Thirty Minutes in New York City

If you're very lucky, when you're walking near Saint Patrick's Cathedral you'll run into Lionel Shell, or someone very like him, visiting from England, and not afraid to wear color in a city that idolizes black.  (Check out the two tone blue boots!)  Lionel said he has hats in every color, AND matching glasses as well.  Lionel is a percussionist with The Cool Jazz Trio, but also models for the somewhat inappropriately named Ugly Models agency. For Lionel's page click here and scroll down (you'll find him there in white glasses), then have fun jumping around to see the other so-called ugly models.  This photo doesn't nearly do him justice, but it wouldn't have done to impose too much on his free time.  Don't write us to ask if Lionel is single.  He was accompanied by his equally marvelous but camera-shy wife.

Yes, folks, that's the Michael Kors flagship store on Fifth Avenue, part of Rockefeller Center, in the background.  If you drew a straight line from Kors to the mail box and then proceeded an additional twenty feet in a straight line, you'd run into Saks Fifth Avenue.  Who says New Yorkers lack a sense of humor?  And yes, it's a functional mail box.

Not ten minutes away, on Park Avenue, was this:

In a no standing zone, where the limousines of Very Important Persons must circle the block, sometimes keeping Very Important Persons waiting, was this amazing contraption. What the heck is it doing here?

Film crews are notoriously tight-lipped, but someone who worked in the building said he'd heard it was for a television commercial.  So you can see who the Truly Important Persons are in this city.

And if the man on the motorcycle had turned to face the IF camera, this is what he would have seen on the Park Avenue median.

Periodically, well known sculptors have outdoor exhibitions of their large scale works over a several block swath of Park Avenue.  This is one of several pieces by sculptor-of-a-certain-age Alice Aycock now on display.  The series is humorously entitled Park Avenue Paper Chase.  Pictured here (and actually made of aluminum) is Hoop-La.  Oh, and behind that, for architecture buffs, is Lever House, the second international style building to go up in New York, designed by the renowned architectural firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and  built in 1952.

All of this in less than an hour, and less than six blocks, on a marvelous spring-like day improbably tucked between two spates of freezing cold.