Thursday, January 22, 2015

Roosevelt Island Seniors Association Sponsors Health And Wellness The Natural Way With Doctor Jordan Wolf On Nutrition, Exercise, Posture & More

The Roosevelt Island Seniors Association is sponsoring:

Health and Wellness the Natural Way!
With Dr. Jordan Wolff
Monday, January 26, 2015
546 Main St. (Senior Center)
at 4:00pm

Image From Roosevelt Island Seniors Association

You're invited.

UPDATE 1/26 - The Health & Wellness Seminar has been cancelled due to the blizzard.

3 comments :

CheshireKitty said...

Here are 20 wonderful abandoned properties in NYC as of January 2014 - including the Smallpox Hospital. I certainly give the explorers/photographers a lot of credit for capturing these amazing photographs of abandoned properties - doing so can entail a risk.

http://untappedcities.com/2014/01/28/20-abandoned-places-nyc-asylums-hospitals-power-plants-islands-forts/

Here's another story on a pair of abandoned hospital buildings from the same era as RI's Smallpox Hospital - in this case, lunatic asylums - that offer unforgettably haunting images as they decay. It's not clear if the communities these buildings are in - Morris Plains, NJ, and Poughkeepsie, NY - managed to save these historic structures, the way RI has saved the beautiful Smallpox Hospital.

http://narrative.ly/ghost-stories/up-in-the-old-asylum/?utm_source=narratively&utm_medium=relatedstories&utm_campaign=story-relatedstories&utm_content=2

Also, an article about an abandoned coal-burning powerhouse in Gowanus Brooklyn that was subsequently purchased by millionaire philanthropist Joshua Rechnitz in 2012, and slated to become an art gallery of sorts.

http://narrative.ly/outsiders/vice-and-vagrants-old-school-gowanus/

As of October 2014, the project remains on the drawing board however - here an architect proposes their own idea for the repurposing the powerhouse as an opera house:

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/10/23/picture_this_gowanuss_decrepit_bat_cave_as_an_opera_house.php#more

Some additional proposals by Syracuse University architecture students on possible future re-imaginings of the powerhouse (AKA the Bat Cave of Gowanus):

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/01/07/imagining_a_new_artsy_life_for_decrepit_gowanus_bat_cave.php#more

However, before anything is done with the Bat Cave, it must first be decontaminated, as the State has determined it is a brownfield.

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/01/03/gowanus_bat_cave_needs_decontamination_before_development.php



The Smallpox Hospital site for all we know may also require remediation before redevelopment.

CheshireKitty said...

This is like saying Philippe Petit should have never walked the Twin Towers. His courageous accomplishment was (technically) trespassing - but it created an incredible global memory of that vanished landmark.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Petit


There are plenty of things people do that may be quite dangerous and may or may not be exactly legal at the time but which are usually eventually accepted as either performance/conceptual art or in the case of urban exploration of abandoned buildings, the only way a beautiful image could have been captured, such as wonderful photographs of decaying buildings, graffiti, all sorts of fantastic urban, industrial decay - brimming with the creative destruction of nature breaking down the structures of man, often overlaid with human additions such as graffiti. In a few years, these areas are usually reborn in other incarnations - look at W. Queens/Brooklyn - acres of previously completely abandoned post industrial wasteland, now reborn as gleaming redeveloped acres of housing, parks, and so forth. This is the cycle of life and death of cities - it has constantly happened, constantly will happen, and why not record aspects of the decay cycle of areas on film? As much as we rejoice in the rebirth of areas, there is also an exceptionally beautiful haunting quality that can't be reproduced any other way, in urban decay, that should be captured by enterprising photographers.

CheshireKitty said...

I also lived in Boro Park - but years later, in the 70s and 80s. I lived on 38th St bet. 13/12 Aves. & later on 51st St. bet 9/10 Aves - Ft. Hamilton subway station was my stop and I was constantly riding my bike around to shopping on 13th Ave etc, so I must have walked/ridden by the building innumerable times. It it registered in my consciousness at all during those years of frantically running back and forth to work, school, etc, it never registered as a former movie palace.

It is incredibly beautiful

http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/902

and the community should try to save/restore it (if there isn't already a group that is trying to do so).

A Flatbush former movie palace has been successfully restored http://www.nycedc.com/project/kings-theatre

The $94 million project completed this year and Diana Ross will reopen the hall on February 3rd.

http://www.vulture.com/2015/01/loews-kings-theater-renovation-photos.html


Above article includes a slideshow of the heyday, decay, and restoration of this architectural gem.