Empire State

With the Empire State Building one of my favorites among New York's larger buildings, I've enjoyed working just around the corner from it for the last year. Everywhere one goes in this neighborhood one can find it peeking out from behind all of the other height-challenged structures. And if buildings are organic structures, anthropomorphized by so many authors (particularly in children's books), then the apartment towers and blocks of offices in this neighborhood must suffer an inferiority complex in the shadow of this tower of steel, glass, and stone. I always marvel at the irony of this confident - and yes, phallic - symbol for New York, since it was constructed at one of the lowest points in the history of this city and nation. It at least provided jobs for several thousand New Yorkers desperate for employment in the period before Roosevelt moved from Albany to Washington and launched the relief programs of the New Deal. (And like so many New York residents, I've never done the "tourist thing" and gone to the observation deck!)

The middle photo was taken as a sepia image, then photoshopped a bit as an experiment.