The Solow Building, 9 W57th Street (the best surface for skating!)
From down the block…
The Exxon Building, 1251 6th Avenue
Trump Tower, 721 Fifth Avenue. Two things: Fifth Avenue is always spelled out, and this building looks like this all the time.
This is what the rest of it looks like for the holidays…
Barneys, 660 Madison Avenue, used celebrity chefs for their window dressing. The men are in a food fight which Mario Batali appears to have lost, his head on a platter surrounded by orange crocs. Happy Holidays?
Here are the women, who display more decorum. Though someone appears to be in the oven underneath Martha Stewart. Weird.
The Pulitzer Fountain in front of The Plaza, 768 Fifth Avenue.
Nutcracker on 6th Avenue
Bryant Park’s blue lighted tree…
Rockefeller Center…
The Snowflake hanging over Fifth Avenue at 57th Street, and the Crown Building
Midtown lobby trees…
The Exxon Building
1251 6th Avenue…
…comes with a wreath.
The Bertelsmann Building
1540 Broadway
The Millennium Hotel
145 west 44th Street
The New York Public Library…
…has the best ornaments…
Happy Hanukkah…
Macy’s…
Macy’s dual holiday theme is Miracle on 34th Street and Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus. Unfortunately, there was too much reflection in the windows to get good pictures…
But I remembered last year that Justin Ferate, preeminent NYC tour guide and selfless clearinghouse of all the best information, had forwarded this video of Virginia O’Hanlon reading the response she received to the letter she wrote to Frank Church in 1897, the editor of The Sun. She went on to receive her doctorate from Fordham University and wrote a dissertation on the importance of play in children’s lives. She eventually became a junior principal in Brooklyn at PS 401. Here’s the short letter she wrote that would elicit perhaps the most famous editorial of all time.
Dear Editor:
I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, ‘if you see it in The Sun it’s so.’ Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?
Virginia O’Hanlon
115 West Ninety-fifth Street
Virginia O’Hanlon herself, in her 70s, reading the letter Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus in 1961…(Vintage WTEN) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28zUv0FRcBk>
And, if you like Christmas music, more gratitude to Justin Ferate for sending this link via Patricia Myers. O Holy Night, sung by Bryn Terfel. If you right click and open the the link in a new window you can then come back and look at the rose window (below) in Saint John the Divine. They go well together...
<http://www.wqxr.org/articles/album-week/2010/dec/12/bryn-terfels-carols-and-christmas-songs/>
Merry Christmas!
