Cushman Time Machine to Old New York

The Daily Mail this week posted a slideshow of color photos of lower Manhattan taken in the early 1940s by Charles Cushman. Cushman's camera was state of art for the time, and the result is a peculiar kind of anachronism: The images look much more recent than they are; what most obviously dates them are the abundance of hats, the abundance of boats in the river, and the abundance of wood (wooden baskets, wooden pushcarts with wooden wagon wheels). Those ephemeral artifacts measure time precisely. Rich material for archeology of the ordinary. (via Brain Pickings)

Teju Cole on the Insular City of the Manhattoes

"This strangest of islands, I thought, as I looked out to the sea, this island that turned in on itself, and from which water had been banished. The shore was a carapace, permeable only at certain selected points. Where in this riverine city could one fully sense a riverbank? Everything was built up, in concrete and stone, and the millions who lived on the tiny interior had a scant sense about what flowed around them. The water was a kind of embarrassing secret, the unloved daughter, neglected, while the parks were doted on, fussed over, overused. I stood on the promenade and looked out across the water into the unresponsive night. All was quiet and lights called from the Jersey Shore across. A pair of joggers sailed softly toward me, and past me. Along South End, facing the water, there were rows of townhouses, small shops, and a little, round gazebo choked with vines and bushes. Out, ahead of me, in the Hudson, there was just the faintest echo of the old whaling ships, the whales, and the generations of New Yorkers who had come here to the promenade to watch the wealth and sorrow flow into the city or simply to see the light play on the water. Each one of those past moments was present now as a trace."

—Open City