Bloggers Do Downtown

A hastily improvised blogger lunch at Chelsea's Elmo proved to be a lot of fun. Anything involving Bloody Marys can prove to be a lot of fun. Towards the end of the meal, I was making fun of somebody at another table wearing ginormous reflective aviator glasses. They seem to have replaced those amber-tinted Twilo glasses amongst the still-high-but-at-brunch-anyway disco crowd. Vasco dug into his pocket and pulled out a pair. "Oh, you mean these, Joe?" How embarrassing. (For me, not Vasco.) As penance, I posed.

After brunch, the seven of us embarked on a long walk down through Chelsea, the West Village and Soho, ultimately ending up downtown near City Hall.
Below:Manhattan Municpal Building, one of the largest government buildings in the world.
Below: The New York County Supreme Court.
Below: Front of Manhattan Municipal Building.
Below: Down on Spring Street, we ran into a group of cooks waiting for the dinner rush.

We stopped for pints at the almost 200-year old Ear Inn, which some consider to be the oldest bar in Manhattan, where Eddie took this picture, oddly raising the ire of the bartender. The poster is a call for volunteers for World War I. I'm intrigued by the line that notes that German marks are trading 40-1 on the dollar, and "YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS!", presumably a reference to cheap German whores. Not that there's anything wrong with that!

I had to get a shot of this mammoth apartment building going up next to the classic 79-story Woolworth Building. (Actually the Woolworth only has 60 floors, but the height of the floors gives the building a modern equivalency of 79.) I can't tell if I hate it yet, but this new building was designed by Costas Kondylis, the same guy that built the most atrocious skyscraper in North America, Trump World Tower, so I don't have a lot of hope.