Today’s word of the day is concision.

Used in a sentence…

Last week I spent some time in NYC, almost all of it on the West side, upper, middle and lower.  As usual, I took the subway, and along the way I noted two ends of the lifecycle of transportation: the birth of a new station on the 7 line, and the rebirth as a park of a section of an old elevated freight line.

The 7 line extension

The 7 train connects Times Square and Flushing via 42nd street, Grand Central Station, Queensboro Plaza, Jackson Heights, and Shea Stadium, to name just a few of the stations and neighborhoods.  But anybody who’s ever had the misfortune to attend a convention at the Javits Center can tell you where the 7 does not go.  But this will change.  Sometime in the next ten years or so, the 7 train will have a new Western terminus at 34th street and 11th avenue.  You can see a bit of the area in question here, via google maps:

What’s even more interesting to me are two additional factoids about the 7 extension, gleaned from the estimable Transitblogger and the ever-turgid wikipedia.

• It *might* eventually get extended to 23rd street and 11th avenue, further revitalizing Chelsea.  More on Chelsea in a bit.
• A planned station at 41st street and 10th avenue (”Hell’s Kitchen”) has been canceled or postponed.  I for one would be totally excited to have a station called “Hell’s Kitchen” but it appears that the plan would label it “10th Avenue.”

The high line

Way out at the other end of the transit lifecycle is the High Line, a new park created from the skeleton of a long-abandoned 1930’s elevated freight rail line near 10th avenue.  The first section of the High Line, which opened on June 9, runs from Gansevoort street in the appetizingly-named meatpacking district up to 20th street.  Eventually the park will run all the way to 30th street, then West around the rail yards, ending up pretty close to the Javtis Center and the new 7 line terminus.  You can see the tracks more clearly in Google’s map view, and the satellite view doesn’t yet show the High Line’s current state.

I’m very much in favor of walkable urban space, urban green space and imaginative recycling or urban relics, but I found the High Line a little unfinished.  Actually, it is unfinished, not just because not all the old track has been opened as a park, but also because as a park, it has yet to grow and develop.  The plantings are young, the wooden parts have yet to weather, and yes, the taggers haven’t made their mark yet.

The High Line has some great beats making imaginative use of the materials at hand, such as the chaise lounges on wheels set into the old tracks and a sunken ampetheater that ends in glass windows looking up 10th avenue.  It also passes under or through some buildings along the way, notably the Standard Hotel, which straddles it between Little West 12th and 13th streets.  The vistas are impresive and there’s a good amount of green for the space available, which is maybe 20 feet wide in most parts.  There’s an elevator at 16th street (also the location of the only restrooms), so the line is pretty acessible.

What’s missing for me - and I hope this is just temporary - is shelter.  None of the plants are tall enough for shade yet, and there seems hardly anything to break the wind that comes off the river and down the avenues.  I wonder what the park will be like in the winer.  But these are small nits, and I’m very happy to see such an interesting new space come up.  And of course, some of the gritty side is still visible from the line, if not at yet on it.

The problem with a lot of good design is that it’s a pain to clean it.  Great design includes forethought on the cleaning department, if you ask me.  So every few months, I find that despite my best borderline OCD hand washing, my Apple wireless keyboard needs a cleaning.  After some research, I figured out that the best and possibly only way to do this is to snap off all the keys and wash them in a bowl of warm soapy water, carefully dry them, and then put them all back, one hopes each one in the right place.

It wasn’t the original source of the method, but here’s a link to a pretty exhaustive and visual rundown on cleaning your Apple keyboard.  This model is no longer made, but I’m sure there are plenty out there.  I cannot overstate the importance of having a photo or diagram of the arrangement of keys before  you start the process. You can use the before/after shot above in a pinch.  Since they letters on the keys are oblique (not italic, mind you), once they’re off, there’s some confusion between the L and the 7, and the I and the /, among others.  Beware and stay clean.

Dad wanted a phone “with a camera and internet and keys that aren’t too small to see”, so for Fathers’ Day I picked one up, a 3G flip phone from a major manufacturer with T-Mobile’s mobile web thing.  What dad wanted most was to be able to check his stuff on eBay.  So I set out to configure the phone for maximum mobile eBay usage by the on-the-go 70-year-old.

I thought I knew a thing or two about the interwebs, but in an effort to make things easy, T-Mobile has wrapped the web in a very confusing little phone package.  For starters, there’s no button or menu item for “surf the web” or even “mobile internet” - you have to know that the operative term is “T-Zones” which I always thought was the oily bit on your nose and forehead.  How is anybody supposed to figure that out?  Plus, when configuring “shortcuts” which are accessible with one click, you can’t add a URL or even a link to these “T-Zones”

Since “typing” on a phone with T9 “predictive” text entry is a chore for the most skilled and a terrible challenge for the newbie oldster, I figured the least I could do would be to set up Dad’s phone with eBay as a bookmark and enter his username and password for him.  After some poking around, I found that eBay has a special T-Mobile mobile portal, tmo.ebay.com, pre-configured in the phone.  I added it to the homepage bookmarks and thought I was pretty cool.

Then I clicked the “sign in” button and got a weird error.  The phone can’t display that page, it claimed.  Checked everything, tried again.  Same.  Rebooted, moved to a different location, same.  I even tried the same operation on my own T-Mobile phone. Fail. What good is special t-mobile eBay if you can’t log in?  Well, I suppose it could be good for one’s paypal balance.  Then, on a total lark, I tried the regular mobile eBay URL, m.ebay.com, and what do you know, everything worked fine.  let’s compare the two pages:

vs.

I can’t really be bothered to view the source, but it’s pretty clear that the T-Mobile version adds the “t-zones home” link and somehow subtracts the actual “sign in” functionality.  (Both seem to work fine on a full-blown PC browser) Rather a poor deal, if you ask me.  Now that I finally have the phone logged into eBay, it’s looking pretty good.  It remembers the login, and defaults to a nice compact “my eBay” view showing items you’re selling, buying, watching, etc.

The final step that almost defeated me was adding this non-standard eBay page to the phone’s little web homepage link list.  I was instructed to “enter a URL, such as msn.com” but apparently “ebay.com” or “m.ebay.com” didn’t count, so I ended up tortuously entering the “http://” in T9, and when I finally did, the page showed up in the menu under the full URL, not just “eBay”

So where does this all leave us?  Well, I’m pretty sure Dad will be able to check the status of his bids and sales on the go, but between the T9 text entry and the imperfect experience of the mobile versions of most websites, I doubt he’ll be doing much more.  Perhaps he’ll list this phone on eBay by next Fathers’ day.

The Flatiron Building is an iconic landmark in New York City.  When I chanced to walk by this week, I saw many people taking pictures of the building, some tourists snapping themselves next to it, some more serious looking photographers looking for a new angle on the building.

I called up Stieglitz’s classic 1903 image of the building and tried to find the vantage point from which he took it, probably somewhere in Madison Square Park.  I thought I could find the great Y-shaped tree and work from there.  The difference in camera equipment would make it impossible to really get the “same” shot even if I could find the tree, but I looked around.

How much does a tree grow in 100 years?  None of the living trees looked right, but of course they had leaves which made things tough.  There was a huge section of a dead tree still standing for some reason, and I decided that it was Stieglitz’s tree, preserved as a landmark of some sort, so I took this admittedly poor approximation.

Not exactly a unique contribution to the canon.  And I still put the tree too far toward the center.  You can compare Stieglitz’s image with mine and with a 1904 Flatiron Building picture by Edward Steichen in this bit from Slate magazine.