Corlears Hook

Let's say you found yourself unexpectedly in 19th century New York with an urge to steal cargo off a freighter, consort with a prostitute, get yourself stabbed, or some combination of these three. Your best bet is to make your way down to a projection of land in the southeast quadrant of the Lower East Side known as Corlears Hook.

Originally a marshland used by Lenape Indians to beach their canoes, Corlears Hook was transformed into a farm by the Van Corlaer family after the Dutch took charge of the island. The name was later anglicized to Corlears. ("Hoek" is Dutch for "point" or "corner.") The area was strategically suitable for a harbor so cargo docks eventually glutted the shoreline. By the 1800s the area had deteriorated into a slum of bars, brothels, and tenements. The streetwalkers who worked the red light district of "The Hook" eventually came to be known as "hookers." By the end of the century gangs of hoodlums like The Short Tail Gang and Monk Eastman's boys ran rampant, terrorizing the harbor's shipyard docks.

Anyone familiar with New York knows nothing stays the same for long. The 20th century brought about idealists intent on cleaning up the shoreline. In the 1930s Robert Moses built an esplanade along the river, replacing the docks and providing some greenery to the overwhelmingly brown tenements. A decade later an amphitheater was constructed as a venue for Shakespeare and Greek classics to be performed. The last of the tenements had vanished by the 1950s to be replaced by the monstrous East River housing project.

I headed down on a mild Saturday afternoon seeking river pirates and prostitutes. Instead I found several dogwalkers, girls on roller skates, joggers, a professorial father playing with his kids, and a softball game in progress.


The entrance to Corlears Hook Park. A pedestrian walkway over the FDR Drive leads to the East River Park.




The amphitheater built by Robert Moses in 1941.




The amphitheater had badly fallen into disrepair by the '70s, but was rebuilt by the city in 2001.


Seal sculpture art by G. Augustine Lynas.




The Williamsburg Bridge, which opened in 1903.


The iconic Domino Sugar factory is visible beneath the bridge.






If you've read Caleb Carr's The Alienist (or even if you haven't) this is the anchoring tower of the Williamsburg Bridge on which our heroes discover the first murder victim which kicks off the entire investigation.


Another view of the anchoring tower. As you can see, police are still on the scene, which indicates the killer has struck once again after all these years.

Museum of the Moving Image

The Museum of the Moving Image can be found on an unassuming street in Astoria, Queens, hedged in by the tremendous Kaufman Astoria Studios complex. According to its website, the museum's mission is to advance the "public understanding and appreciation of the art, history, technique, and technology of film, television, and digital media." I stopped by on a rainy Friday afternoon to have my understanding of these things advanced.

The two current exhibits that grabbed my attention the firmest were Surviving Life: Collages by Jan Svankmajer and Jim Henson's Fantastic World. Svankmajer is a surrealist Czech puppeteer who blends the grotesque and the innocent into indescribable stop-motion films like Alice and Faust. Jim Henson, as we all know, was a Muppet.


This giant slab of building houses the Museum of the Moving Image.




A scene from Day the Earth Stood Still?


Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not watching.

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The following are scenes from the joyfully demented mind of Jan Svankmajer...

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And now on to Hollywood...


Standard issue movie makeup.




From The Elephant Man.




"Na-Nu Na-Nu."


Rather convincing scale model of a theater.


As a kid you are told not to waste your time and money on foolish things like arcade games. As an adult you pay admission to visit them in museums.


The motherlode of Star Wars action figures.


My kingdom for a Hogan's Heroes lunchbox.


Film-related sheet music.


King Goshposh and Feathersto​ne from the Jim Henson exhibit, taken before I realized photographs were not permitted in the Muppet gallery. Unless you visit the museum yourself this is all you'll get.


An early Chaplin film viewed through a handcranked Mutoscope. You can't see it very well, but Chaplin is about to brain a mustachioed villain with a wooden mallet. Ha ha.


A Mutoscope of Melies' A Trip to the Moon, featuring the famous scene where the creampie moon gets a rocket lodged in its eye.


A Victorian-era zoetrope, an early device for producing the illusion of motion.




This Regan MacNeil mechanical puppet from The Exorcist is responsible for the revolving head effect.


Miniature of the Tyrell Skyscraper from Blade Runner.


An RCA television from 1939. World War II put a temporary halt on the development of television broadcasting, which didn't get kicking again until after the war ended.


A Sony Trinitron television with built-in Betamax video recorder from 1975.

The Quester Submarine

Amid the broken pilings of Coney Island Creek rests a strange sight—the partially-submerged wreck of a submarine, its corroded conning tower visible above the water's surface like a relic from a Jules Verne novel. Called the Quester I, this derelict craft was built in the late sixties by a local shipyard worker named Jerry Bianco. Its purpose was to salvage the remains of an Italian luxury liner, the Andrea Doria, that sunk off the coast of Nantucket in 1956 after colliding with a smaller passenger liner. Rumors of untold valuables aboard quickly circulated but the location of the wreck made conditions especially hazardous for divers.

And that's where Bianco comes in. He built the 45-foot craft from salvaged metal and coated it with yellow chromium which happened to be the cheapest paint available, thus unintentionally referencing a certain Beatles song.

The Quester was launched in 1970 using a crane, but problems with ballast caused the sub to tip sideways and become lodged in the mud. For years Bianco tried to convince locals to chip in enough money to have the submarine raised, but ultimately he was forced to abandon the project. The submarine was left with its hull jutting out of the creek as a unique local landmark, one which fishermen have been known to use on occasion as a pier.



Incidentally, the vault of the Andrea Doria was opened on live television in 1984. Among its contents was found an assortment of traveler's checks and bank notes, but nary a sign of treasure.

Flushing Meadows

Flushing Meadows has come along way since referred to by F Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby as a "valley of ashes." It hosted two world's fairs, first in 1939 and again in 1964, and was home to the first United Nations until the iconic headquarters was completed on the edge of Manhattan. Today the area is a sprawling park, containing the Queens Museum of Art, the New York Hall of Science, the Queens Zoo, Botanical Garden, and several stadiums, as well as several artifacts from its heyday.


The New York Hall of Science.


Mercury-Atlas and Gemini-Titan rockets.


Arthur Ashe Stadium and Forms in Transit sculpture.


The Great Hall, built for the 1964 World's Fair.


Geodesic domed aviary.


Free Form sculpture.


The Unisphere, centerpiece of the 1964 World's Fair.


The New York State Pavilion and observatory towers.


The derelict pavilion is used as storage space by the adjacent Queens Theater in the Park.


The Unisphere symbolizes "Man's Achievements on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe."




Panorama of the City of New York at the Queens Museum of Art.


Brooklyn.


The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.


Manhattan.


Poster art depicting the Trylon and Perisphere, the central symbols from the 1939 World's Fair.




A relic from the 1939 World's Fair.


Scale model of the 1964 World's Fair.