A day in New York City – The Kneeling Fireman

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We’d just eaten a meal at Grand Central Terminal in New York City. My wife was going to do some shopping so I decided to go to a nearby Barnes and Noble to see what I could find.

I was walking along 43rd Street when I came across this statue. I hadn’t seen it before and it looked interesting so I took a few pictures. When I eventually read the story behind it I was even more fascinated.

According to Big Apple Secrets. Hidden Treasures of New York.

The dramatic statue of a firefighter on bended knee is located at 43rd Street near the headquarters of Emigrant Savings Bank.

The “Kneeling Fireman” is one of NYC’s 1st memorials to 9/11. The statue arrived in New York City two days before the death and destruction on 9/11 because it was originally commissioned by the Firefighters Association of Missouri.

Over 100 fire departments in Missouri met in 1954 for the purpose of forming a state-wide firemen’s association. Since organizing in 1954, the organization has grown from 600 members to more than 7,000 members.

October 2000 Matthews International Corporation of Pittsburgh received the commission to create the bronze statue for the Firefighters Association of Missouri. The Matthews International was formed in the middle of the 19th century when the founder of the company John Dixon Matthews arrive in US from England. Among the Matthews Bronze products are flush bronze memorials, cremation urns, and monuments. One of the most famous of the company’s bronze memorials marks the grave of Elvis Presley.

The statue for Missouri was custom manufactured by Matthews plant in Parma, Italy in August 2001. On September 11, 2001 a 2,700-pound bronze statute sat at JFK International Airport en route from Italy.

“Our customers started calling us to find out if we had plaques, anything commemorative,” Corinne Laboon, Matthews’ public relations director said. “We sat down to discuss ideas and someone brought up the firefighter statue. We called the Firefighters Association and without hesitation they decided to dedicate the statue, with Matthews, to the citizens of New York.” Matthews promised to the Firefighters Association of Missouri that Matthews would make and supply them a duplicate firefighter statue.

…

Ten years after the statue was created, in 2011 “The Kneeling Fireman” found a permanent home at Emigrant’s Midtown Headquarters, owned by Milstein Family. “I am honored to be able to provide a home for this noble and inspiring statue,” said Howard P. Milstein, chairman and CEO of Emigrant, in a statement. “It is a fitting tribute to all first responders who answered the call on that fateful day.”

The copy of the statue was unveiled in Missouri during the Memorial dedication on May 18, 2002.

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Taken with a Sony RX-100 M3.

A foggy day. Chilmark – Overview

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A bit over a week ago I woke up to thick fog. I don’t usually go out to take pictures in bad weather, but this time the fog looked rather interesting so I decided to see what I could get.

Almost directly opposite our house is what remains of the V. Everit Macy property. When I say what remains I don’t mean to imply that it’s an abandoned ruin. Far from it. There’s still a lot of land (about 60 acres I believe) and the old house still stands. I had some difficulty finding a picture of it online and since the house is still occupied and I didn’t feel like wandering around on private property to get a picture of it, I had to be satisfied with the above scan from Mary Cheever’s book: “The changing landscape: a history of Briarcliff Manor-Scarborough“.

According to the book:

In 1896, V. (for Valentine) Everit Macy bought several large tracts of land just north and west of Walter Law’s Briarcliff Farms. Macy, then in his mid-twenties, was the son of an official of the Standard Oil Company, a descendant of prosperous Nantucket whalers, and nephew of a founder of R.H. Macy & Company. He and his bride, Edith Carpenter, set up housekeeping in their newly built Tudor-style stone and stucco mansion set on the highest hill of their estate, overlooking the Hudson. They named it Chilmark, after the Macy family’s ancestral home in England. The Macy’s property, added to over the following quarter of a century, amounted to some 300 acres bounded, roughly, by Old Briarcliff and Pleasantville roads on the east, Croton Avenue to the north and Holbrook and Scarborough roads on the south and west, with some lots on its western border within the village of Ossining. The old gate house, now missing its porte-cochere, still stands at the corner of Holbrook and Scarborough roads. The mansion was surrounded by gently sloping lawns planted with shade trees and shrubbery, meadows and woodlands. Great stone barns housed Guernsey cows, givers of prize winning milk, and Hampshire Down sheep. There was a greenhouse for the gardens, a carriage house with apartments over it for the help, a chicken house, a stable of spirited ponies, a polo field (the Holbrook School Football field), squash courts, a swimming pool, two tennis courts and a small but challenging (par 27) nine-hole golf course.

Empire State Building

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Taken in the days when I was still working (October 2010). As I recall I was in an external meeting and we had broken for coffee. I was standing looking out of the window at this view and decided to take a picture.

I liked the diagonal lines leading towards the Empire State Building rising up in the background and the repeating geometric shapes of the windows.

Taken with a Panasonic Lumix LX-3.

April Fools Day came a day late

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We woke up to about four inches of snow now this morning. Usually when it snows we just step out onto the patio and take a picture. What this means is that we keep taking pretty much the same picture over and over again. This time, however, I decided to go down to the dock to see if I could get something a little different.

This forlorn little guy sits on a wall by the dock. After an early very cold start to Winter, followed by four Nor’easters in three weeks, and now significant accumulating snow in April I know exactly how he/she feels.

Taken with a Sony A77II and Minolta Maxxum AF 50mm f1.7.