[applause]
And enjoy your visit!
Vince
Click here to visit the main photo galleries at VMP.com or stick around and click here (or on the blog header from anywhere in the blog) to reach the Coriolistic Anachronisms home page and most recent posts.
My name is Vincent Mounier. I'm a photographer and designer of this site. My blog Coriolistic Anachronisms is now five years old. Find out more about the web site and me.
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introduce you to my blogging and life soulmate. Different blogs, different views, different ideas, same passion.
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Fellow divers, did you know that the first people to get bent were not divers but bridge builders? You see, decompression sickness (DCS) - also labeled decompression illness (DCI) when diagnosed and treated on a common ground with the similar arterial gas embolism, was actually born under the name of « Caisson Disease » and although it involved pressure and the surrounding water, 
its unlucky victims certainly never saw little fishies. They were building a bridge.
Their task was digging to anchor the foundations of the future Brooklyn Bridge towers into the bottom of the East River, incarcerated for hours below the surface in enormous watertight pressurized caissons. Their average progress rate on a hopeful descent towards firm bedrock was a mere 6 inches a week. It was the end of the 19th century. Crossing the bridge would later cost 5 cents.
DCS, also called the bends, can be described as the formation of air bubbles inside the body following depressurization. Recreational and commercial divers are thoroughly familiar with the risks associated with pressure changes, but theoretically, DCS can also affect someone flying in an unpressurized aircraft and astronauts - the latter probably being more than happy to assume this slight risk in exchange for space walks...
In the case of the Brooklyn Bridge construction, at least three men died of DCS; but records were poorly kept and other casualties might easily have gone unnoticed. Washington Roebbling, the mastermind behind the project left in charge after his father’s early passing, was struck himself and left incapacitated. He finished supervising the 13 year-long process from his house, his wife insuring the liaison with the engineers.
When it was opened, the Brooklyn Bridge was the longest suspension bridge in the whole Wild Wide World. Today it is just the longest bridge to be called Brooklyn. Was it worth dying for? Not unless you’re a visionary - and these workers most certainly weren’t, quite the opposite. Their vision must have been that of bread on a cheap table, period. But because of their sacrifice and the dedication and hard labour of so many others, we now have a cool way to walk from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back, enjoying one of the most spectacular cityscapes worldwide. 
In fact, the only place I can think of that would top the skyline view from the Brooklyn Bridge is the magnificent Bay of Honk Kong.
We now have a cool way to walk, as I think I just wrote in my modern English. The folks who built this bridge would not even have understood what I mean by that. Cool? Why, is it a bit cold up there? And once enlightened, they would have remained skeptical. How could we call such a marvel of engineering, the fruit of 13 years of incredibly hard work involving over 20 casualties and requiring 3600 miles of cable wire - « cool »?
Easy. You just need to be a 21st century child. To have seen a man walk on the moon. To have flown 
across the ocean in a giant coach along with 300 others just below the speed of sound in 5 hours. To have been granted a view through space to an event horizon located over 46 billion light-years away. To have explored the human anatomy from a front-row perspective with miniaturized cameras. To have decoded the human genome. To be able to write this today in New York and have you read it from half-way across the globe, instantly, on your iPhone.
We are a spoiled species. We tend to take it all for granted. Still, the Brooklyn Bridge is so freakin’ cool.
It’s a rare sight. You walk up a small hill through a parterre of pretty white tombstones on well kept grass, aiming for the deepest blue autumn sky above, and suddenly, among the crosses and seemingly one of them, a familiar silhouette. Tall, slender even, stylish and sharp, it’s the Empire State Building. You’re in the Calvary Cemetery in Queens - that’s the middle of nowhere, or maybe slightly north of it.
Getting there without wheels isn’t so casual. It involved in my case a remote subway station, lots of walking and advanced dead reckoning. I had spotted the very nice perspective from the Kosciuszko Bridge on I-278 (above), on our way back from the Long Island nurseries, and even though the overpass had no pedestrian path I’d decided to come back and scout the vicinity for a similar view of distant Manhattan behind a hilly foreground of memories.
It turned out the best angle was to be found within the cemetery itself (below.) I walked around for a long time, alone, and shot many a silly picture of the Manhattan buildings emerging behind a forest of graves. It’s a beautiful - if a bit strange - sight that probably very few New Yorkers have enjoyed.
Until it’s too late, that is.
I’m miserably dragging my bones, today. The subway ride wasn’t even that long yet stations lazily drifted by like distant planetary stops on an endless journey to the universe’s end. I wonder if I’ve got a fever. Space travel is said to be hard on you.
As I sip my coffee at a terrace, a warm autumn day lighting up the wide Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd, Harlem is asleep around me. Its Dutch roots forgotten, the renaissance of the 20’s a pale memory, later crime and drug records having painfully been filed and put aside, the city finally seems at peace. She speaks in hushed tones, subdued by heavy gentrification and a new found love for peace.
Harlem finally seems at peace. She speaks in hushed tones, subdued by heavy gentrification and a new found love for peaceA man with a perfect Easter Island statue profile walks by wearing a brightly coloured African suit and open sandals, hurrying on some mid-day errand. I imagine him having a deep voice and maybe speaking some French. He doesn’t fit my expectations of this place. But then again nothing does.
The young black woman who served me my double espresso with a bright smile wore her baby behind her in a cradle board while working behind the coffee shop counter. People are sitting at small tables around me and inside, sharing cups and laptop computers, wearing headphones and microphones, smiling blindly to distant interlocutors.
The streets are indeed surprisingly wide in Harlem, as Marie had described them. The southern parts almost have a Parisian feel with their long avenues of nice buildings looking like hôtels particuliers, with the exception of those ugly street-facing fire escapes, which - thank god - were never invented in Europe.
I look around me while rubbing my eyes. The scene seems password-protected, and I haven’t cracked the code. What am I not seeing? Something is missing, something previously written to a chapter of my preconceptions by history and media and now having been lost in a new superficial reality.
I should come back when my imagination is healthier. And my head. Maybe, then, will I see through the curtain and figure out where Harlem has gone.
I’m late. The crossing is long over. ‘Been working on the web site and picture processing took a plunge. Anyhoo, here’s the deal:
Once a year, Atlantic Street is blocked off between 
below Henry all the way to 4th. Nearby stores and others not so near send in a crew and set up little street kiosks. Everything goes, from food to drinks to arts to hats to music and events. Then hundreds of thousands of people flock in. The place is jam-packed. It lasts all day.
So the crossing is actually a long one-way, slow-paced drifting ride along the human tide. You eat, you drink, you stop, you drift, you eat. It’s one way because after a full-street-length crowd overdose, you probably don’t have the guts and energy to go back the way you came, so you take a shortcut on an adjacent street. The calm there soothes you.
Street food is just that, yet the sardines were quite excellent! Of all places, a Brooklyn street festival isn’t where I would have expected to find such good fish. An island, maybe. A small fishing village in the middle of nowhere. But here... Go figure.
With many - rather average but interesting - pictures on hold, the last week has seen me obsessively reworking the main site’s look and feel, and trying to integrate the blog into it more seamlessly. A striped background has emerged because, well, I always liked stripes. And they serve the unifying purpose very well.
The good old winged dolphin logo was reborn and modernized, another thing I’m quite fond of despite its age. Entry date display was upgraded from the original template’s calendar icon to this very sleek CSS-based system that uses a mapped single image.
I hope that the overall result is a nicer-looking, cleaner and yet more focused interface, with less visual disruption when switching from the blog to the main galleries and vice-versa.
Some posts about recent New York micro-events and mini-expeditions soon.
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