Graffiti

In preparing the itinerary of today, I found the location ‘5Pointz’. This is a former factory location where the present owner thinks highly of graffiti. Therefore the outside walls of this factory are covered with graffiti.




The graffiti artists need to get a permit from the 5Pointz organization, before they can put their creation on a wall. I guess that the persons that don’t get a permit, because they are not good enough, use other walls to spray their graffiti on. Therefore, I think local businesses are less amused by these graffiti artists.

After I visited 5Pointz I was a little hungry and stopped at a road side diner. http://courtsquarediner.kpsearch.com/df/default.asp In general, finding a restaurant in New York isn’t an easy job i.e. the meal is quite expensive and not very good. I guess they know most of the guests won’t return anyway, so why bother with quality. So I enjoyed my lunch at ‘Court Square diner’ with the right price, quantity and quality. It is only three stops from Grand Central station (45th Rd / Court House Square on line 7). I returned twice the next days, to have a dinner at this 24/7 location, on my way to the hotel where I stayed.

Today is the last Saturday before Christmas. Traditionally the last Christmas presents are bought on this day. Last year, when I visited 5th Avenue, the sidewalks were packed with people. At every intersection cops were controlling traffic, because none of the pedestrians were paying any attention to the traffic lights. Therefore I was surprised to see that there were significantly less people in and around Rockefeller Centre. Even though the reduced number of people were smaller, the ‘rappers’ from the Salvation Army did a great job in raising money. My money hardly fitted in the kettle. (Only when I was researching for this blog, I found out that the kettle for donations, as used by the Salvation Army, is designed after a soup kettle.)


Between 5th and 6th Avenue, the Rockefeller Center located with its 8,000,000 square feet of floor space, which has the Ice Skating Rink, with the traditional Christmas tree. Just below the three you can see the statue of Prometheus and, when you would know, the murals inside the building. I was surprised that no one was ice skating on the lakes in Central Park. All people were skating on the miniature rinks at the Rockefeller Center or in Central Park.


You might think something is wrong with the picture below, taken at Time Square. This is the light snow that started falling in the early evening, which eventually resulted in a snow blizzard that would paralyze much of the east coast of the US, for the coming days.


By the time I got to my hotel, the light snow had developed into a snow blizzard with horizontally 'falling' snow. I was wondering what tomorrow would be like. Since my wondering wouldn’t change anything about the weather, I just got to bed and would figure out where to go to tomorrow.