Looks like that in my move I've traded ten days of the Feast of San Gennaro for the single afternoon, Puerto Rican Day Parade pre-party known as the 116th Street Festival. 116th between Lexington and Second Avenue and a great length of 3rd Avenue were closed off and the whole thing was packed by locals and visitors all united in a celebration of Puerto Rican pride.
What are these folks gathered around? An electronic boxing bag. You'll see more of that later.
He didn't fall. This is a breakdancing action shot.
Hermano Grande is watching
This woman turned up dancing anywhere I went that music was playing.
There was this electronic boxing bag that was a huge hit. Great big line of people paying to give it a wallop and bigger crowd of spectators.
Biggest line at the festival was for a free sample of McDonalds fries, the Cronuts of East Harlem.
Do not worry. There was a Segway guy there.
The festival was full of enterprising entrepreneurs, lots of people selling cold water bottles and sodas out of coolers, but nothing tops the people that remember to bring out their giant snakes.
Bargaining hard over Emoji pillows
Vigilante recruitment programs in effect. Young Guardian Angel outfit not much less embarrassing than my summertime Boy Scout uniform. At least there's not knee high socks with tassels?
Was there a parade? No. But that's no reason not to show up with a float.
Another popular attraction: Cats behind a fence.
Tuesday, May 17th I was walking home from tutoring and there were a lot of fire trucks in my neighborhood. The trucks became denser and denser the closer I got to my house and my attitude crept from "wow, so many fire trucks" to "uh oh, so many fire trucks" As I approached the end of 118th at Park (that's my intersection) I was like "Oh good, my building isn't on fire." But something very big had been going down.
The situation is: There's the garden center/nursery beneath the Metro North tracks between 116th and 117th and they have a bunch of storage and offices between 117th and 118th. About twenty minutes after I had left my house that evening to go to tutoring a fire broke out in the storage area (cause of fire later determined to be someone refueling a still-hot generator) that quickly escalated into a spectacular four alarm blaze that brought out every fire engine in the world and shut down the Metro North right in the middle of rush hour. The street was all taped off and the firemen said I couldn't go into my apartment building (although I could see my neighbors in their windows). Me and this other guy just kept asking different firemen if we could go down the block to our apartments until we finally found one that said yes.
The fire was completely out by the time I was home, but they were hosing it down and working all night right outside my window. The Governor even stopped by to check on the situation.
The fire was so hot that it bent the girders that hold up the train tracks and the next day they were already working hard to reinforce the girders...even the job looked done to me by the end of Wednesday, they keep working on it till this day.
The fire was so hot it melted the sides of cars parked on the street
But that's nothing compared to this truck that I assume was under the tracks during the fire.
As soon as I saw my building wasn't on fire my first concern was for the chickens that live at the 117th street end of the garden center. It was a real relief to see they were all ok Wednesday.
Oh, also no humans died either.
Sorry about the title. But here's a post about the two trips to museums I took in May to check out some special exhibits.
Manus x Machina at the Met
One Saturday evening I joined Kristin, Bryndee and Caroline for a trip to the Met to see their annual exhibit of dresses. Every year (hence the "annual" in the last sentence) there's some fashion exhibit at the Met that's really popular, they kick it off with that big gala where all the celebrities wear fancy stuff? Anyway, I'm not sure if I've ever been to the annual fashion show, I definitely didn't go to that Alexander McQueen show that drove the city as wild as Hamilton. The theme was "Manus x Machina", meaning to focus on, like, the intersection of technology and, uh, people? in the making of fancy clothes. I think these themes are pretty bare skeletons to hang a lot of dresses on. And sure, lots of the dresses were cool, but the exhibit was a chaotic zoo of people shoving their way towards each dress to take pictures of them on their phones. So, okay, yes, I took pictures so I'm as bad as everyone else that was there. But it was an entirely unpleasant churning throng of people trying to look at dresses, and I was a part of it.
Before looking at the dresses we went up to the roof to see the house that's up there (every summer there's something up on the roof of the Met) before it started raining. It started raining while we were looking at the house. Perfect timing.
Then it was back down into the museum to check out those dresses. One thing that definitely did impress me were all the old dresses from the 30's and such and how the wall text would say "on loan from Mrs. so-and-so", meaning that someone's grandma wore this dress to a fancy party a long time ago and it's been in some Park Avenue closet ever since and when they heard Manus x Machina was coming up the owners thought "Oh, guess the Met will probably need to borrow Grandma's dress for this."
A dress of black plastic straws.
This was described as a wedding ensemble.
Another wedding ensemble
I dug the pleats
High fashion museum exhibit, high fashion gift shop, get your $300+ t-shirts and fancy purses here
Engaged in a little non-fashion exhibit-seeing, too.
Lost Kristin for a minute. Then found her.
Ramones at the Queens Museum
Then one sunny day Cher and I rode out to Flushing Meadows to see the Ramones exhibit at the Queens Museum. It had been about 7 years since my last Queens Museum visit, it had been totally renovated in the interim. But before museum pictures there's going to be some Flushing Meadows Park photos.
Oh snap, first Mister Softee of the season!
Chocolate Half-Merlin represent representsent
The Ramones exhibit was pretty good...just lots of t-shirts, old photos, and posters. Not giant, not tiny. Perfectly fine little thing.
Giant Sergio Aragones Ramones concert cartoon. I'd buy a poster of this.
Yoshitomo Nara Dee Dee doggy. I dig it.
In one room they were showing a Ramones concert video and my question was: "How loud did they play?" I hope very, very. I'd buy a time machine ticket to that show if you can promise me it was loud.
Post-Ramones Queens Museum browsing. Some of the best art was in the bathroom.
In the Panorama room, Brooklyn was under attack by a gigantic woman with a tiny vacuum
Can you see the plane coming in for a landing at LaGuardia?
There's a little side gallery showing off a few pieces from the largest private Tiffany glass collection. Here's what I learned: those Tiffany Lamps? They were invented/made/designed/whathaveyou by the SON of the founder of Tiffany & Co., the jewelers. So that's the connection. We all knew there had to be one.
Additional art and a glimpse of a panorama of the New York watershed and mural about water coming from the Catskills to the city with beavers in it.
