Blunt Stick

The mission to find the spots from which Calvary Cemetery is seen in the opening minutes of Dog Day Afternoon was basically a failure. The cameras in that film must have been on the Kosciuszko Bridge, or else otherwise elevated, because Sections 1 and 6 (where I thought the shots were filmed) are nowhere near as high as I imagined. I was able to line up where the Pan Am Building (today the Met Life Building) intersected with the school (today a Best Western) but when I made that connection it became obvious that the shots were filmed from much higher up than the highest point of the Calvary grounds.

The profile of Manhattan’s skyscrapers rising up like a chorus of needle-like ancillary graves in those opening moments of Dog Day Afternoon is one of the few memories I have from first seeing this film in 1975.

Calvary forbids filming on its grounds, and now that I know the Dog Day crew filmed the cemetery from beyond its actual grounds I revisit my hunch that the makers of The Godfather either got special permission to film the funeral scene there, or they just ignored the rules and trespassed, setting up shop without asking. The latter scenario would be pretty uncool.

Seeing the Citi Building from Calvary reminds me of a project I started but only pursued with feeble distraction.

I was once ejected from the grounds of the Citi Building after a security guard at the building saw me taking a picture of a flag pole. The picture would have included the Citi Building in the background, and for that reason I was told to leave the grounds. I was further admonished to never again take a picture of the Citi Building. “Nobody takes pictures of the building,” I was told.

In response I decided to get as many pictures of the Citi Building as possible from all the creative angles I could find, and I pursued the project with some zeal for a few months. I had a goal of 181 pictures of the building, and I may have reached 100 before moving on to other malcontentednesses.

The idea that the Citi Building was not to be photographed seemed ludicrous enough to inspire a fantasy line of sunglasses and filters. I imagined a product line of CitiView sunglasses. In accordance with that security guard’s fantasies these CitiView glasses, when worn, would cause the Citi Building in Long Island City to vanish. You put the glasses on and the building becomes invisible to you. Using lens and filter widgetry that made a zebra look like Ed the Talking Horse, these glasses would render the Citi Building invisible. New cameras could be equipped with CitiView technology, making photography of the building impossible.

Yeah.

The Citi Building is a blunt stick which, at the time, lumbered solo over the Long Island City landscape. Since then another curvy building has been added to the slowly growing Citi compound, but from a distance the profile of the first building still registers like a thud on the skyline. In direct afternoon sunlight the building looks like it is made of Saran Wrap, and the structure’s contours suggest it is the center of a 3-D game of Tetris. From certain vantage points around Long Island City the building just screams, demanding attention by virtue of its spatial histrionics, just as the bucktoothed Twin Towers mercilessly grinned over lower Manhattan.

I was hired to take a picture of the Flatiron Building and the editor told me that the Citi Building in Long Island City, along with the Flatiron Building in Manhattan, is one of only 2 skyscrapers in New York that can be seen in its entirety from the ground. I thought that an interesting bit of trivia, reflecting how a proper appreciation of Manhattan’s architecture is made difficult by the congestion. I have been browsing through Mannahatta, one of the more excellent books I’ve seen in the last year, and I find it baffling but also gripping to know that the surface of Manhattan was once dense with wildlife and rugged hills, and that certain places in midtown still retain the contour of the land as it was 400 years ago.

One of the many angles from which I appreciate the Citi building is when it seems to be an extravagant glass tomb among the markers at Calvary. Outclassing even the mighty Johnston Mausoleum on sheer size the Citi Building fits nicely (and with suitable bluntness) into the Calvary lineup.

I have heretofore told this only to D. (and that was while we were sitting there) but one of my favorite places to sit in all of New York is on a staircase on the western tip of Section 6 at Calvary. It may be the lowest point on the grounds, from which one looks up at a fairly steep hillside behind which the Citi Building lurks. There is a sound I hear from that spot. It is the sound of cars crossing the Kosciuszko Bridge, sounds of engines rumbling and horns uselessly honking, and at moments of particularly fragile silence I can hear the sounds of human voices from the cars. The bridge must be a half mile away but its sounds rain down on that hillside and deflect off the graves. Without those stone platters these sounds I hear would vanish into the soil.

I got some serious sunburn yesterday. Heat is waving through my system, so if I fall asleep while writing this I hope you’ll excuse the lack of decorum. I grew up in Florida and you might think I knew a thing or two about exposure to sunlight, but I failed to demonstrate this knowledge yesterday. Your skin is your body’s largest organ, a factoid which sends me into adolescent huh-huh nudge-and-a-wink behavior as I contemplate my enormous organ. I took a dump at the cemetery bathroom, and with the window wide open and the open air feel of that little space I felt like I was shitting off a tree at summer camp. It was a humorous exit from my comfort zone — a place I think I should exit more frequently.

I took my film SLR out today and shot 20 or so pictures before noticing that the film was not advancing. Crap. So I got the film lined up on the spool thingie and went back to get some shots again. I hurried to Walgreens to get the film developed but Walgreens let me down. Their one-hour photo developing machine was busted, so the best I could expect was to come back in 24 hours. I tried to find other places but no. Rapid fire photo developing is becoming hard to find, and even if it was not Easter Sunday I think it would have been hard to find a one-hour photo place at 5pm on a Sunday. The darkroom gear lurks in my kitchen but I have no memory of how to use it, and today’s photos were color while this enlarger is a black and white monster. I expect to tell the story of that film SLR to my accountant tomorrow, in our annual conversation covering the highlights from the past year of my fascinating life.