#88th street

[haikumaker]

The upper west side in 1970. Biking down Broadway, at 88th Street.

[newplayingsmash]

It’s a little book for kids about a family who moves into a new house and finds out a guy in entretainment business has left his crocodile in the bathtub and he tells them they can keep him because he’s very fun and helpful. And his name is Lyle. It’s pretty short, but sweet. Just like many kids books. It’s among the things I blame for my current ability to speak english. He dances, but... in funny circus way. Not in a “Imma turn some kids into scalies” way.

Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile (2022) dir. Josh Gordon & Will Speck

[madeline-kahn]

@pscentral event 25: seasons

"How about meeting Saturday? The first day of spring. 4 P.M. There's a place in Riverside Park at 88th Street where the path curves and when you come around the curve, you'll find me waiting." -- You've Got Mail, original script

[postcardaday]

Guggenheim Museum Newest and most modern art museum Ramp-like construction designed by Frank Lloyd Wright 1071 Fifth Avenue (88th Street)

[solarbird]

what was this bike route?

This thing – this sign and the route it indicates – is NOT on Seattle’s official Bike Map.

And it’s old. It’s pretty dang old.

The sign is on Burke-Gilman, on the left side, as you bike south. The picture’s from Riviara because Google Maps is annoying that way, but at least with this you see the trail itself.

Is this a leftover sign from a dead route that just never got removed? What is – or maybe more accurately was – this route?

If you go down any of the streets in that direction, you don’t find any followup signs. At least, I can’t find any. Nothing on Lakeshore, which would need it the most and right away, if nothing else to tell you go to north or south, even if south is obvious. No sign of one on NE 103rd, 100th, or 97th.

I’ve noticed it for ages biking by, and never bothered trying to track it down until I got into building bike maps (Greater Northshore shoutout) and it’s not even in my primary coverage area, but now I’m curious and interested and it just goes…

…nowhere.

And now I’m wondering, where even could it have gone? 103rd and 100th both stop at Sand Point Way which is your first opportunity to continue south, and you don’t want to be biking on that. 97th goes past tho’, continuing two blocks further, to 45th Ave NE, and that’s a reasonable bike road if you’re okay with hills… but… again, no signs.

You can get back onto Burke-Gilman from 45th NE via … NE 94th and 93rd both, though. But that’s a weird and short “bypass,” and isn’t UW, so I don’t know what’s up with that.

Past there, you’ve got to get off 45th as quickly as you can because there’s nowhere else to go, it spirals down into dead-end side streets with no way out.

Going west on NE 92nd gets you onto 43rd NE gets you to NE 88th to… 35th NE? Is that what they were doing? I hope not, dang, that’s scary riding.

Let’s say they put you on 40th NE off of 88th instead. That’s not terrible. It’d get you back to Burke-Gilman in close-to-UW territory, at one of the more unpleasant crossings. It’s not my favourite idea but it’d work.

Or if you wanted or need to stay off Burke-Gilman you could go right onto to NE 52nd off of 40th Ave, then left onto 39th Ave, then right onto NE 50th. I’ve done this; it doesn’t actually save you time, despite saving you distance. That road would dump you onto Blakeley, which points you straight at UW campus north but doesn’t give you a good way in. Or you could drop down to NE 49th, which gets you to 24th NE and from there Pend Oreille, which does.

No matter how you do it, it’s gonna be a weird goddamn bypass and I don’t understand why you would want to do that.

It is a M Y S T E R Y O F B I K E R O U T E S!

To me, at least.

Somebody has to know what this used to be. Is that person you?

If it is, let me know! I’m really curious, because seriously – what the hell? ٩๏̯͡๏)۶

[polwarth]

88th Street, part of the Relics exhibit

[workersolidarity]

[The Zayed Mosque in central Gaza City's Al-Katiba area was severely destroyed by Israeli forces, leaving the site in ruins.]

🇵🇸⚔️🇮🇱 🚨

ISRAELI OCCUPATION KILLS PRISONER, MASSIVE DESTRUCTION IN GAZA ON 88TH DAY ISRAELI GENOCIDE

The Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) continued with their genocide of Palestinians in Gaza on the 88th day of Israeli aggression in the Gaza Strip.

Dozens were killed and many more wounded in overnight bombing raids by occupation warplanes, with the current death toll standing at nearly 22'000, with an additional 56'697 wounded in the fighting.

In Khan Yunis, IOF warplanes carried out a firebelt, along with several individual bombing raids across various parts of the city.

Four Palestinians were wounded as a result of an IOF bombing raid targeting a house in Jourat al-Aqqad, west of Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip.

In Raffah, occupation warplanes targeted a security site near the border with Egypt. No one was injured in this particular attack.

In central Gaza, the Israeli occupation army destroyed a home in the Nuseirat Refugee Camp. Occupation warplanes also targeted the Matar Family home on Abu Arif Street in Deir al-Balah, killing 15 and wounding several others.

Another 15 were killed in bombing raids targeting several family homes in the al-Maghazi Refugee Camp in central Gaza.

IOF warplanes ran several bombing raids across northern Gaza, leaving a number of dead and wounded as a result. However, the occupation army withdrew from several northern Gaza neighborhoods after several hours of incursions into the area.

Previously, several rumors were going around suggesting the occupation army was arresting and executing Palestinian civilians caught in areas being invaded, after which an occupation spokesperson acknowledged that last night, a prisoner taken from Gaza was arrested, investigated and then transfered into the custody of an occupation soldier who then executed the prisoner in cold blood.

An investigation by the occupation military authorities has been opened into the assassination of the prisoner.

#source

#videosource

@WorkerSolidarityNews

[mannytoodope]

Kramer: Hey. Oh, uh, yeah. Uh, here are your pliers back....Weak hinge.

Elaine: Well, I guess I better go and price fur coats.

Kramer: Oh, go down to 88th Street. They're free.

Elaine: What are you talking about?

Kramer: Well, they're hanging from the trees. You know, Newman found one there yesterday. Man, that guy can climb like a ring-tailed lemur!

Elaine pushing Kramer in her 'get-out!' style.

Elaine: 88th Street? That's where Joe Mayo lives. That's the coat!

Jerry: What was that pop sound?

Kramer: Well, I had some hard candy in there.

[stairnaheireann]

#OTD in 1920 – Following a mutiny in India by soldiers of the Connaught Rangers in protest at events in Ireland, Private James Daly is court-martialled and executed by firing squad.

The Connaught Rangers (‘The Devil’s Own’) was an Irish regiment of the British Army originally raised in 1793 as the 88th Regiment of Foot (Connaught Rangers), which gained a reputation both for indiscipline and for its prowess as shock troops and street fighters with the bayonet while serving under the Duke of Wellington during the Peninsular War in Spain. It was one of eight Irish regiments…

[jasminebutintaiwansojiemin]

July 12th, 2024 星期五 - Taipei101 + 饒河街觀光夜市

We met around 10:30 am, then took the brown and red lines on the subway to Taipei 101, where we walked through a huge high-end mall and got to see Taipei from its highest point. To get from the info-desk area to the observatory level, we took an insanely fast elevator that went probably around 80 floors or more in less than 40 seconds. Inside the observatory level, there were a surprising amount of floral photo-op set-ups for visitors to take pictures, however I think the backlight from the floor to ceiling windows did not come out well in the pictures.

The view was pretty amazing. You can see the actual city as well as the lush mountainsides which remind me of the countryside of Jamaica. After taking some pictures in different scene in spots and admiring the view, I went to the gift shop to look at the souvenirs. These days, I try to buy souvenirs or merchandise that I’ll actually use, because I feel like it then carries more meaning to me. After browsing for a bit, I settled for a gold metal bookmark that was cut out in the shape of the Taipei 101 building and a postcard/necklace set. I’m not exactly sure what the necklace is but I thought it was pretty lol. Later, I went to the 90th floor to see the view from the sky deck. It was slightly underwhelming because of the wall/anti-jump gate but it was crazy being that high up and being outside to see the clouds at eye level. After coming back inside, I got the envelope of my postcard stamped with the free ink stamps. At around 12:30, the tour group met back together and we took the stairs to see the massive damper on the 88th floor. After finishing the tour, i went with some of my group-mates to eat at a banquet style restaurant about five minutes away from Taipei 101.

After eating, we took the red line to Taipei Main Station to try to meet some others in the underground mall but it got complicated and we just ended up going to a different above-ground mall. I bought some stationary from one the shops on the 4th floor. I noticed that in this mall, many stores weren’t completely walled off from others. For example, there was a section selling Hurley stuff and quite literally a couple steps to the right a whole other store. At first I figured it was just a giant department store we had wandered into, but now I think that’s just how the mall was. The mall was also connected to a mass bus terminal, which makes sense since it was across the street from the Taipei MRT main station. When one of the other girls went to the bathroom, I noticed there was an option of both western toilets and squat toilets. After shopping, we found another one of the girls in the program and figured out how to ride the red line to the green line transfer. We got help from this Taiwanese lady who spoke perfect English even though she’s Taiwanese. Her American accent was probably better than mine. When we got to the green line transfer platform, we ran into even more of the girls in our group and planned to visit Raohe Night Market after resting for a bit.

I started doing homework when I got in the hotel before decided to attempt to do my laundry. The washing part went fine and I took a nap in the meantime. I woke up to transfer the clothes to the dryer and then went back to sleep. The dryer did not dry much. After trying to figure it out for a while, my roommate came to help but she didn’t have any luck either. We opted to just put it to cold dry in the washer and figure it out later. While it ran, I went to get dressed. I wore pants all day and drowned myself in mosquito spray before because the day before, I got bit up by mosquitos. Before heading out to the night market, I brought my clothes back to the hotel room to finish drying. We took the green line of the MRT to the last stop and spent a few hours walking through the night market. I bought Guava, a brown sugar donut, and some hello kitty playing cards. We headed home closer to 11pm where I showered, FaceTimed by boyfriend, and did more homework.

Academic Reflection

Today’s reading focused on the building of and structural integrity of Taipei 101. It describes the unique damper, structural limits, and safety limits. The reading described how the World Trade Center in New York City went down because of fires, not because of the planes’ impact. It also mentioned that in Hong Kong, every 25 floors of a building must have a refugee floor that is empty and designed to resist smoke accumulation. Reading about safety limits in comparison to the World Trade Center after visiting Taipei 101 made me think a lot about when I went to the 9/11 memorial in New York City. I did notice that when we went down the stairs to the 88th floor, the rest of the stairs were blocked off. Aside from these stairs and the elevators, I didn’t see any other marked and visible exits. Thinking about safety, perhaps it was not the safest. The readings talks about how typhoons and earthquakes are serious concerns in Asia, which makes me think about the lack of clearly marked exits.

Something else I found interesting was the damper on the 88th floor of Taipei 101. The reading describes how the swinging of the internal damper would dissipate wind energy and prevent the building itself from swaying too much and possibly falling over. Our tour guide said that the damper was built to withstand a 10.0 magnitude earthquake. Recently in Taiwan, there were 6.0 and 6.2 magnitude earthquakes on April 23rd, 2024. This made me think about how perhaps being in a building like Taipei 101 would be good as an earthquake shelter. When walking down the street in Zhongshan, I noticed that there were signs showing certain areas to be aerial attack shelters. I have yet to see any signs pointing to earthquake shelters though.

[austin-in-taiwan]

July 12 - Taipei101

Today was the first full day of this trip with the entire group. Our first and only stop of the day was to the famous Taipei101, which was the tallest tower in the world when it was built in 2004. Now, it is the 11th tallest tower in the world, standing at 508 meters. The view from the 89th floor was breathtaking. We could see the mountains surrounding the city from every side, the Taipei Stadium and Taipei Dome, the rivers, the Elephant Mountain, and many other exciting sights. Besides the beautiful view from the top, Taipei 101 had a mall and food court downstairs. This is the first time I have seen such a wide variety of the most prominent designer stores in my life. 

After we toured Taipei 101, we had the rest of the day to ourselves. A group of 11 of us went down the street to a restaurant inside a convention center, and we all paid about 420 NT for a selection picked by the restaurant staff. There was a lazy susan in the center of a round table, and we all got to try a bit from about 7 dishes. Once we ate, we convened at a mall called QSquare and browsed around the 7 stories of different stores.

Earlier in the day, I had asked our tour guide, Peter, if he knew where I could find a Taiwan national team jersey. He directed me to a small store inside a metro station. Unfortunately, they didn't have the authentic CTFA jerseys I was hoping for. Instead, they had a jersey with 'FC Taiwan' printed on it. I decided to return at the end of our Taipei trip if I cannot find a real one.

Academic Reflection

Today, I read the articles in our textbook after experiencing Taipei101 in person. When actually in Taipei101, I already learned a lot about the building and how the damper (an 800-ton ball on the 88th floor) works to counteract and help absorb the high winds and earthquakes, keeping the building stable. Our tour guide, Peter, and the information video inside the building helped explain to us how the damper works. The gold steel sphere is suspended by cables and acts like a pendulum that counteracts any motion. I also learned how the building is used in times of celebration, specifically New Year. Taipei101 is a significant landmark that shoots off fireworks and is very similar to our “ball drop” experience in the United States. 

However, the book and the readings later helped me appreciate some of the architectural significance of this building. I had already learned how it was once the tallest building and had the fastest elevators in the world. However, I had yet to understand the significance of the number 8 in this building. The number 8 is considered a very lucky number in Chinese. In Taipei101, the building has eight distinct tiers, which have 8 floors each. On top of that, the 800-ton ball (the damper) is on the 88th floor. Overall, the lucky number 8 was very significant when the architects designed this building, which also helps the luck of the stock exchange which is housed inside the building.

[haikumaker]

A rare shot of Murder Ink, a mystery-themed bookstore on 88th Street near West End Avenue, in the 1980s.

[z45capp]

July 12 - Taipei 101

Visiting Taipei 101 was an excellent introduction to Taiwan. Being able to go up to the 91st floor and look over the city ensured a lasting impression. The view, not only incredible, gave way to the life of the city, enabling me to watch the cars and buses going up and down the streets, see the open-air basketball and tennis courts, as well as point out the different apartment buildings, memorials, and temples. The mountain view was incredible too, I could see the lush, green vegetation that hints at the natural beauty of the country and gave way to plans to hike Elephant Mountain. The inside of the building is gorgeous as well, with beautiful decorations, floors dedicated to luxury goods, and elegant restaurants along the way. But, the building has something for everyone as there is also a food court and popular restaurant, Din Tai Fung, on the ground floor. With much to explore, Taipei 101 stands out as one of the most necessary places to visit in Taiwan. 

Academic Reflection

One thing that I learned the most about is the damper on the 88th floor. The damper is a 800 ton copper ball composed of eight damping devices. When in motion, each damping device forces fluid through small openings that help to counteract the swaying of the building. Although  the damping devices cannot be seen when visiting the damper, it is nice to have an understanding of how it works and what would happen in the event of an earthquake or typhoon. Nevertheless, when seeing the damper up close, I would not have believed that it weighs 800 tons, the in-person size betrays the mental image provided by the text of a massive pendulum like ball. I do appreciate the opportunity to visit the damper in person and read about similar dampers in other towers around the world. 

The second important lesson I learned from today is about the architectural structure and functional and social use of Taipei 101. Symbolizing luck and prosperity, the architects of Taipei 101 designed the building to have eight floors for each of the eight tiers. The tiers are easily seen from the outside of the building, marking Taipei 101 as an easily recognizable landmark. While inside the building, I found it difficult to recognize when the tiers changed from one to another, but knowing that I only saw a small part of the inside, I suppose I would not have been able to see the different tiers. Still the architectural and structural design should not detract from the functionality of the building. Functionally, Taipei 101 houses the Taiwanese stock market and financial centers. With all the thought put into planning this building and the repetitive use of the lucky number eight, I do believe that the building is very suitable to host businesses where luck and prosperity are much needed. In social functionality, Taipei 101 is the site of many New Year’s celebrations, similar to Times Square in New York City, USA. While I had not known this before, upon experiencing the building I am easily convinced that this is the case. The height of the building is perfect for a celebratory ball drop as there would not only be enough room but  many would be able to witness it from the convenience of their homes. Additionally, viewing fireworks from the tower would be an incredible experience as one could be very close to the display and take in the view of the city at night at the same time.

[gotankgo]

«A wig store on Broadway around W. 88th street in the 1980s.

Photo: Stephen Harmon»

[wanderingnewyork]

Looking eastward along the A line from the 88th Street-Boyd Avenue Station, #Queens.

[beardedmrbean]

NEW YORK, NY – A woman who attempted to abduct and kidnap a 5-year-old boy in Brooklyn Monday night is being sought by detectives from the NYPD’s 88th Precinct.

Police said an unidentified black female approached a child walking with his parents in the area of Lafayette and Flatbush Avenue at around 5:40 pm.

The woman was able to grab the child and began to run off with him. The boy was set free after the woman fled approximately 10 steps away from the parents toward State Street.

“The child did not sustain any injuries as a result of this incident and was reunited with the parents,” the NYPD said.

The woman was between the age of 30 and 40 years old. She was wearing a red and gray jacket with red pants. She had a medium dark complexion, medium build, and short-cropped hair.