends that I meet with for church on Sunday invited my room mates and I out to dinner at their house in Queens.

We had a great time hanging out and chatting. Mrs. Chao made the most amazing dinner and dessert!! A huge spectrum of Chinese dishes from salmon to noodles and pork.

It was a nice reprieve from the hot busy city to hang out in their comfortable house and get to know some other friends that I usually don't hang out with much.

I took a lot of pictures of us on the subway too, not sure why I like subway pictures so much, maybe it's because they always end up with interesting looking ppl in the background or things in motion.

I read this today on a blog link from the democratic party web site and found it quite interesting...

I’d like to say that there’s a real dialogue taking place about the state of the U.S. economy, but the discussion leaves a lot to be desired. In general, the conversation sounds like this:

Bush supporter: “Why doesn’t President Bush get credit for a great economy? I blame liberal media bias.”

Informed economist: “But it’s not a great economy for most Americans. Many families are actually losing ground, and only a very few affluent people are doing really well.”

Bush supporter: “Why doesn’t President Bush get credit for a great economy? I blame liberal media bias.”

To a large extent, this dialogue of the deaf reflects Upton Sinclair’s principle: it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. But there’s also an element of genuine incredulity. Many observers, even if they acknowledge the growing concentration of income in the hands of the few, find it hard to believe that this concentration could be proceeding so rapidly as to deny most Americans any gains from economic growth.

Yet newly available data show that that’s exactly what happened in 2004.

(snip)

...the real income of the richest 1 percent of Americans surged by almost 12.5 percent. Meanwhile, the average real income of the bottom 99 percent of the population rose only 1.5 percent. In other words, a relative handful of people received most of the benefits of growth.

(snip)

In short, it’s a great economy if you’re a high-level corporate executive or someone who owns a lot of stock. For most other Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.

Can anything be done to spread the benefits of a growing economy more widely? Of course. A good start would be to increase the minimum wage, which in real terms is at its lowest level in half a century.

But don’t expect this administration or this Congress to do anything to limit the growing concentration of income. Sometimes I even feel sorry for these people and their apologists, who are prevented from acknowledging that inequality is a problem by both their political philosophy and their dependence on financial support from the wealthy. That leaves them no choice but to keep insisting that ordinary Americans — who have, in fact, been bypassed by economic growth — just don’t understand how well they’re doing.

It was great to spend this past 4th of July in New York City. I went down to the South Street Seaport with my friends and room mates to see the fire works on the East River. There were a lot of people, but not too many. We took our dinner down there and hung out for a few hours enjoying the wonderful weather. Just as a side note, so far I think NYC has wonderful summers!!! no matter what anyone here says :) At least compared to Houston. Today the high is 80 and right now it is 62!!!!!! and it's July. If that is not a nice summer I don't know what is.