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Great pictures from your recent posts Mike :salute:Mike, my favorite is the color one. Excellent.
Museum Worthy!Chairs....
Regards
Mike
Thats So 3 Dimensional That You Could Walk Right Into It!A ghoulish looking abandoned farmhouse just down the road at the end of a soybean field.
Kurt
Eleanor - The answers to you questions are a suitable subject for a book. One of my goals in doing a daily photo blog is to write this book in a visual sense. Your question encourages me to get out into neighborhoods.
Compare and contrast Houston and Manhattan - where to start. People walk a lot more here - where I live in Carnegie Hill is about a 45 minute walk to my midtown office, which I do when it's not too humid, wet or hot (conditions that are well-understood in Houston), or cold. Public transportation, the subway, is safe, fast and cheap. Car ownership is expensive: monthly garage rental for parking is equivalent to lease payments on a good car - car ownership here basically costs twice what it does in Houston. People tend to use cars for escapes and major errands. It's common for people to own weekend escapes outside of the city, modest or grand depending on the person's means.
On 24 hour noise and congestion, it depends on where you live. Carnegie Hill, parts of the upper west side and of Greenwich Village are like leafy suburbs, populated with families with school-age children. People tend to find communities in organizations such a churches and schools, or in their work, much like anyplace else.
One critical difference between the cities is zoning vs. no zoning at all. When you look at Manhattan what you're actually seeing is the zoning envelope - buildings are built to the edge of it, within millimeters because the real estate is so expensive. Park Avenue north of 57th street is a result of the zoning envelope without setbacks or "air rights" transfers; the lipstick building is built within the envelope for its plot, but with credits for setbacks, some limited "plaza" space and an "amenity" - a street level subway entrance, all of which permitted IM Pei to add floors at the top. It's viewed by critics as a cynical exploitation of the zoning regulations. The Seagram building got to build higher because of the plaza; the building behind the Racquet Club built higher because the Racquet Club sold the developer the "air rights" above the club. Air rights transfers are the main cause of the skyline's jagged appearance.
Beautiful shots Eleanor. I especially like that second one.
I bet you will!Thanks Lloyd, I will sure be missing my accessibility to this river! eleanor