Urban Adventures in Asia: Kathmandu, Nepal

This Urban Decay decay essay will take you about as far from New York City as possible: about 180 degrees in longitude around the world, 1300m higher in elevation, no ocean, 2000 years older, and vastly different in culture. Our destination is Kathmandu, the bustling landlocked capital of Nepal, a mountainous country squeezed between Tibet and India and dominated by the Himalaya. Kathmandu is an urban area of about 1.5 million inhabitants in the Kathmandu Valley in central Nepal, along the Bagmati River. Because of the fertile, well-watered land and the relatively comfortable climate (cooler than the sweltering Indian lowlands and warmer than the high Himalaya), the valley has been inhabited for millenia. As you can see from the signpost (photographed at the Kathmandu Guest House, a fun place to stay in the Thamel District), it is a long way from anywhere.

To reach Kathmandu, you fly from a US gateway city, cross the Atlantic or Pacific, wait at an Asian gateway city for hours, and then fly again, on and on and on. You finally reach Tribhuvan International Airport very grubby and jet-lagged and feeling pretty beat up. Your fellow passengers largely fit into three groups: local citizens (often workers on their way home from jobs in the Gulf states), hikers and climbers, and "adventure" travelers. The latter are the type who wear safari clothing and multi-pocket travelers' vests (but nothing is in the pockets), and have more luggage than the true climbers.


Most tourists stay in or congregate in the Thamel District. This was a popular stop-over on the Asia circuit in the 1970s. Hippies loved it because living was cheap, drugs were cheap and readily available, and it was trendy ("I'm going to be creative and unique and go to Nepal along with thousands of other hippies."). Oddly, some are still around, but a bit grayer and chubbier now. The district throbs with discos (yes, disco still lives), internet cafes, restaurants, shops, and bars. They even have their own Barnes & Noble book house. The pharmacies are well-equipped and most chemicals are sold without prescription. The supermarkets sell chocolates from around the world; the bookstores stock magazines and books in many languages. Another oddity: Nepal's time zone is GMT +5:45 hours (15 min different than India). This is the link to Google maps: Thamel.



Everything about Kathmandu is a visual delight. The buildings are colorful, rather funky, and have a somewhat makeshift look to them. Parts have been added to parts, colors are all over the spectrum, and the glass box monstrosities of US and European cities are largely absent.

Don't look too closely at the electrical wiring. Some of the outlets are the odd triple prong type used in India, others are the narrow dual-prong from Europe. The electricity was dependable during my visits.

The people are absolutely wonderful. This little girl kept her father company in his fabric shop.


Kathmandu is a city of shops, and you can find almost anything you need with a bit of hunting. But many vendors are out in the street. Pay attention when you walk on a sidewalk or you will fall over a merchant or stomp on his display.

The people I met were unfailingly friendly and gracious. They are alert and energetic. The ladies are petite and sophisticated.

(More Nepal in future essays. All 2007 photographs taken with an Olympus E-330 digital camera or a Fuji F31fd compact.)

New York and the World Trade Center: the Late Years and Destruction

This is the second of a two-part series on my memories of New York City and the World Trade Center.

Brooklyn Bridge pedestrian walkway

Right half of undated stereo card of Brooklyn Bridge, from  the Boston Public Library digital archives

After visiting New York in the early 1970s, ten years passed before I returned. I recall a snowy stop-over in 1982, but did not make it to lower Manhattan that time. A decade later, professional duties took me to the Big Apple three or four times per year. I really enjoyed these trips; the people were nice, food great, and there was always something interesting to see or do. On 1994, after a long, dull day of meetings, I decided to clear my brain and walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. It's a great walk on a brisk day, and the view is spectacular, but the ambiance is marred by the constant traffic directly below the walking deck. This first photograph shows the view looking west while walking from Brooklyn to Manhattan. The twin towers are off to the left (south) of the bridge axis.
The second photograph shows the view north, with the Empire State Building beyond the historic Manhattan Bridge (opened to traffic on December 31, 1909). These were taken with Kodak Gold 100 film, which worked well on gloomy days and scans well.
In 1995, the family and I stayed in the Vista International Hotel at 3 World Trade Center. It was a 22-story steel-framed building, said to be the first hotel to open in Lower Manhattan since 1836 (is this possible?). It was badly damaged by the truck bomb that terrorists set off in the underground parking garage in 1993, but had been renovated and reopened. The hotel was convenient because you could pass through enclosed walkways into the lobbies of the north and south Trade Center towers. I recall one of the lobbies had a ticket office where you could buy half-price tickets for Broadway and off-Broadway productions. One evening, we went to the top floor of the hotel, and one of the stairways had an unlocked access door to the roof. The view of the south tower was awesome. It loomed up into the foggy night sky seemingly forever. Some employees were toiling away late in their offices. On September 11, the hotel was almost totally crushed, and 40 people lost their lives.
In 1997, I attended a meeting in a NY State Department of State office building at 212 Broadway. The meeting was on the top floor, and once again, an access door to the roof was unlocked. This was too good to resist and I took a panorama of the World Trade Center building using a 35 mm Olympus shift lens (in this case, shifting the lens vertically).

Panorama of four Rolleiflex exposures on 120-size film.

On April 29, 2001, I spent another day in meetings. It was a gorgeous clear day, and when I escaped, there were still two hours of daylight left. I had never been to the rooftop observation deck, and this was a perfect chance. Although being quite expensive, I recall thinking I might not have another opportunity. The Top of the World observation deck was on the 107th floor of 2 World Trade Center (the South Tower), and stairs went up to the open roof (open only on calm days). Amazingly, there was absolutely no wind that afternoon. Tourists from Germany and other countries were taking self-portraits with the spectacular view of Manhattan in the background (I confess, I took the obligatory dorky picture, too). The panorama looking north and east shows the north tower and Manhattan spread out across the horizon. The metal frame at the lower right is the rail system for the window-washing machines. The tourist gallery was set back, and you could not look down at a steep angle and see the streets immediately below. The panorama consists of four Rolleiflex (120-size film) frames merged together. Being a large film size, the original prints contain an astonishing amount of detail.

Card by Mayor Rudi Giuliana, from the Leica Gallery

Mayor Rudi Giuliani was a talented Leica photographer. I saw a sign at the Leica Gallery that the mayor always took his Leica with him when he made rounds around the city.

Federal Plaza from World Trade Center, April 29, 2001

Antennas and equipment on the roof of the North Tower, April 29, 2001

The view of Federal Plaza shows the amazing vista from the enclosed Top of the World observation level. The banal rectangle building in the center is the Jacob Javits Federal Building. The 1913-vintage Woolworth Building at 233 Broadway is in the lower right. The tall windowless red/brown edifice to the left is the former AT&T Long Lines Building. According to Wikipedia, it was designed to be self-sufficient and protected from nuclear fallout for up to two weeks after a nuclear blast. The East River is in the background.

Then the unimaginable happened. Five months after visiting the observation deck, the towers were destroyed. My coworkers and I watched television in our Vicksburg office transfixed as we saw the towers implode and throw up an immense dust cloud.

NASA photograph iss003e5388_232021.

This amazing NASA photograph from the International Space Station, taken by astronaut Frank Culberston, shows the dust plume rising into a clear sky (photograph iss003e5388_232021).

The next time I had business in New York was on December 19, 2001. Work crews had already cleared out an amazing amount of the rubble and twisted metal, but as the photographs show, some gutted buildings were still standing. I could not enter the demolition site, but the views past the truck entrances were horrifying. Two of my coworkers told me that was the first day they did not smell fumes from the underground fires. Before then, fumes were sucked into the ventilation system of the Jacob Javits Federal building, causing severe headaches for some workers.
This was the remains of the Winter Garden, across West Street from the Trade Center Plaza. It once housed beautiful palm trees.
Very moving were the impromptu memorials of flowers, notes, letters, and photographs of loved ones who had perished. Fortunately, none of my coworkers were hurt, but all knew someone or were connected via a friend or neighbor to someone who died.

MTA route map, December 2001

The December 2001 MTA route map shows how four subway stations were out of commission after the disaster. The WTC station was destroyed and had to be rebuilt.

I took the black and white photographs with Kodak CN400 film using my 1949-vintage Leica IIIC camera with a 5 cm ƒ/3.5 Red Dot Elmar lens. This was the post-war coated version of the famous Elmar lens, in production until the 1960s. This, as well as the later ƒ/2.8 version, are wonderful performers when adapted to Leica, Micro 4/3, or Fuji X digital cameras (and, of course, are best on film). My IIIC is still in regular use, but I sold the Red Dot Elmar lens.

Updated August 15, 2014, with added photograph.
Updated October 2018: added MTA map.
Update March 12, 2020: Mr Michael Hertz, whose design studio created the iconic NY Transit Map, died on February 28, 2020.
Update July 12, 2020: Added early-1900s stereo card of the Brooklyn Bridge

New York and the World Trade Center: The Early Years

Introduction

Ten years ago, on September 11, 2001, terrorists flew two fuel-laden jet planes into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, causing their collapse, killing thousands, and changing history. The destruction led to two foreign wars, an enormous increase in the security apparatus in the United States, stunning increases in the military-industrial complex, and myriad changes in the ways we view ourselves and the world around us. In many ways, we lost our way and lost the moral high ground internationally. To commemorate the terrible events of ten years ago, I looked through my archives to find photographs of the towers and other memories of New York. Although I did not live in New York during the years that the towers stood, I saw them on visits to the city, shopped in the underground malls, and once went up to the open observation deck.

Pre-tower Manhattan

This is a map of lower Manhattan from a brochure given out to tourists who visited the Towers in the 1990s. The towers were on the southwest corner of Manhattan. They did not directly face the Hudson River, but the site they were on was artificial fill. The scale of this map is off and the Liberty Island is really much further away.

Early 20th century map of Manhattan with steamship company docks along the Hudson River.

First, let's step back in history to well before the towers were built. The scene above shows upper New York Harbor and Manhattan Island at about 1940. The original photograph is from the archives of the Beach Erosion Board, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The archives are now housed at the Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory at the Waterways Experiment Station in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Notice how the Hudson River (on the left) is lined with docks and wharves.

In 1940, New York and Jersey City were gritty, bustling working cities and ports. If 1940 is the correct date, war was raging in Europe, and New York harbor was a major transit origin for cargo convoys. Most of Europe was shrouded in darkness, but New York was a beacon of freedom for the few refugees who could find transit to the United States. Lights were blazing, food was plentiful, shops were stocked, and music and entertainment were everywhere - war seemed far away. The site for the towers was on the lower left side of Manhattan, then a district of small shops, factories and residences, known as Radio Row. The George Washington Bridge, completed in 1931, crosses the Hudson in the upper left of the photograph.

The island off the tip of Manhattan is Governors Island, occupied by the Coast Guard for most of the 20th century and now run by the National Park Service and the Governors Island Alliance. In the late 1930s, Robert Moses (Long Island Park Commission) pushed to build a monumental bridge connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn, with one of the bridge supports on Governors Island. Moses had such influence and control of funding sources that only President Franklin Roosevelt was able to squash the plan.

Liberty Island, with its Statue of Liberty, is the small island on the lower left, really much closer to the New Jersey shore than to New York.

The 1960s

Let's move forward to 1967. I took the photograph above from Rockefeller Center, probably from the observation deck in the GE Building, the Top of the Rock. Looking south you see the Empire State Building. If they had been built, the WTC towers would have been in the far distance to the right of the Empire.

This is the former PanAm building, built over the railroad lines leading into Grand Central Station. Back then, First Class passengers on Pan American World Airways were ferried to JFK airport by helicopter that took off from the rooftop heliport. This is a Boeing Vertol BV-107 helicopter (also known as a Sea Knight), operated by New York Airways. The heliport was permanently closed after a 1977 accident, where a broken rotor blade decapitated four passengers.

A side note: 1967 was near the end of the era of trans-Atlantic passenger traffic via ocean liner. The 1940 photograph showed how the entire Hudson River shore of Manhattan was lined with docks. But by the late-1960s, many of the docks were unused and passenger traffic on the great liners was drying up. This was largely a result of the success of the Boeing 707 jet liner, which entered service in 1958. The post-war generation was impatient and did not want to spend six days crossing the ocean (but I am glad that I made two Atlantic ship crossings in my childhood - they were fun). I took the photographs of the S.S. Constitution and the docks on color print film with a Canon range-finder camera and 50mm ƒ/1.9 Serenar lens.

The 1970s

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey built the twin WTC towers between 1996 and 1972. The matching buildings, designed by American architect Minoru Yamasaki, rose to 1353 feet (412 m) in height. When completed in 1972, they were the tallest buildings in the world. A Wikipedia article nicely summarizes their history and the decades of controversy and sordid political maneuvering surrounding the project. The aesthetics of the design were resoundingly criticized at the time and for many years later as extreme examples of post-war gigantism, but eventually they became icons of New York. The undated post card above, from Golden Apple Postcards, shows the towers taken with a long telephoto lens from the waterfront at Bayonne, New Jersey. Unfortunately, the photographer was not credited.

In March, 1974, I made a one-day trip to New York and took the excursion boat to Liberty Island. The South Tower had only been open two years and both towers were were only partly occupied. Attracting commercial (as opposed to subsidized Port Authority) tenants was part of the controversy that continued for years. From this vantage point, it was obvious how huge the buildings were, looming over everything else in lower Manhattan.

This is a 105mm tele view of the towers, scanned from a roll of Kodak Tri-X black and white film. This negative was double-exposed, adding to the dust and flaws in the frame. Still, after 35 years, the negative is intact and contains data that can be extracted. Will we be able to retrieve digital media in 35 years? (Camera: Nikkormat FTn; lens: 105 mm ƒ/2.5 Nikkor.)

Update May 6, 2013

I found this remarkable aerial photograph in NOAA's archives of a flying boat cruising over Battery Park. The Hudson River is in the foreground, the East River in the background. As in the 1940 photograph, you can see the many docks lining the rivers.

The label states:

A flying boat cruising by Battery Park at the south end of Manhattan Island. In: "Flug Und Wolken", Manfred Curry, Verlag F. Bruckmann, Munchen, 1932.

Image ID: line0987, NOAA's America's Coastlines Collection
Location: New York City
Photo Date: 1930 Circa
Credit: Fairchild Aerial Surveys Inc.

(To be continued in the next article.)
Updated with two photographs added on August 15, 2014

Shotgun Shacks, Rigby Street, Vicksburg, Mississippi

Rigby Street is an out-of-the way dead-end lane west of Washington Street. Drive west on Polk Street, cross Washington Street at the fire station, and you are on Rigby. The houses in these photographs were west of Oak Street.


Once there were probably tens of shotgun shacks lining both sides of the street, but in 2006, only four were left. They were examples of the ubiquitous narrow one-floor wood houses built in great numbers during the early 20th century. The first one beyond Oak was 507, occupied in May 2006 when I took this photograph.

The second was 509, also occupied and reasonably neat.


No. 513 had clearly been deserted for years and was being overtaken by the vines. This reminds me of shows on the SyFy channel, were evil vines overcome and squash a house, often with the occupants inside.

513 had once been fixed up with wood paneling on the walls. The original fireplace had been boarded up. You can see wood tongue-and-groove where the door trim has been removed. I am not sure if the walls were ever plastered or if originally they had cheesecloth tacked to the wood with wallpaper over the cheesecloth (a common practice here in the late-1800s and early 20th century).

As of August 2011, all of these houses are gone, and the jungle has grown so luxuriously, there is little evidence that the house lots ever existed.

(Photographs taken with a Sony DSC-W7 digital camera.)

Railroad Warehouse, Levee Street, Vicksburg, Mississippi

Drive on Levee Street in Vicksburg south of the waterfront and the casino, and you soon reach the Kansas City Southern railroad yard. This is a historic railroad yard and has been in continuous use since before the Civil War. There is still a turntable, and there was once a brick roundhouse, but it was demolished sometime in the 1970s, I was told. One remnant of the 1800s remains, a forlorn and sad but once handsome brick building. According to the Vicksburg Post (20 January 2008), it was once a warehouse and work shop for steam engine supplies, but it now sits neglected and deteriorating.

Some Vicksburg residents do not know about the warehouse. The view above shows the railroad yard from Klein Street, looking west. The steel building beyond is part of the Anderson Tully wood mill.

This is the west side of the building, seen from Levee Street. A marble plaque above the louvered entry shows "L. N. O. & T. 1890, R.T. Wilson, President, J.M. Edwards, Vice Pres." According to the Mississippi Rails web page, the abbreviation stood for the Louisville, New Orleans & Texas Railway, in operation from 1884 to 1892. It was sold to the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad in October of 1892 (this is the name on the Vicksburg Depot, highlighted in a previous blog entry this year). As of December 2010, the plaque had disappeared from the facade.

The south side has a section of wall that is collapsing. Some of the window sashes had broken and the glass has fallen out.


The north side had a loading dock. Overall, it is in as bad condition as the south side.

As of 2010, many of the windows were broken. Sad, this was a handsome building in its day with nice proportions.


The rooms inside have old tools and furniture strewn about. I have never been able to walk inside but could take photograph through the windows.

The handcart above is the type you see in old movies where the porter takes the elegant passengers' luggage into the terminal, with dramatic lighting, steam hissing from the locomotives, and the couple smoking into each others faces (and then kissing without brushing their teeth).

Ledgers were kept in a pre-computer age.

According to the Vicksburg Post article, there are no plans to restore the building, and calls to Kansas City Southern railroad were not returned. Another piece of our heritage will soon be lost.

Finally, here is the turntable I mentioned earlier. KCS rebuilt it about 20 years ago. The old one looked like it had the original timbers and machinery from 100 years ago. I do not know how often it is used. The brick engine barn (roundhouse) would have been located about where the modern steel shed is situated. In the old days, all railroad yards needed a turntable because steam locomotives did not run in reverse as efficiently as forward. Therefore, the easiest way to turn them around was to place them on a turntable. There is less need now because modern diesel/electric locomotives run in either direction.

This the the motor and chain mechanism to spin the turntable. It had to be robust because of the weight of the locomotives. Notice the disk brake mechanism.

(2008 photographs taken with an Olympus E-330 digital camera, tripod-mounted. 2010 photographs with a Sony DSC-R1 camera. The turntable photograph was taken with an Olympus 9-18mm lens at the 9mm setting (equivalent to 18 mm on 35 mm film) on a Panasonic G1 camera.)

2014 update: I added two photographs.