Pearl & Lodge

Nice floral detail on the corner of North Pearl and Lodge Streets.

Bull's Eye Grating

An interesting target-like grate on some sort of small drain in Academy Park.

Ivy

A bed of ivy in the Empire State Plaza's Vietnam Memorial courtyard.

All Gone

Not long after I started this blog, I wrote about a tiny, forlorn house on Madison Avenue. One of the oldest on the block, the little house had suffered from extreme neglect in recent years.

Sadly, this building could not be saved. Slowly, over the course of this spring and summer, the current owner demolished the building by hand. It came down beam by beam and brick by brick. Until there was nothing left.

The beams in the photo above are new. I don't know what the owner's plans are, but it's clear he is building something there.

See my original post about 402 Madison Avenue.

The Square Pie

My partner is Brooklyn-born and raised and he knows good pizza. He's also very critical of most of the pizza available here. I'm a self-taught cook and learned to make pretty good pizza from scratch about fifteen years ago.

I've never actually been to L& V Pizza in Brooklyn (yet), but I've heard a lot about it. So, I decided I'd recreate one of their square pies...without a recipe. I figured he'd like that.

The result is pictured above. Sometimes, I impress myself. As good as it looked in the pan and on the plate, it tasted even better.

After dinner, my partner was busy texting photos of it to friends back in Brooklyn and posting pictures on Facebook. Which apparently resulted in people licking their phones and drooling on their keyboards

(I'm not a serious food photographer by any means. That's not counting the occasional cell phone pictures taken for Facebook. I'm usually too hungry to bother arranging the food just so for a nice picture.)

Skating Lounge Sign

Stairs descending from the Empire State Plaza's main platform to the old Skating Lounge. The red sign strikes me as a tad ironic since the ice rink has been closed for several seasons already and, with all the usual budget issues, it probably won't open this year, either.

The Steps At St. Mary's

A flight of enclosed steps along the side of Saint Mary's Church overlooking Chapel Street.