Crescent Street, Night

jeeff: 1st Jul 2005 - 18:09 GMT

what's the building at the end of the street?

scenes like this always remind me of akira, where the camera pans out across the neo-tokyo skyline rising up out of the old city.

Peter: 1st Jul 2005 - 18:43 GMT

thats the citicorp building out in queens. my guess is that this shot is facing due east...

www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com/bigmap/queens/lic/citibank

theres an interesting story on that building... its in a very remote, non-built-up area of queens... rumor has it that citibank got a tip that the MTA was gonna build a subway extension to long island city, and as such, they bought up alot of cheap land out there, figuring theyd build this huge operations/coroprate center there, then rake in the revenues when the train line went in and it became easily accessable to the city proper... not to mention worth a ton more.

well, in a folyl deserving of only a corporation like citibank, the subway plan got nixed... but after they had already started constructing the building.

ther it sits, with no other large buildings around it, and no really easy way to get to it. the area that citi thought would grow into a major outer-boro corporate area (thus letting them sell the land they speculated on for 100x as much) is worht not much more now than it was then.

haha!

jeeff: 1st Jul 2005 - 18:58 GMT

also, "don't block the box - fine + 2 points" would make a good t-shirt for frat boys.

BZZZP: 1st Jul 2005 - 19:38 GMT

it's facing south, actually, from a ways up in lic/astoria... those lights you see at the bottom are the queensboro plaza NW/7 platforms.

speaking of neo-tokyo/akira scenes, the poulaski bridge between queens and bklyn is excellent for these... absolutely astounding manhattan scraping the sky, with the right low cloud cover... i try to snap something every time i go over, but i usually go over ehrm, not sober, and late at night, so i have a lot of blurry pictures... also nice views from there facing what i think is NE... good elevation on desolate industry.

i have always wanted to get somee good images of the poulaski raised.. it's very surreal, this chunk of roadway sitting there almost veertical... strange mix of bird's eye and ground level angles... but have only been on the bridgee to see it happen once, and without my camera.

i always thought the citi building was just where it is in qns so that it could be -directly- across the river from its manhattan counterpart - you can sight it looking west on 53rd street from deep within manhattan. i have seen no planning documentation to corroborate this, it's just a relationship in the landscape i have always taken for granted.

kc: 2nd Jul 2005 - 12:23 GMT

yep, I'm confused about the train thing. I'd always heard that story as if it worked out--i.e., that you could get into a train at the basement of Citicorp in Manhattan and go one stop to the Queens version, so it was almost as if they were neighbors and the subway was the company's own private shuttle. But I guess it's the F/6? that are downstairs there...guess that doesn't work with the NW/7. Never thought it through. Ha.

BZZZP: 3rd Jul 2005 - 18:48 GMT

well, there IS the E/F down there, right under the qns citi building... (which is also under the 53rd st one) the NW/7 is actually a few blocks north, despite what it looks like in the pic.