I’ve got spring fever, I’m sick of being plugged in to my computer, and I’ve been out and about with my camera.

[updated to fix typos]

I’m a travel nut. I enjoy having new experiences in places that are not quite familiar to me. Whenever I can get free, I like to go somewhere else and see it with my own eyes. There’s nothing like a firsthand view of unfamiliar terrain to sharpen your powers of observation. And those powers carry over when you get back home, too: you tend to see things with fresh eyes—at least for a while. So I recommend it.

But if you’re not free to travel—or if, like me, you’re not inclined to go too far afield when you do travel—there’s always armchair travel.

So, those of you who can tear yourselves away from more pleasurable distractions and are curious about what on-the-ground reality looks like in the Palestinian town of Bethlehem should check out this feature in National Geographic.

There’s a reported piece that goes along with the stunning pictures. I haven’t read it yet, but here’s a taste.

Bethlehem and Jerusalem are only six miles apart (ten kilometers), though in the compressed and fractious geography of the region, this places them in different realms. It can take a month for a postcard to go from one city to the other. Bethlehem is in the West Bank, on land taken by Israel during the Six Day War of 1967. It’s a Palestinian city; the majority of its 35,000 residents are Muslim. In 1900, more than 90 percent of the city was Christian. Today Bethlehem is only about one-third Christian, and this proportion is steadily shrinking as Christians leave for Europe or the Americas. At least a dozen suicide bombers have come from the city and surrounding district. The truth is that Bethlehem, the “little town” venerated during Christmas, is one of the most contentious places on Earth.

Be sure to check out the pictures.

I’m unplugging for a long weekend. See you on the other side. Here are a few more New York pix to tide you over:

down by the Hudson River:

SoHo fire escape:

Regular readers know that I recently took a little detour away from my usual subject matter to post some pictures of Lower Manhattan. (I’ve got a lot more, by the way, but I have to clean up my startup disk to make room for them on iPhoto. Nightmare.)

Meanwhile, you can read all about the transformation of Lower Manhattan here, in the New York Sun:

Luxury Seems To Be Set For the Lower East Side

Ultra-luxury five-star hotels, the largest supermarket in the Northeast, apartments renting for $80 a square foot, condominiums selling for $1,500 a square foot, top-flight restaurants, a hip nightlife scene, and high-end boutiques: It’s not TriBeCa, the meatpacking district, or the High Line area I’m talking about — it’s the Bowery and the Lower East Side.

“Once a few new projects that were initially viewed as trailblazing succeed and take hold, it makes it easier for other projects to prosper and the gap between the lower end and the high end of the market and condo prices diminishes. That’s precisely what is happening to the Lower East Side,” Mr. Ivanhoe continued. “Once the area is viewed as acceptable for people to live in safely and some entertainment, shopping, and services fill in, the foundation is in place for a strong, stable area for years to come.”

“Its not just condo mania, it’s a confluence of everything coming together in the Lower East Side,” a principal of Columbia Street Developers, Marshall Sohne, said. “From working in the neighborhood, I got to see some of the forces at work. The Bowery was the commercial kitchen district. Now just look at Bond Street between Lafayette and the Bowery where people want a location that they are paying real numbers for lofts without any services. These are ‘hip’ artistic types with big dollars, willing to pay the type of prices that were paid by the tycoons living in the Time Warner Center, but these people prefer to be on Bond Street.”

Read the whole thing if you dare. Here’s a sampling of what a neighborhood in transition looks like.

the old Bond Street, up close

Bond Street, looking east from Broadway

Bond Street, looking west toward Broadway, where it ends in a T

Bond Street construction, seen from a Bleecker Street rooftop

the new 23-story hotel going up on the Bowery

The 23-story hotel is being built around the building where Hettie Jones, ex-wife of Amiri Baraka (ne LeRoi Jones), lives. You can read all about it here. (I snuck onto the building site and took a lot of up-close-and-personal shots like this before getting chased away by a guard. Exciting!)

In the backyard of the new Bowery Hotel

Across the street from the new Bowery Hotel. Just what you want to see after you’ve paid $600 a night for your room, right?

Spring Street, Lower Manhattan, May 2007

See that reddish building way off in the distance, and the greenish one next to it? They’re across the Hudson River, which you can’t see, in New Jersey. The beige building in the right of the picture is on the pier on the Manhattan side of the river.

Update: does it remind you of this classic Saul Steinberg illustration?

Sullivan Street, SoHo, May 2007

Distance usually helps clarify that which was murky.

I’ve made some minor edits*** to “What am I documenting?” … if you’re interested.

————

*** Why is this important? Because unclear writing is evidence of unclear thinking. And since I spend a lot of time on this blog pointing out the logical flaws in the arguments of others, it is only right that I try to keep my own house clean.

For those of you who like to pore over such things, although I can’t imagine why you would want to, here’s a reprint of my original post:

1800	2007-04-29 8:40:20 pm	what am I documenting?

My son borrowed my camera the other day.

“What are you documenting?” he asked when he saw the pictures I’d taken.

Good question. I’m not quite sure, except to say that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction—in this case, the bold and fast-paced transformation of a formerly sleepy neighborhood via striking (and sometimes strikingly incongruous) architectural statements (some of which are artful and most of which are gut-wrenchingly bad) have propelled me out into the streets of Lower Manhattan with my camera. When the inevitability of change gets in your face every time you walk out your door, it seems like a natural reaction to want to document those changes.

There is nothing conservative about me. I come from a long line of rebels. I am not afraid of change—as long as the rush to change isn’t so great that we are tempted to throw out all of the old to make way for all of the new.

So: I have taken to documenting the changes in my backyard. It’s an accompaniment to the hints of changes that I’ve picking up in the culture but cannot possibly document because of the dizzying pace of change.

and here it is in context

Canal and Renwick Streets

Half-measures are not my thing. Yesterday, I took 116 pictures for my photo project without a name.

This is how the old and the new can live side by side in harmony:

and here it is in context:

way west on Spring Street, by the river, April 30, 2007

update: this post has been updated.

My son borrowed my camera the other day.

“What are you documenting?” he asked when he saw the pictures I’d taken.

Good question. I’m not quite sure, except to say that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction—in this case, the bold and fast-paced transformation of a (formerly sleepy seedy, then sleepy) neighborhood via striking (and sometimes strikingly incongruous) architectural statements (some of which are artful and most of which are gut-wrenchingly bad) have propelled me out into the streets of Lower Manhattan with my camera.

When the inevitability of change gets in your face every time you walk out your door, it seems like a natural reaction to want to document those changes freeze the present, at least temporarily. I didn’t set out to hold off the future but rather to preserve my memories of the present (because we always think we will remember how things were, but we never do).

There is nothing conservative about me. I come from a long line of rebels. I am not afraid of change—as long as the rush to change isn’t so great that we are tempted to throw out all of the old to make way for all of the new. The old and the new can not only coexist peacefully; they can live together in harmony.

So: I have taken to documenting the changes in my photographing my backyard. I thought I was documenting the change, but that makes it sound too much like I’m trying to hold off the future. Which I’m not. I have always been intensely curious about the future.

This intermittent photo diary is an accompaniment to the hints of change that I’ve been picking up in the culture but cannot possibly document because of the dizzying pace and odd trajectory of that change. Are we taking two steps backwards at the same time that we claim we’re making progress?

the Gwathmey building at Astor Place, viewed from Cooper Square

NoHo, corner of Bond and Lafayette, looking north

April 2007

The view from Pier 40.

Bond Street, NoHo, April 2007

A while ago, I said I was going to start taking pictures of downtown Manhattan, which is undergoing a massive transformation under my nose. I took my camera with me today, but what I felt like photographing wasn’t new.