One of my favorite buildings in Morningside Heights is the Britannia at 527 West 110th Street.

The building, built in 1909, is divided into two wings and features two rows of fantastic gargoyles below the second floor balconies:

What makes this building particularly great is how low the gargoyles are to the ground. At only ten feet up or so, a passerby can actually appreciate their design (as opposed to those stationed tens or hundreds of feet up that seem to have been put in place only for the birds).

The gargoyles were said to be “symbolic of some form of the homely art of housekeeping,” according to a recent NY Times Streetscapes article, but nothing more is known to elaborate on this. First off is a man writing in a ledger, a very shifty look on his face:

Next is a man carrying a platter with a roast chicken:

Next is a man eating from a bowl:

Finally, there’s the cook, stirring a pot and taking a taste:

So money, ingredients, preparation, and consumption? The building features other interesting design elements as well…

[Read more →]

Tags:   apartment building · blogsherpa · gargoyles · history · Morningside Heights · upper west side · west 110th street1 Comment

Spend enough time in any part of the city and you’ll start noticing the resident stray cats foraging when no one is around. We’re getting ready to shoot in a park on the East Side, and every day, I’ve noticed these two guys running around. They’ve been very shy but seem hungry.

During prep and wrap days, the film production provides coffee and donuts in the morning for the rigging crew, and I always try to leave out a cup of cream. These cats have been loving it, though they’re still very wary of me. I had to stand way, way back to get this picture of one of the cats cautiously stalking the cups of cream. It looks like he thinks the cream is going to run away!

It’s funny, I’m really not a cat person (1. Don’t like the attitude, 2. VERY allergic)…but I hate to see them running around homeless. A few years ago, I was working on a job at a soccer field in a particularly bad neighborhood when I started hearing meowing. Underneath a dumpster, I found the cutest little kitten crying mournfully. I got him some milk and a can of cat food every day during the week-long shoot.

When it was getting time to leave, I decided that I had to do something about him. I called around the office, and someone graciously agreed to take him in. Now the goal was to get him in the car. I’m allergic, and I also have a paranoid fear of getting rabies or some other weird disease from stray animals. So I got a pair of ultra-thick electrician’s gloves and began luring him out. 

It took FOREVER, but I finally managed to grab him and plop him in the car, then started back on the 30 minute drive to the office. Of course, as soon as we started driving, the kitten became very scared and started climbing all over me. By the midway point, the cat was literally standing on my head as I drove 75 down the interstate. I suppose it was worth the scalp lacerations though… 

-SCOUT

PS - I give NO permission to disgrace these cats by adding LOLCATS crap to them!

Tags:   new york · stray cats7 Comments

Hidden on the second floor of this building adjacent to the JMZ elevated train line in South Williamsburg is Frenchie’s Gym, a slice of authentic old school Brooklyn culture that has somehow managed to avoid the gentrification wrecking ball rapidly swinging toward it.

Blink and you’ll miss it. From the ground level, the only evidence of a gym is this red awning over a wooden door. No neon signs with enormous fist icons, eXtreme in-your-face fonts, or toned girls with clipboards trying to sucker you into trading your soul for a duffel bag.

But to those that look closely, the door alone should give an early indication that Frenchie’s has infinitely more character than any modern gym you’ll find anywhere in New York City. Old polished wood, worn with age, surrounds chicken-wire glass. The type of door they don’t make anymore. The type of door no one would ever put on a modern gym.

This is the kind of door that reminds me of a Raymond Chandler novel - private dick Philip Marlowe standing in front of it, hand on the knob, sucking on a cigarette and debating whether or not the low pay he’s getting for the case is worth the risk of going upstairs to question a suspect who looks like the guy on the glass.

Of course, Marlowe would go up, and I had to too.

[Read more →]

Tags:   blogsherpa · Brooklyn · frenchie's gym · gym · new york city · old school · old school brooklyn · South Williamsburg · Williamsburg6 Comments

Yesterday, we shot overnight in a somewhat sketchy section of Brooklyn. Today, I was in charge of wrapping out the location - basically, babysitting while the electrics and grips gather their equipment from the previous night. It was raining, so I spent a lot of the day parked in my car.

At around 8 AM, this Hassidic Jewish guy showed up on the sidewalk and started smoking and pacing in circles while talking to himself. He’d light a cigarette, pace and mumble, put out the cigarette, then light another and pace and mumble some more. Over and over and over. 8 AM became 9 AM, 9 AM became 10 AM…I dozed off at one point and woke up 15 minutes later, and he was still there.

Then, at around 10:30, he comes over to my car and starts staring at me through the windshield with a weird, crazy look in his eyes. He looks like he wants to tell me something, and I lean forward to hear him.

Then, he takes his cigarette and puts it out on the hood of my car.

It was one of those surreal things you don’t expect to ever have to deal with in life: someone just put a cigarette out on the hood of my car. Should I be…annoyed? Angry? Ambivalent? Do I need to get out and confront him or something? I mean, it’s a rental…

Meanwhile, the guy continues to stare at me as he approaches my partially-opened window. He taps on the glass and says loudly “SORRY ABOUT THAT” with a sarcastic shrug. He went back and started smoking and pacing again.

He did not put out any more cigarettes on my car, and disappeared around 12.

Tags: 5 Comments

Great Mercedes I saw parked on Church St south of Canal - anyone know anything about its make?

Also, modern cars should still have dual enormous horns visibly attached to the outside.

-SCOUT

Tags: 4 Comments

I love seeing these signs gracing lamp poles in the North Williamsburg area because, to my understanding, they were put up long before the area went through its current day gentrification.  Sort of like if you put in shopping district signs, maybe a shopping district will follow?

But North Williamsburg is not the only neighborhood with a shopping area. South Williamsburg apparently does too, as evidenced by this (way better) sign I noticed for the first time today at Broadway and Havemeyer:

And in fact, if you go east to Hooper St and Broadway, you’ll find that the “Broadway West” neighborhood has a shopping district too, and frankly, the best sign around (even though mentally, I think of it as being East Williamsburg).

The latter two neighborhoods have a little ways to go before they reach the success of North Williamsburg, but the way things are going, it’ll happen in my lifetime. I hope these signs stick around.

-SCOUT

Tags: 1 Comment

I was talking with the owner of a building the other day about getting shooting access. As it turns out, his main business is in greeting cards. I never knew it, but apparently, this is the award a group like Hallmark wants to win for designing a perfect greeting card - the Louie Award.

I love that it’s in the category of “Creatively Finished - $2.50 and Below.” According to the Greeting Card Association’s website, the Card of the Year Awards in 2008 went to American Greetings of Cleveland, OH for Get Well/Feel Better (Above $3.00 price break) and Great Arrow Graphics of Buffalo, NY for Valentine’s Day ($3.00 & Below price break). Nice. The awards are named after German lithographer Louis Prang, who is credited with introducing color lithography to the U.S. card industry in 1861 and is considered the “Father of the American Christmas Card.”

-SCOUT

Tags:   Greeting card award · you never knewNo Comments.