A Saturday walk through Washington Heights, Manhattan -- page 2.

Click on any image to get the full sized view.

After lunch we walked down to 181st Street and found these kids on the corner of 181st street and Broadway. They were advocating the usual nonsense which their bretheren spout down in Times Square, but -- perhaps due to their peach-fuzzed boyish faces -- they seemed more innocent and less angry. Maybe with time they'll find more constructive ways to use their energy?

Aspiring members of the Lost Tribes of Israel.

Down between 178th and 179th the Trans Manhattan Expressway (I-95) runs underneath the street. Over the expressway, the city built the George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal, and the Bridge Apartments -- a low-income housing project. In the photo's foreground on the left is part of the Bus Terminal; the apartment towers are in the middle of the photo. Unfortunately for the project's residents, the expressway was not covered over. Therefore, the people living in the apartments breathe the exhaust escaping from the open-cut all day and all night. "New York 1960" (Monacelli, New York, 1995) says,

One of the city's most unusual housing projects, Brown & Guenther's Bridge Apartments (1963), was built straddling the new road-way. The project's four thirty-two-story aluminum-clad north-south slabs, housing 960 families, were not only banal but were subject to appalling environmental conditions: noxious fumes from the traffic below rose from the highway that separated the pairs of slabs, rendering the balconies useless and the apartments almost uninhabitable.

View of the Bridge Apartments.

An gem in the rough at 175th Street and Broadway is "Loews 175th Street Theater", which was formerly a grand palace for film. About the theater, "New York 1930" (Rizzoli, New York, 1987) says,

In 1930 (Thomas Lamb) designed Loew's 175th Street Theater, a building whose facade was an indescribable marriage of Classical, Islamic, Mayan, Indian, and Oriental motifs. The architect described his desire to cast 'a spell of the mysterious and, to the Occidental mind, of the exceptional . . . conspiring to create an effect throroughly foreign to our Western minds. These exotic ornaments, colors, and scenes are particularly effective in creating an atmosphere in which the mind is free to frolic and becomes receptive to entertainment.'

Loew's 175th Street Theater is now the home of the Reverend Ike ! (Yeah, that reverend Ike!).

Lowes 175th Street Theater

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