February 14th! What a great excuse to buy each other gifts and do something different!
As we can't fit anything else in our suitcases, it was best to get each other edible gifts...and I think we did well on the sugar front...cupcakes and popcorn for Sam, chocolates for Rosina!
We opened these at stupid a'clock as we had a all programs meeting (had to introduce ourselves to all the new students) at 9am...but then headed home, I had to send a package to Ella so I met Sam at home...arrived back to a dozen..
...chocolate strawberries! From Edible Arrangements!
We then caught up with some chores , as we'd chosen to take the day away from the studio and went for a nice long walk along the Hudson River...Spring is coming!
We had made reservations at our local Japanese restaurant (cheap but so tasty!) and headed there for our Valentines meal... the `Salmon Teriyaki was amazing!
Rosina had decided to book something that I had never done before (but she's done a lot!)...going up to the top of one of the iconic skyscrapers! So there are two choices The Rockefeller Centre or Empire State Building...from experience The Rock is way better and you get to appreciate the Empire state rather than being on it, or so Rosina said and yes indeed, as usual, she was right. The view was amazing.
First we had Ice cream watching the Ice skaters as our reservation wasn't until later...
Then, we headed up into the Rock! Iconic as a complex created in the thirties by Billionaire Rockefeller this 850ft tall building , helped create many jobs in the Great Depression and enabled a lot of workers to keep in work. Although numbers of fatalities from this enormous project (health and safety was pretty non-existant then!!) the celebrated picture in nearly every office of the men eating there lunch on the 69th floor beam is magnificent!!!
(There is however some skeptic about this photograph, read it at the end of this blog!)
Rosina has only been up these buildings in daylight, but nightime was just as amazing. The Lights of New York definitely do shine brightly! You can see major points of interest, 1World Trade Centre, Empire State, Chrysler, Central Park, Brooklyn Bridge, Time Warner building, 5th Ave, which stand out in the sea of lights! It was quite breezy on the 70th floor observation deck, but not too cold we got there about 30mins before the rain, so perfect timing!
Enjoy the view!
Scandal of the 'Lunch a-top of a Skyscraper' picture and other stomach churning photos!
These photos would seem almost suicidal, with a leg hanging off of the beam, it would be very easy to lose one’s balance. However, there are also some things that these photos reveal that are not so obvious in the most famous version. First, this is not a single beam, but rather a double-beam that would offer greater area to sit on and walk across. It also would mean that the men could more easily get up from a sitting position. The beam is very close to another beam and in the first photo, a wood plank can be seen as a means to walk off the beam.
However, a full uncropped version of the photograph provides even more evidence that things may not have been as dangerous as they at first seem. Here it has been colorized to make the evidence more obvious:
Clearly there are beams bellow these men and there are also planks of wood making a floor for the workers to stand on during construction. The beams appear to be sitting on top of the planks, perhaps set there before being used to construct the rest of the building. This would have been a fairly common practice of the time. However, the perspective of the photographer makes it difficult, if not impossible, to tell if the beams actually extend beyond where the men sit. Clearly the beams do come to an end. This is likely the exterior wall of the building.
This, however, is where the structure of the building comes into play. The top floors of the building have several roof levels, with only the center section of the building extending all the way to the highest point. These are known as “set backs” as shown in this image.
There is some confusion over how floors and levels are denoted on this kind of structure. If a setback is used as an observation deck then it may be refered to by the floor number that one would exit to go onto the deck, but the roofs of setbacks may also be refereed to by the floor that they are above. In the above diagram, the levels are noted by the floor level under them – the floor to which they are the roof.
There is also some conflict as to what exactly the “69th floor” means in the context of the construction of the building. However, based on the images and information about the photographs, it appears that the men were sitting on what would become the floor level of the 69th floor (as opposed to the ceiling level). This would put them one story above the 68th floor base level, which is only slightly above the 67th floor roof. It appears that the photographer was standing on a perch above the workers, thus putting him on the seventieth floor base level.
If this is the case, the men are not really in as dangerous a perch as it would seem, but are just a single story above a solid floor and more than ten feet from the edge of the building. Other photographs taken
around the same time appear to indicate that this is likely the case.
http://depletedcranium.com/were-steel-workers-really-this-reckless/
It's definitely not the first photographer who used perspective or shooting location to make a photo more dramatic....creating Arts!
