New York City NYC - 5 Boroughs - Topical

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Manhattan Viewing South Across Bay to North Shore Staten Island

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World Trade Center Views - October 18, 2013

View - North to South

Click on Photos to get Bigger Image

View from Staten Island - Bayonne / Jersey City center left - Manhattan center top

http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3672&page=923



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St. Patrick’s Day Parade in NYC w/o Cardinal Dolan is like a real St. Patrick’s Day Parade w/o GOP Politics – Dolan a no show – TG ! - still in Rome with all the boys

Let's redo the soundbite on page three - I want to look and sound more Papal

Timmy Dolan is still in Rome celebrating the collateral damage of the Argentine Junta 1976-1983 - i.e. Pope Francis etc.

It was such a relief this year for the airwaves not to be filled with the usual Gay Hate fight of the Manhattan Ubers not allowing gay groups to march under open signs of association.

With Timmy Dolan waiting in the wings to be the second American Pope for the Ubers once Francis retires probably the day after Benedict dies etc. – Dolan was a No Show at this year's Mahattan Parade – Thank God! – for the peace and quiet and no political bullshit over the probably gay Saint Patrick of Ireland and his straight masked, "silk lace" parade in Manhattan.

Democratic front runner for mayor in this year’s upcoming election, openly Gay Speaker of the New York City Council Christine Quinn boycotted the Neo-con Catholic /GOP St. Patrick’s Day Parade yesterday in Manhattan.  She opted instead to parade in the Rockaways, Queens St. Pat’s Parade that does not discriminate based on sexual God given orientation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Quinn

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/quinn-dolan-big-irish-no-shows-st-paddy-parade-article-1.1289051

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911 - World Trade Center - Memories and Reflections

ghosts of 911 - reflections and memories of September 11, 2001

Reflections and memories of the events leading up to and following 911, by a resident of Staten Island working in mid-town Manhattan. Dealing with the immediate consequences of a city brought to a standstill by an act of war and living in and traveling through the war zone for months to come. This includes memories of the old World Trade Center before its destruction as well as points of views from different communities and their dealing with the tragedy.

There is also a tribute to Father Mychal Judge, Fire Department Chaplain, listed as casualty number one of a long list of victims on that day. There is hope in the building of a Peace Garden in Snug Harbor Gardens in Staten Island, which had the highest percentage of Fire Department deaths of any of the five boroughs of the City of New York
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There is a poem Opede rededicated to the spirit of rebuilding which the author originally wrote in 1978 and rededicated to the spirit of that building of a New World Trade Center out of the ashes of the old.

All in all, this is a series of short stories and reflections on various real people and unknown heroes of that infamous day in September 2001. I think your reading of this will help in the healing process and contribute to awareness of what some would label the beginnings of a New Global Culture. 


Available on Amazon Kindle:

Freedom to Worship - Mosque at WTC

There is a done deal on Park Place in Manhattan. It is a bunch of mid nineteenth century buildings without any grand architectural features to landmark what will eventually be torn down to make way for a multi-storied multi-use building and Islamic community center.

There is a hate element on the right fighting a “mosque” at the World Trade Center. It is not at the world trade center. It will be two blocks from the WTC and with no view of it – blocked by a taller building at 100 Church Street.

The thought occurred to me reading many pros and cons of this secular Islamic community center. One is that in most of Islam, secular is secular. Sacred in a western sense is a different perspective on the situation. The mosque or prayer on rugs in a skyscraper is hardly a cathedral type structure.

God is God. If God demands or needs worship, then a growing segment of the population from Islamic lands and Islamic cultures will be praising God within shouting distance of the old new World Trade Center.

Saint Peter’s is one half a block from the WTC. When this RC pagan style temple was built two centuries ago and approximately two blocks from New York City Hall, it must have been thought to have been an abomination to the English Protestant establishment.  But it got built none the less.  This is America.

America is about free movement and free thought. And freedom to worship.

All these arguments about and against a Mosque at the WTC is useless out of date dross in our modern secular society.

Cordoba House - NYC - Mosque - Columbia College

Recalling memory of perhaps forty years past, I have to say one of the best basic cookbooks of all times on basic American cooking is the Settlement Cook Book. It’s recipes are derived from a cultural secular phenomenon called Settlement Houses that existed in the heyday of mass immigration into American culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Reading the various things being put out there, I go back to the concept of Cordoba House as a community center. I am reminded of the settlement movement, a secular movement in the 19th century both in England and the United States.

Having done some research on Islam, the Mosque as the center of a community is more secular a building than the west would treat a church as sacred. A church might have a community center but rarely do you see children in churches doing homework or reading, memorizing the bible.

The Mosque as community center and as planned in Cordoba House sounds more like an old-fashioned settlement house where someone like Eleanor Roosevelt did her Christian charity and taught some classes to the poor in a secular settlement house in the slums of NYC.

As the name suggests, in the American model, a settlement house that taught English, civics, hygiene, cooking and provided a gymnasium in the midst of crowded tenements, it, as a community center was also like an assimilation center for immigrants to ease into the American culture.

Cordoba house, especially for a fundamentalist or a Sufi specialty branch of study is perhaps a settlement house of sorts. The difference is that Islam is the center of community, secular like, structure?

Settlement houses went out of existence with the social safety net of government established and expanded over the decades. I have often thought that as in the case of influx of Mexican immigrants, legal and illegal, that an old-fashioned concept of a settlement house teaching English and American customs might be an old idea that would ease some tensions between the existing culture and the influx of a foreign culture(s).

There is now some credible evidence surfacing that the Proposed so-called World Trade Center mosque, Cordoba House will sit on approximately forty percent of the original land that was under the original Columbia College Building, now Columbia University, when it started in colonial times on what is now the street called Park Place in downtown Manhattan.

Columbia College Building 1857

Cordoba House being proposed on this historic American spot is perhaps a good marriage of the old native culture blending into the new secular global cultural still forming.

Dear Christians, One and All, Rejoice

It is Spring. It is Easter. There is promise of rebirth and renewal in the air.

A story about St. Paul’s Chapel in downtown Manhattan caught my eye. They have resuscitated the organ at St Paul’s for this year’s Easter Service. If you are unfamiliar with Saint Paul’s, it is a small church, a chapel, and part of the Trinity Church at the foot of Wall Street some three or four blocks further south. Saint Paul’s is older than the present Trinity Church and older than the Revolution. Washington’s private pew box is enshrined within and surrounded by beautiful Georgian architecture.

Also, this stone façade building from the 1770s and its graveyard would look more comfortable in a rural English town. But here it is in the middle of the most valuable real estate in the world. Some of that valuable real estate and the precious lives of valuable people got destroyed on September 11, 2001 with the attack on the World Trade Center literally across the street.

By some miracle and or the grace of God, St. Paul’s was spared that horrific carnage and destruction.

Now that the World Trade Center is slowly rising from the ashes of that day, so too St. Paul's and it’s organ are making a comeback. The wounds of that day are slowly healing and life goes on.

Near Ground Zero, organ in historic chapel 'speaks' again

A man from the Bronx who assisted the New York Fire Department in the months after the attacks remembered a time when the chapel "closed its door to souls and opened it to bodies" and the organ fell silent under the clamor of refuge-seeking firemen, police officers and other workers. He said he was attending Friday morning's rehearsal to hear the organ played for the first time.

St. Paul’s multipurpose, multitasking function after the 911 attack harkens back to a time when a church building was the center of a community’s full life and functioned as hospital or refuge when times dictated these uses.

1. Dear Christians, one and all, rejoice,
With exultation springing,
And, with united heart and voice
And holy rapture singing,
Proclaim the wonders God hath done,
How His right arm the victory won;
Right dearly it hath cost Him.

4. But God beheld my wretched state
Before the world's foundation,
And, mindful of His mercies great,
He planned my soul's salvation.
A father's heart He turned to me,
Sought my redemption fervently:
He gave His dearest Treasure.

8. The Foe shall shed My precious blood,
Me of My life bereaving.
All this I suffer for thy good;
Be steadfast and believing.
Life shall from death the victory win,
My innocence shall bear thy sin;
So art thou blest forever.

M. Luther 1523, Lutheran Hymnal