Local

The Empire State Building is on 5th Avenue and about 32nd Street.

Obviously it is the best known landmark in the city - I wonder what it was before that? I wonder what the most important landmark in Paris was before the Eiffel Tower? In London before Big Ben?

Anyway, we see the ESB in its many moods out of our sitting room window - here mysterious and swathed in cloud.

Here, last Sunday, looking oddly like a rocket ship emerging from very low clouds. Seen between the SVA theater and our building.

Here seen from a speeding taxi by Madison Square Park on Tuesday evening.

And another of the same... The red zeppelin like thing (upper right) is probably a reflection in the taxi window - or else it is a real zeppelin I hadn't noticed.

Most of the time I'm plodding round Chelsea with my faithful hound, Buster. This is the rectory of St.Peter's Church which is currently in a pretty dire state  - as is St. Peter's itself. A really wonderful article in the New York Times just before Christmas http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/nyregion/church-with-ties-to-famed-christmas-poem-is-in-need-of-repair.html

It's the church where Clement Moore worshiped and utterly Church of England inside - down to the pews, the hymn books..... and the mold. The rectory is probably worth a million billion dollars  - or would be if it was for sale on the open market. Let's hope they merely restore it.

Some nice billowy clouds on 20th Street yesterday

and on 9th Avenue.

A mural at the gas station on 8th avenue

and my treat of the week when I went to Tea  & Sympathy with Frances on Wednesday (which was bitterly cold) and we had an utterly English and delicious lunch...