indisarray

I've been very unimpressed with recent store windows but found some previously unposted photos of a run I made in August 2022 that involved Bloomingdale's, Bergdorf Goodman, and Saks Fifth Avenue. Many are very colorful and some are strange. I also put up a few recent photos of a shoot at St. John's Cemetery. All of these are at my Flickr.

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During that recent Manhattan night trip that didn't give me any good window options, I drove way uptown for a bit just to see stuff. They've really gentrified a part of Harlem I hadn't been to in many years.... For the way home, I consulted the Apple map on my iPhone and noticed it suggested a way home that wouldn't involve tolls, an option I always have on. Now, I'd already gone through Manhattan's Congestion zone to get into Manhattan and shouldn't have to pay again if I went back through it, but I decided to see what my alternative was just so I'd know. So, you can't use the Queensboro Bridge to get back into Queens without paying the congestion toll; you can get into Manhattan without the toll if you use the top level of that bridge because the top feeds out into the 60s, above the zone. To avoid a Congestion zone toll from 110th Street, where I was, you have to take the FDR Drive all the way down to Brooklyn Bridge, where the FDR feeds into the bridge without actually hitting the city streets, then take the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway back to Queens, adding a lot of additional miles. I was unlucky enough that the BQE had a lot of traffic that night at that time too.

The Forte's seats really aren't as comfortable as they should be, so I was somewhat stiff and hurting after this long drive.

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Local Crowley Playground has reopened after months of work, and I'm so disappointed with what they did to it. It needed work, desperately, but everything aside from the child play area now looks like the most generic contemporary-styled park, all white and beige and tile and the exact same plants they put in all new parks. Less seating, less identity. It used to look like the old school park it was. They took out a lot of old trees that used to be around it too. They couldn't just fix the paving?

I haven't been back at night yet so I don't know if they improved the lighting. There were parts of the playground that had none, so anyone using it after dark had to put their cellphone flashlights on to see anything. I don't assume someone with sense fixed that.