Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!
Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves!
Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me!
— Walt Whitman, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
Many of these photos were taken from the Staten Island Ferry. The harbor is my favorite.
Dates taken were from around 2017 to the present.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
May 2023
photographs by Roger W. Smith
— posted by Roger W. Smith
April 27, 2023
‘Hunker Explores New York’s York’s Subway’ – NY Times 9-13-1914
‘Huneker Explores New York’s Subway’ – NY Times 9-13-1914
Posted here (see above):
“Huneker Nervously Explores New York’s Subway”
By James Huneker
The New York Times Magazine
September 13, 1914
James Huneker (1857-1921) was an literary, theater, and arts critic for the New York Sun.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
April 2023
L train, 11:35 a.m., April 18, 2023
Non-New Yorkers may think it is something that only people who have to take it endure … that it is unpleasant to take the subway.
Mostly I find it’s the opposite.
I thought about this while taking the L train from Brooklyn to Manhattan yesterday.
The subways are often not that crowded. I tend to be in a thoughtful mood (all of this is true of the buses, as well); enjoy the people, who by a large majority are polite and usually pleasing in appearance.
There are always a lot of young people, by which I mean mostly 20s and 30s. A large number of them are reading their cell phones or engaged in lively conversations. Some are reading books in which they usually seem engrossed.
I often catch up on the news on my phone or on Facebook posts.
And, sometimes I am lost in thought. The subway is peaceful enough to permit this.
I don’t have to worry going home if I have had a couple of beers, and I don’t have to deal with driving.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
April 19, 2023
I love the place, and I am not alone. It has been a refuge and a place for reading and learning since its founding over a hundred years ago.
Everyone is welcome.
The main library opened in 1911.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
March 2023
photographs by Roger W. Smith
I feel the ship’s motion under me, I feel the Atlantic breezes fanning me,
— Walt Whitman, “A Song of Joys”
I myself felt the delicious cool breezes blowing on me as I crossed and recrossed the harbor on the Staten Island Ferry last evening.
A great end to a splendid day.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
March 25, 2023
I thought of this post today when I met a homeless woman in a subway station.
It seemed applicable to NYC as one experiences it,
It’s on my rogersgleanings.com site:
“in minute particulars”
— Roger W. Smith
March 14, 2023
It was Sunday afternoon, March 5, and I was at my favorite pub, on Seventh Avenue, engrossed in a weighty book of literary criticism.
Time to leave, I thought. I called my wife and told her, I’m leaving the bar, but I don’t want to go home. I think I will go downtown and take the ferry.
Good idea, she said, My wife is an affirmative person.
I just made the 5 p.m. ferry to Staten Island, and took the ferry going back. I took the photos shown below.
It was a perfect sky on a late winter day.
— Roger W. Smith
Sea-cabbage; salt hay; sea-rushes; ooze–sea-ooze; gluten–sea-gluten; sea-scum; spawn; surf; beach; salt-perfume; mud; sound of walking barefoot ankle in the edge of the water by the sea. — Walt Whitman: Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, Volume IV: Notes, edited by Edward F. Grier (New York University Press 1984), pg. 1309
photographs of Midland Beach, Staten Island, by Roger W. Smith
— posted by Roger W. Smith
February 2023
Roger Smith's New York 