The Taelemans´ Blog

Rockefeller Center is a complex of 19 commercial buildings covering 22 acres between 48th and 51st Streets in New York City. The centerpiece of the Rockefeller Center is the Rockefeller plaza with the bronze statue of the Greek legendary titan Prometheus, bringing fire to mankind. During winter, the Rockefeller Plaza hosts an ice skating ring as you can see in the picture.

Rockefeller plaza | Location on map

In the picture you see the famous GE building (872 foot – 266 m) which was the setting for the famous photograph by Charles C. Ebbets in 1932 of workers having lunch on a steel beam without safety harnesses.

A picture of one of my favorite animals, a squirrel hiding a nut in the snow in a park in New York.

I has a nut!

The Flatiron Building, which when constructed was called the Fuller Building, was one of the tallest buildings in New York City upon its completion in 1902. The building is located on a triangular island block at 23rd Street, Fifth Avenue, and Broadway, on the south end of Madison Square. It received its name because it is shaped like a clothes iron.

Flatiron Building | Location on map

St. Patrick’s Cathedral is a Catholic cathedral in New York, right across the street from Rockefeller Center. The land on which the cathedral stands was bought in 1813 by Dom Augustin Lestrange, abbot of a community of Trappists from the original monastery of La Trappe, which now brews the only non-Belgian Trappist beer (and the only one I haven’t tasted yet…).

The cornerstone of the cathedral was laid on August 15, 1858, just south of the orphanage founded by the Trappist monks and later further maintained by the Diocese of New York. Currently, it is the seat of the archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York.

Saint Patrick’s Cathedral | Location on map

PS: If you want to see the strangest case of perspective, take a look at the map location of the picture.

The Brooklyn Bridge is one of the oldest suspension bridges in the United States and stretches 1825 m over the East River connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn. Since its opening, it has become an iconic part of the New York skyline.

The pedestrian walkway which lies in the center of the bridge and higher than the automobile lanes, permits the passage of pedestrians across the bridge. From the Brooklyn side of the bridge, you get a fantastic overview over the skyline of New York, as you can see in the picture.

In 2006, a Cold War era bunker was found by city workers near the East River shoreline of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The bunker, hidden within one of the masonry towers, still contains the emergency supplies that were being stored for a potential nuclear attack by the Soviet Union.

Brooklyn Bridge | Location on map

Another view of the edge of Central Park, New York, in the snow. This shot was taken around 9 in the morning.

Central Park, New York | Location on map

Let’s do a small jump of about 4500 kilometers (2800 miles) form San Francisco to New York. While having to wait 12 hours for a connecting flight to Brussels, we decided to make a quick visit to the Big Apple.

I spotted this photographer while during our morning stroll in Central Park. I learned from Ron Niebrugge that the camera he is using is a 4×5 large format camera which apparently is still very popular with landscape photographers. It is not as impressive as the one he encountered during his photo shoots though, which you can see in this post on his blog.

Central Park, New York

An interesting fact about New York is that during the last glacier period (30.000 – 10.000 years ago), New York was fully covered by glaciers. The grooves left by these glaciers can be easily observed in the rocks still present at Central Park (as you can see in the picture). These glaciers also contributed to the current skyline of New York. Large amounts of soil, stone, and other debris were scraped up by the expanding glaciers were deposited where the ice front retreated. Therefore, buildings can be a lot higher on those places. This is why Manhattan has areas with very large skyscrapers and other spots with smaller buildings.