Happy Holiday Season and Happy New Year

I’m making digital cards this year and wanted to put together something a bit different. You know, not your typical NY themed holiday card featuring a yellow cab, some skyline, Rockefeller Tree, Times Square or Central Park.

Welcome to the 2014 FiDi (Financial District) holiday card edition, where you can find a card featuring the new Fulton Transit Center and another featuring the Christmas Tree at the Seaport.

top left to right clockwise: 1) Front of Fulton Street Transit Center overlooking Freedom Tower. 2) Side view of subway signs. 3) Beautiful staircases. 4) Basket-like weaves on the ceiling. 5) Sign for Fulton Center

 

Left to right: 1) Neon stars overlooking Freedom Tower. 2) Side view of a beer hall at the Seaport. 3) Seaport Christmas Tree next to ice rink.

Bonus: colored version of Fulton Center

All photos were taken with my iphone on a windy Dec evening. I made the collages in Shutterfly, using their “collage poster” feature. If you want any of the photos as a stand-alone, let me know.

I’ll include a few streets (around the seaport) and their entries from “The Street Book: An Encyclopedia of Manhattan’s Street Names and Their Origins” by Henry Moscow.

Front Street: The namesake: its location in front of Water Street, which until the end of the 17th century was the city’s shoreline.

South Street: The namesake: something of a misnomer though the street’s lower end is close to Manhattan’s southern tip. South Street might better have been called Easter Street since it parallels the East River.

Water Street: The namesake: the East River waters that washed the street at high tide in the 17th century.

Have you walked around your neighborhood lately? You may find tons of beautiful and unexpected subjects for a holiday card. What better way to personalize your holiday cards or correspondences than to include photos and facts about your neighborhood!

A museum underground

This is not your average subway station... it's actually the entrance to the New York Transit Museum! After visiting the MTA Annex Gallery/Store in Grand Central Terminal (GCT link) for years, I finally made it to the actual transit museum in Brooklyn. 

Don't miss the parade of vintage trains in the lower level of the museum! Get a kick out of browsing old transit maps (when it wasn't all consolidated into the MTA), history about the world fair train (orange and blue are world fairs colors), and old advertisements inside the trains (various products, shows, and even WNYC).

perhaps my favorite part of the artifacts: slugs! I don't remember whether I ever used the subway tokens before. I'm sure when I first visited NYC, my parents or relatives shuffled me through subway turnstiles while they placed tokens into the machines. When I was finally old enough to walk around NYC (and old enough to get horribly confused by the local vs express trains), I only remember the metro cards.

Other educational sections of the museum talked about the beginning of the tunnels and history of the different modes of transportation in New York. Horse drawn carriages, buses, cable cars, underground, elevated trains, and trains all helped people get from place to place. 

The store has about the same amount of merchandise as the Grand Central annex. I like to suggest the transit store (Brooklyn or the GCT one) for visitors because the items are iconic NYC without being too touristy. My personal favorites are: transit umbrella, transit round boxes with the number or letter of a particular line, transit posters (same ones you see in the subway trains), and the GCT anniversary commemorative items (stationery, magnets, etc). Have a favorite station? You may be able to find a tile or a magnet of it!

I ride the subway frequently and take it for granted most part. Reading through the history, engineering, and advancements in transit at the transit museum gave me a new appreciation for what the earlier New Yorkers started and built for us, generations later. I hope other subway riders get a chance to visit this whimsical museum and learn a bit about their trusty subway ride.