Sights and Sounds Are All Around

Approximately forty years ago, Seaside Heights, New Jersey had a boardwalk attraction called Cinema 180. Inside a movie theater-circus tent hybrid, paying customers stood and watched films of speeding cars, airborne planes zigzagging over the Grand Canyon, soaring hot air balloons, and other breathtaking adventures. The barker outside the place piqued people's interests with a lively come-on script that concluded with the punch line: "Sights and sounds are all around." And indeed they were...

I'm afraid it is...

I have always felt that seagulls have a good thing going for them.

More evidence of that...

It's called "thinking outside of the box." Take a cruise up Broadway on the HRYSLER.

See such sights as Broadway Joe's Pizza, established 1969; the former locations of legendary Manhattan College watering holes, the Pinewood and Terminal; Burger King, which originally was a White Tower, and the Marie Antoinette, a walk-up apartment building that was once home to bartender and neighborhood icon Timmy O'Connor.

"Now the children try to find it...and they can't believe their eyes...Yes, there used to be a nuclear reactor right here." 

Christmas 2017 seems like a long time ago. Yet, when Christmas 2018 arrives, it'll be like Christmas 2017 just happened...

Just a short year ago this age-old midget entrance to a Van Cortlandt Park baseball field endured. The portal was there forty years ago when my crouching friends and I regularly passed through it to "hit some out." 

But this portal proved to be mortal after all. And a venerable rite of passage is no more. 

If vans could talk...

I don't know what it is but there's something about subway track sparks...

Mike Quill was one of the founders of the Transport Workers Union of America (TWU). He was deemed a "Red" by some back in the day. Now he's got a corner all his own.

Whenever I see graffiti in places like this I think of Robert Shaw frying himself in The Taking of Pelham 123...a movie classic from the 1970s that holds up quite well in my opinion.

I went to high school in the East Bronx and remember some classmates arriving via the "Dyre Avenue" line, which always sounded dire to me.

Walking in a winter wonderland...

McMann and Tate ain't what they used to be...but then what is?

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)