Between 1939 and 1941, the Works Progress Administration collaborated with the New York City Tax Department to collect photographs of every building in the five boroughs of New York City. In 2018, the NYC Municipal Archives completed the digitization and tagging of these photos. This website places them on a map. Zoom in! Every dot is a photo.

“We’re telling you that no one should be out here because it’s dangerous, but we’re sending you out there and we’re not giving out any masks.” --- The bus driver, who declined to be named for fear of losing her job, is one of hundreds of thousands of Brooklynites still working essential jobs, even as the borough is hit hard by the coronavirus. Twenty-eight percent of New York City’s essential workers live in Brooklyn — the most in any borough — and the vast majority of them are people of color. In Brooklyn, the number of deaths outpaced those in Queens on Sunday. Brooklyn has more than 2,606 confirmed COVID-19 deaths and 865 “probable” COVID-19 deaths, according to NYC data released April 19.

I can’t imagine how I might have conceived of myself and my possibili­ties if, in my formative years, I had moved through a city where most things were named after women and many or most of the monuments were of powerful, successful, honored women.

The reality is that whether it’s at school, home or in the open space, lots of little city boys just don’t get the physical activity their restless bodies need. I’m focused on my boy, but the same is surely true for many girls as well. The results to me are obvious: a city of little boys with ants-in-the-pants who become grown men affected by it. I wonder if it’s worth it.

Coffee shops and other establishments to work in in New York City.

Remembering the 70s/80s occult boom in NYC.

‘How the rank and file of both the City and the NYPD deal with our mass nonviolent protests is on them, not us, and certainly not on the people reporting the events of the day.’

Heartwarming. Sixty photos of the world becoming just a little bit happier.

The political process that made this happen. Fascinating, inspiring, and moving.

Jamie creates animated GIFs by selectively animating a portion of a photograph. These are wonderful and a little creepy.

Statistician has a fifty-worksheet Excel file filled with numbers and ideas, mostly based on 'congestion pricing', that could fix the traffic problems of NYC. “Komanoff is a dyed-in-the-wool stats geek, and the BTA demonstrates his faith in data. By measuring the problem—the amount of time and money lost in traffic every year—we can begin to solve it, he says. We can turn the knobs on the entire transportation system to maximize efficiency. Komanoff’s model suggests a world in which everything from subway fares to bridge tolls can be precisely tuned throughout the day, allowing city planners to steer traffic flow as quickly and smoothly as a taxi driver tooling his cab down Broadway on a quiet Sunday morning.”

A elegy to hipsters, complete with obnoxious photography, sort of just picks and chooses various elements of youth culture and NYC hipster party culture and starts dividing them into subspecies. I have read this through three times and still don’t get it. That may be my fault or this may just be total bullshit.

"People don't hate hipsters, and hipsters don't hate themselves. What people hate so much is the faux-hipsters: they hate poseurs. And because it's such an irritating thing to be having to tell the real from the fake (exactly as in the matter of overpriced European handbags), the easiest way out is simply to deny any involvement in the whole business. That is why nobody, not even someone who fervently embraces hipster culture, wants to call himself a hipster."

On the universal love for Jay-Z and his history as an authentic brand.

"The rage and self-loathing associated with hipsters has become more annoying, more naive, and more artificial than hipsters could ever hope to be."

Post-crash style.

"I spoke to an economist friend about the city’s problems. 'We don’t make anything,' he said. 'We don’t produce anything. We're a service economy, and no one can afford the services.' What happens after that? I asked. 'Anarchy,' he said. 'Basically, Gaza. If only we had something to rail against except ourselves, as Arab peoples do. What a relief that must be!'"

Audio Visual Arts is a gallery in New York. Christian Joy, fashion designer for Yeah Yeah Yeahs and friend of my fashion-designer friend Leah, has a costume installation there. I hope to go there someday.

Just for reference.

This is fun to browse through. "From an initial gift of eight prints and one drawing, The Museum of Modern Art's collection has grown to include 150,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, architectural models and drawings, and design objects. MoMA also owns some 22,000 films, videos, and media works, as well as film stills, scripts, posters and historical documents. The Museum's Library contains 300,000 books, artist books, and periodicals, and the Museum Archives holds approximately 2,500 linear feet of historical documentation and a photographic archive of tens of thousands of photographs, including installation views of exhibitions and images of the Museum's building and grounds."

Cute and well-done.

What to do if you're robbed.

A few NYC friends are getting into this.

Another take on the "NYC" portion of the recent and much-maligned NYC taxi redesign. It is praised. The logo on its own is quite interesting, and the possibilities shown with it as a "vessel" are cool.

On the new NYC taxi logo: how it got to where it is and what some designers think. It could be worse, but it could be better.