Tag: chelsea NYC

metal pipes of manhattan

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W 23rd Pipe 032925 sm

I can’t go to a new city and not record some of the hydrants and other metal pipes sticking out of the ground, can I. I have sketched a New York hydrant before (on a well-below-freezing day) but there is quite a diverse selection. However I am at the stage now where I see a movie or TV show set in ‘New York’ and I see the hydrants and I just know it’s filmed in like Cleveland or Toronto, because the hydrants are all wrong. I don’t care that much, but it’s like when an American Hallmark movie is set in Scotland and everyone has a fake Irish accent. Anyway, here are some of the ones I drew in New York. I liked the pipe above spouting out of the ground like a metal worm down on 23rd. The New Yorkers like to put stickers on their hydrants and pipes, it makes them look a bit more personalized, like your water bottle. The hydrant below was also on 23rd, sketched on a Chelsea morning. Nice to see the hearts around it, scrawled into the concrete. I saw that yellow ‘SK’ sticker on a lot of pipes around Chelsea.

Hydrant 23rd St NYC

This one covered in stickers and rust was on 6th Avenue, one of those hydrants you see with the two little poles next to it like bouncers, protecting it from errant cars banging into it. “Geddouddahere!” There was a pizza place near here where we ordered a massive New York pizza on our first night and ate it in the room, bloody delicious. New Yorkers know how to do pizza. Sorry Chicago those big deep dish pies were a bit much for me, tasty though they were.

Hydrant 6th Ave NYC 032625 sm Hydrant W 28th St NYC sm

This one above was on West 28th, sketched as I was walking out toward the High Line one afternoon. I like exploring the city, seeing what I come across along the way. This hydrant had those bouncers as well, but it also had a little metal X on its head that reminded me of a hot cross bun. Now the thing below, on the corner of 23rd and 7th, I drew on the way back, it’s obviously not a hydrant but is some sort of telecommunications post. I saw some others dotted around. Do they still work? Probably, but I just liked the look of them so I had to sketch one. “We are the Future” says the graffiti”. There’s that SK sticker again. It was busy here at this intersection, a lot of interesting characters about, I could have sat and people sketched for ages, but hydrant sketching is easier, and hydrants don’t complain if you get the size of their nose wrong. I didn’t see anyone famous, but I never do. My family did spot Michael Emerson – Ben out of Lost – on this very street while I was still sketching Brooklyn Bridge, out walking his dog with his distinctive little glasses on (on him, not on the dog). As big Lost fans this was a big deal. But that is just New York for you, and to paraphrase another former New York resident, not seeing famous people is what happens when you are busy sketching fire hydrants.
NYC 23rd & 7th 032825 sm

Way Up Above New York City

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My dream as a sketcher is always to go high above a city and sketch everything below – not too high above, I still want to see things. (Click on the sketches and you will see it all in bigger detail). New York City is easily the most exciting place for this. Our hotel was located on 6th and 28th in Chelsea, in sight of the One World Trade Center, the Chrysler, and the Empire State Building which loomed outside our bedroom window. It was too big to include in the view above but would be just to the left of that view. The above panorama was drawn while sitting on my bed. The light and colour of this view changed enormously throughout the day, and I did this in a couple of sittings, about a couple of hours total at most, but I drew much of it in the late afternoon/early evening while the sky was all purples, pinks and blues. Below, cars moving slowly in lines, the famous yellow cabs weaving in and out, and people the size of ants, all looking for the jam. What excited me most is not all the windows or the depth or the movement, or the feeling that I am in the Spider-Man video game, but the water-towers.

The distinctive New York water-towers really are everywhere you look., especially in the view above which was drawn from the roof of our hotel, just a few floors above our room, about 30 stories or more above the street. I was looking south towards the One World Trade Center on the left, and across Chelsea on the right. I was a little overwhelmed by how many water-towers there were, and on another day I might look at the pictures I took and draw a big detailed one, all coloured in. On this day I stood up on the roof of the hotel, which was open to the elements with just an elbow-high glass fence keeping me safe. It was thankfully not too windy. It was late afternoon/early evening, the sky was an interesting collage of shades, and the tall towers in the distance were just blue-grey silhouettes. I drew fast (this took less than an hour and a half) but could not quite finish it, and left a gap which I never had time to fill, and felt that my mind’s eye would fill in the gaps. My eyesight is not that great anyway, and while I sketched one of my lenses actually fell out of my glasses, thankfully falling on my side of the barrier and not hundreds of feet to the sidewalk of 28th Street. I popped it back in. There were taller buildings to my right, and my eyesight was not so bad that I could miss the sight that greeted me there, a man at the window completely, well, ‘stark bollock naked’ as we say and possibly oblivious to the fact anyone could see him at all. I tried not to stare, and thankfully he was not very long. By the window I mean. I think I understand that song about being ‘caught between the moon and New York City’ differently now. I kept drawing (not that obviously) until I could draw no more, and we went for dinner. I was so glad to have the opportunity though to draw New York from above, which is always a dream, and to stay in a hotel where I have the time to actually do it and not feel rushed to leave, even though I still drew faster than usual. New York, all those movies, all those photos, all those paintings and songs and stories, all that culture that has played with our imagination, all right there below me. I want to draw more of it!

new york evening, chelsea mornings

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Madison Sq Park view NYC

New York is not my favourite city. My favourite city is London, but New York is a very close second. Sometimes when London isn’t listening I tell New York that it’s my favourite, but when London walks back into the room I grin suspiciously and go on about how the Underground is better than the Subway and curving streets are so much nicer than straight ones, but it’s hard for a proper city person like me to hide it, New York is just great. It literally does feel like you’ve stepped onto all those TV shows, those movies, those great records, and certainly all those Spider-Man video games I like so much. It’s an urban sketchers paradise. Arriving by train through New Jersey I was filled with excitement at a glimpse of the skyscrapers. There seem to be more of them than last time; my most recent visit was in early 2016, which in historical terms was a long long time ago now, a special birthday trip with two of my oldest friends. Obama was still president. Leicester were going for the league, with Spurs and Arsenal chasing. My visit before that was in late 2008, with my wife and baby son,  just before Obama won his first election, just before Lewis Hamilton won his first championship, and Spurs had just recently won the league cup, which would surely be the first of many trophies to come. And my visit before that was in another age still, at the end of 2002, the middle of the first George W. Bush term, still in the recent post-9/11 world, my first trip to New York, a city I’d wanted to visit my whole life. It was exactly as I imagined and it remains so, but my gaps between visits keep getting inexplicably longer. We got to our hotel on the corner of 6th and 28th, in the Chelsea neighbourhood, staying on the 28th floor with an incredible view down towards the World Trade Center, looking up at the Empire State Building and over to the Chrysler. Not gonna lie, that view was pretty world-beating. I could not wait to get back down to ground level though, and explore the streets, so I went for a walk towards Madison Square Park. The traffic, the people, the sounds and the smells, I love being back in an urban environment. The Flatiron Building was all covered over, but I sat in the park with a milkshake and sketched up towards Midtown, as that Empire State dominated proceedings. I walked about the neighbourhoods a bit before heading back up to the hotel, where we got a massive proper New York pizza and watched The Avengers. 

Superior Flowers 6th Ave 032625 sm

I have a lot of New York sketches and will try to present them thematically or geographically, but for this post here are some sketches from the area of our hotel. There were lots of florists everywhere, this may well be called the Florist District. It isn’t though. I looked up the Manhattan neighborhoods on Wikipedia, and while this is very much within Chelsea, it was historically called the Tenderloin, the area between 5th and 7th, 24th and 42nd. I don’t know if people still call it that. There were a lot of flower shops though, and hotels. I drew the one above while on my morning sortie. 

Chelsea Hotel NYC

I always like a morning stroll when I visit a new place, before the family get up. Chelsea is a good area to explore. One morning I was walking down 23rd Street, the sun was casting Spring light down the long streets making everything look like an album cover, when I spotted a place so steeped in musical history it knocked me off my feet to see it. The Hotel Chelsea on 23rd Street has so many pop-culture names associated with it that it could be a six season Netflix series all of its own and still have secrets to share. Writers, musicians, actors, filmmakers. Maybe urban sketchers, though I have never stayed there. Bob Dylan stayed there, and Janis Joplin, Joan Baez, Jimi Hendrix, Madonna, Edith Piaf, Alice Cooper, Bob Marley, Iggy Pop, Leonard Cohen, Jim Morisson, you name it. This is where Sid Vicious stayed with Nancy and where she died, allegedly killed by Sid. Rod, Jane and Freddy probably lived there for a bit, for all I know. Writers like Kerouac, Burroughs, Miller, Twain, Ginsberg, Quentin Crisp. Dylan Thomas lived and died here in 1953, so did Brendan Behan a decade later. Sarah Bernhardt slept in a coffin while she lived here. Stanley Kubrick, Al Pacino, Eddie Izzard, Bette Midler, they all stayed here and I’d like to have been in the hotel bar that night. Ironically I don’t think Jose Mourinho or John Terry have ever stayed here. I stood across the street with that Joni Mitchell song in my head, while the traffic wrote the words. I had to check on my phone this was definitely the right place, it would have been embarrassing to have sketched it with all this cultural history going through my head only for it to be the wrong place. I bought some cannoli from a place down the street and went back to the hotel. Check back for more New York explorations…