Your author was privileged last Sunday to have relaxed on a chaise lounge in the Crossroads Of The World – choosing a spot by Fr. Duffy Square, where Big Stem songster George M. Cohan is set with hat & cane in finely-poised stone, under all the history of byzantiastic lights. . .

It was the inaugural day of Mayor Bloomberg’s Broadway Pilot Program, and the Glittering Gulch thru Times & Herald Squares was closed to all vehicles but the human body.  Not so unlike in 1905 – the Gray Lady only one year in the neighborhood – when Studebaker was still a brand name and Budweiser occupied the north side of the bow-tie avenues instead of a hyper-digital Coke sign.

The Times Square Alliance provided lawn chairs for visitors of the unvacuous cosmoporium to better lounge and transfix.

Bravura oldie channel TCM sponsored a screening of gotham sailors-and-songs romp On The Town, from the Jumbotron on the southwest corner of 47th & Broadway.

The Naked Cowboy appears and is about to perform criminal acts upon an eager, nubile fan. Put that camera down and call the freaking cops!  O wait, no, it’s OK: there is a tattoo of Jesus on the Cowboy’s shoulder.

The other day, the International Union of Painters & Allied Trades had the Rat outside the Museum of Sex on Fifth Avenue. There was no chanting nor much brethernly fanfare.

In the New York City morning tourists with Gray Line All-Loops tickets scramble from Times Square to catch the boat to the Statue of Liberty. At the end of the day, these tourists need tour buses in Battery Park to collect them back to the hotel. At Gray Line these sweeper buses are called a Boat Pick-Up: they depart empty from 47th & Broadway so as to maximize seating from the Battery lowland landfill lines, and en route downtown the tour guide gets to ride the bus alone. . .

The Boat Pick-Up

Future Luxy

Old Bar Sign, Cypress Avenue & Stockholm Street.

Underpass Storefronts, Wyckoff Avenue & Broadway.

Liquor Store, closed, Onderdonk Avenue.

Liquor Store Holiday Display, Onderdonk Avenue.

Madonna Collage, bodega, Wyckoff Avenue.

Grotesque, front hallway, 426 Himrod Street.

Cafe Europa, closed, Cypress Avenue.

Conjoined, Roxy Paine, 2007-08 & The Metropolitan Life Tower, Napoleon LeBrun & Sons, 1909. Take a guess which of the two installations was created by the same designer of Schuylkill County Prison?

Tree Huts, Tadashi Kawamata, 2008-09 & the Flatiron Building, Daniel Burnham, 1902.

The Croisic Building, Frederick C. Browne, 1910.

Wisdom, Frederick Wellington Ruckstull, NY Supreme Court Appellate Division,
the late Mauve Years.

Clock, Fifth Avenue Building, green light.

Conjoined & Fifth Avenue.

Public Bathroom, Madison Sq. Park Conservancy, 2008.

Clock, Fifth Avenue Building, red light.

MetLife Tower, 17th Floor of The Croisic Building.