Dream Log: A Good Time in NYC

In last night's dream, NYC was like NYC except that there was no pandemic, and everyone my brother and I ran into tended to be both very bright and very friendly. There are of course many very bright, very friendly people in the real NYC, but most of the people there are pretty much like most of the people everywhere.

My brother and I were visiting New York for some reason.

In downtown Manhattan we ran into a man who was traveling by electric skateboard. I told him I was interested in electric vehicles, and that I had read about electric skateboards and seen videos of them, but this was the first I had seen close-up. The man responded by talking about a minor-league baseball team based across the river in Brooklyn. (When I woke up I assumed that there were currently no minor-league teams in the real NYC, but I researched it, and there are at least 2, and at least 1 in Brooklyn.)

The man's mention of the Brooklyn baseball team carried my brother and me to Brooklyn, where we stood on the sidewalk outside the stadium where a game was being played, and a ball came over the stadium wall and rolled past us and past the glass patio door of an apartment. Inside the apartment, a baby pressed up against the glass of the patio door, reaching out its hands to try to catch the baseball rolling past. My brother ran and got the ball and waved with it through the patio door, offering to the baby's mother to give it to the baby. The mother invited us into the apartment, which was full of children and dogs. One of the dogs tried to eat the baseball. I managed to get the ball out of the dog's mouth, and mentioned to the mother that maybe the dog was hungry. The mother answered that she couldn't see why, and gestured to a dog dish which was full of slices of turkey which looked and smelled plenty good enough for people to eat.

When I saw the turkey, suddenly my brother and I were out on the sidewalk in downtown Brooklyn. A young man was handing out flyers, and something in the expression on his face made me think that maybe the thing for which he was handing out flyers was actually very good. They were flyers for the opening of a soul-food restaurant. The young man smiled and nodded his head to one side. I took a flyer, followed the direction of the man's nod, and soon my brother and I had found the restaurant.

My brother and I weren't the only white people in the place, but all of the staff and most of the customers I could see were black. I returned the warm smile of the woman behind the counter, nodded at my brother and said, "This is my brother. He's afraid of black people. I thought this could be an opportunity for him to learn and grow." The woman laughed, my brother scowled. I asked if there was something on the menu which would be good for eating while walking, and the woman suggested an appetizer which cost $6. It smelled like liver and looked like a brown pile of assorted fried items. I took a plastic spoonful, and it was marvelously delicious. I went back to the counter and asked for a second plastic spoon so that my brother could have a taste. My brother took a bite and agreed that it was amazing. We went back and ordered more food to go. I asked the lady behind the counter, who appeared to be the head chef if not also the owner of the place, what exactly was in these appetizers. "Chicken livers and a lot of other stuff," she answered. I told her I had already assumed that much, and asked if she could be more specific, but clearly, this was a top-secret-recipe type situation. I got 6 barbecued chicken thighs to go. My plan was to put them in the fridge and see what they tasted like as cold leftovers. I was convinced that they were going to be tremendously good that way.

And then I woke up.

Dream Log: Liev Schreiber's Chili

I dreamed that I was working serving lunch in a soup kitchen in Lower Manhattan. Perhaps most of you already know that "soup kitchen" refers to a place which offers free hot meals to people in need, whether soup is included in the meal or not.

This soup kitchen was a big one, with a dining hall seating hundreds of people at a time. After we had finished serving the people and cleaning up, I fixed myself a tray and went to to eat with some other people who had worked there that day.

As some of you may know, soup kitchen food can range from really terrible to really, really good. This particular meal was nothing fancy -- no-beans chili, corn bread, greens and coffee -- but each part of the meal had been made really, really well.

In this dream, there was no dangerous virus circulating. People stood close together and touched each other. On my way to sit down I smacked Liev Schreiber

on the back, and he joined me to sit at a small table with George Clooney and Jeri Ryan. All of us were bundled up in winter clothing because it was cold at this table. A small window let in some light. Outside it was sunny and very, very cold. Liev and George both had beards. I didn't see any facial hair at all on Jeri, and I looked very closely because it was a very, very pretty face, with no make-up on it, my favorite way to look at pretty faces.

I was nervous the whole time because I was afraid that George Clooney was going to spring one of his famous practical jokes on me, but in this dream, he didn't.

Liev said, "How do you like the chili?" Goerge and Jeri and I all groaned and rolled our eyes and said Oh my God it's good. Liev persisted, "Is it only good because it's cold in here and you've all been working hard, or would it taste good or under any circumstances?" The three of us took that question seriously, took a little time with it, but we still all agreed that it wasn't just a matter of the setting or the circumstances, which admittedly enhanced the ewxperience. We all agreed that this chili was just terrific, period. Liev grinned and asked us, "Did you notice that it's vegetarian?"

We had not noticed. After some very, very close inspection, George asked, "Is this tofu? It really tastes like ground beef." Liev nodded. George asked, "Are you sure?"

Liev said, "I ought to be sure, I cooked it." We asked him how he had done it, and he just grinned and replied, "With great care and skill. And some great tofu from one of our donating stores." George, Jeri and I all raised our paper cups of coffee to toast the cook.

After a while Liev said, "It's always cold in this corner in the winter. It's ridiculous, the walls in this corner are full of holes. Let's patch it up." He took a shopping list for a hardware store out of a pocket and handed it to me for my perusal. I just handed it straight on to George and said, "I never paid attention in shop. I only passed because the shop teacher took mercy on me. I honestly think I'd be the most help by continuing to wash dishes and staying out of your way."

Liev didn't want to give up on me that easily. "You could help out, and maybe learn a couple of things."

"I'm fifty-eight freakin' years old, Liev," I replied. "Thank you for offering me the opportunity, but.. You know: old dog, new tricks." And at about that time, I woke up.

Dream Log: Nervous Speechwriter in NYC

I dreamed that I was living in New York City --

-- and that I had joined a firm which wrote speeches and essays for non-commercial institutions. Sort of like ad-copy writing, but with less bad karma. I was given the assignment to write a speech on the history of an entity called The Lower East Side Women's Help Foundation. I was also assigned, in this case, to deliver the speech. I went into my boss' office and said that I had recently gotten into trouble for mansplaining, and that I was worried it might happen again on this project.

"Are you planning to explain their current day-to-day operations to them?" my boss asked.

"No, I'm planning to write about the history of the organization, as they've asked."

"Then I don't see a great risk of accidental mansplaining here," my boss said. "Look," she added, "I know these people. They're good people. You'll like them. They'll like you. Get out of my office."

Despite my boss' kind reassurance, and despite my research into the organization having shown me that I probably would like these people, the day of the speech came, and I was very nervous.

I was at the lectern of an auditorium on the ground floor of The Lower East Side Women's Help foundation. The auditorium was full of cheerful, well-dressed women. One of them knew me, and ran up to say hello. "I'm very nervous," I told her. "I've recently gotten into trouble because of mansplaining."

"Let me see what you got," she said, grabbed the pile of paper on which my speech was typed and paged through it. "Looks fine, she said. "Don't be afraid of these people. They're on your side. I truly think the worst that could happen is they'll notice you're nervous and they'll think it's cute. Believe me, they've sat through speeches much worse than that." And she gave me a reassuring punch to the shoulder and returned to her seat.

After a mercifully short introduction, I began my speech: "The Lower East Side Women's Help Foundation was formed in 1862, and was originally called New York City Ladies for Action." This fact caused a ripple of laughter among the audience, while some others looked around, seemingly wondering what was funny. I relaxed a bit, and continued: "Some women in New York had noticed that hospitals were being hard-pressed to treat all of the wounded Union soldiers in their care..." and then I woke up.

Dream Log: Clueless Corporate Chairman

I dreamed I was in NYC, and I agreed to take over a non-vinyl music store, even though I have never shown any aptitude for business. The store was bare white walls illuminated by bare light bulbs on the street-level floor of a big 1920's skyscraper, the previous tenants had moved everything out.

I already had a couple of employees in this space, and they came with me to another one whose interior resembled a 4-car parking garage in a suburban apartment building, except that there were no vehicles and no fuel smells.

More employees kept joining the company, and if any of them doubted my competence, they hid it well. I ran motivational drills to foster esprit de corps. In the meantime some of the employees did what they would do in a music store, actually buying and selling the CD's and keeping records and so forth, without my having to ask them to do it, which was good, because I didn't even know any of the words involved. If an employee came to me for help or advice I would usually either slap them on the back and tell them they were doing great, or tell them to ask another one of the employees. I began to get the feeling that this method was actually working well and that the company might turn out to be a success.

Adjacent to the part of the business space which resembled 4 parking spaces, there was an alcove with windows that let in a lot of sunlight. Some employees, on their own initiative but with my praise, were turning the alcove into a place that looked like a colonial American alcove. There came a problem when they were starting a process which turned some beer into something that smelled like the animal poop in a colonial American barn. Some of the employees were upset about the poop smells. I solved this problem by simply telling them to use other smells, like the smells of budding flowers. Then I poured a pint of the beer, made sure that it did not smell like poop, and took a sip.

It occurred to me that I was not certain that any of the employees was as old as half my age. (In addition to my other shortcomings as boss, I had not looked at any of their applications, where I could have learned their ages.) It seemed wrong to me to continue to abuse their naive, misplaced trust in me. I decided that the best thing to do would be to pick one of them to replace me. I was beginning to think about who should replace me when I woke up.

Dream Log: Huge Little Italy

I dreamed I was in Little Italy in Lower Manhattan in the 1970's, but in my dream, Little Italy was much bigger, covered much more ground, than the real one.

I went into a restaurant which belonged to the family of a friend of mine, which by itself covered about as much ground as the real Little Italy. I came in off the street into a conventionally-sized dining area painted white, in which a dozen or so heavy-set people were seated, all facing away from me. A door in the back of this dining room led to the main part of the restaurant a semi-private place -- you didn't need a membership, but it was good if you knew somebody -- with many more rooms, some big, some small, and with halls and staircases going up and down, going on and on, with other dining areas which were not strictly separated from food-prep areas. Once past the white dining room in front, the colors of the walls and floors were earthy: a lot of varnished wood, a lot of red-brown paint. Here and there young couples sat and embraced.

Exiting the back of the restaurant, and making a couple of right-angle turns in alleys, I emerged into a large park. The whole area, like the semi-private part of the restaurant, looked lived-in and worn, but solid. The grass in the park was a little bit scruffy. Only a little bit. It looked more comfortable than messy, like a sofa which was obviously old, but not yet full of holes.

As I walked on, I saw at one edge of the park, to my surprise, a row of small houses, looking very much like the houses in some neighborhoods in Queens, New York, and in a hundred other cities in the US, but most unusual, to say the least, in Lower Manhattan. Then I looked a bit closer and saw, through the front windows, rubble piled up inside the small houses, and right away I understood that they were about to be torn down and replaced with something very different, and I thought that that was somewhat of a shame.

Further on, there was a building in a stage of collapse, about ten stories high. One exterior wall was completely gone, and there was no construction or demolition going on inside and the building was not roped off, and people were coming and going.

In this abandoned building were many items there for the taking, including some rather rather nice furniture, old telephones, lamps, file cabinets -- and many large high-ceilinged rooms were quite full of books. I naturally spent some time looking through these. I was quite disappointed, not as much because of the physical condition of the volumes, a bit dampened by long exposure to the open air, as by the texts they contained. Many of the books were bilingual, English and German, and seemed to be offering English texts for natives speakers of German, and German texts for native speakers of English, and offering generally unimpressive texts in both languages.

After I gave up the search for interesting books, I walked on and came to another park, where a group of young people were tossing footballs around -- American footballs:

They let me play catch with them.

After a while I moved on again, until I came to a place with a good view of the skyscrapers in the financial district, including the old World Trade Center twin towers, which at that time were still quite new. I stood looking at the skyscrapers for a while, thinking about the small houses nearby which were about to be torn down, and how in New York City buildings were always been torn down and built. and then I woke up.

Dream Log: In Madonna's Entourage

Last night I dreamed I was walking around in the upper 50's in Manhattan, the place where midtown meets the southern edge of Central Park, near dusk. I did not see John Wick running at the end of John Wick: Chapter 2, but it was the right part of town and time of day to do so. I did, however, see Robert Redford walking on the sidewalk, looking 40 years old or even younger, with collar-length hair and enormous 1970's-style sideburns. A limousine drove past and a teenaged girl pressed both hands against the rear window as she gazed out with longing at Redford.

Then I was in a hotel suite and I had joined Madonna's entourage, somehow. There were over a dozen of us with Madonna in the suite. It was the present day, and although Madonna is 60 years old in real life, and in the dream she was still the same Madonna with the same decades-long career, in the dream she looked like she did in her early 20's:

I felt very much like the newbie in the entourage, and I was very nervous about getting off to a good start. I was in a hallway just outside of Madonna's bedroom. A jewelry box of Madonna's had been the subject of much attention. I noticed that it was not pristinely clean inside, so I decided to wipe out the lint and dust. When I was done doing this, however, I realized that I had made a big mistake, because the box had been the subject of much careful scrutiny without touching the inside of it, as if it had been a crime scene. Another member of the entourage took the jewelry box from my hands and took it into the bedroom to Madonna. I heard Madonna scream "NO!" and throw the box against a wall. I was mortified.

A little later, Madonna and I and several other members of the entourage had gone from the suite to the hotel's lobby. There was a TV hung high on one wall of the lobby. Madonna was sitting on a couch. She had the remote control in her hand and had changed the channel to a movie.

A man none of us knew, about 30 years old, wearing a black leather jacket, blue jeans and shiny black shoes, came and sat down on the couch next to Madonna, took the remote away from her and changed the channel. Several of us in the entourage gasped. Madonna looked surprised and displeased.

I said to the man, "She was watching that movie." He replied, "So what?" I asked: "Madonna, is this guy bothering you?" She regarded him for a long moment, then finally sighed and said, "Yeah."

I went over to him, took ahold of the lapels of his jacket, lifted him up off of the ground by his jacket -- he weighed about half as much as me -- carried him several steps away, set him on his feet on the floor, took the remote from his hand and tossed it to Madonna, put my arm around the man's shoulder, walked him a good distance away, said, "Why don't you go bother someone else now?" and returned to our group. Madonna was beaming at me, and several people actually clapped.

Madonna patted the sofa beside her to tell me to come sit down beside her. When I was sitting she told me, "That was very gallant." I mumbled something like, "Oh. Well." Madonna added, "Forceful, but gentle. I'm glad you didn't hurt anybody or break any hotel property." I responded, "Well, I'm not a maniac." "Clearly," Madonna replied.

We were both silent for a while, and then I said, "I'm sorry about the jewelry box." Madonna said, "Oh Jeez, let it go! I have!" I said, "After I cleaned it out I realized that that was exactly what you didn't want done to it, because you were examining it exactly as it was." Madonna said, "Uh-huh, and did anyone explain that to you?" I said, "No," and Madonna said, "No. So we know that, not only are you not a maniac, you're not a moron either." And she gave me a great big smile, and touched my shoulder.

"Oh," she said, and told me to turn so my back was toward her. She dug her fingers into my shoulders and upper back and said, "Wow, you're really tense." I told her that I had some pain from sciatica and that the pain sometimes made me tense up. She asked me whether the sciatica responded to massage and I told her that it did. She called for her masseur. "We help each other out," she told me. "That's how this works." I wasn't sure whether by "this" she meant the entourage, or life in general, or maybe something else.

When the masseur had me on the table and was working on me, I became sort of like a cyborg with a diagnostic video screen hovering in the air beside me. Every time the pain lessened, an additional red light appeared on this screen.

Then I woke up.

1841. And Latin. And New York City

The 1840 census recorded a population of over 317,000 for New York City, making it just three times the size of the second-largest US city, Baltimore.

At the time, New York City still consisted only of Manhattan; Brooklyn was a separate city, the 7th most-populous in the US with just over 36,000 inhabitants. The Brooklyn Bridge, and the joining of the other boroughs to Manhattan in the area we now know as New York City, were still nearly a half-century away.

The upper crust of New York society was large, growing, entrenched, and committed to at least an appearance of acquaintance with the finer things in life, among which were considered to be at least a fair command of Latin and at least a slight acquaintance with Greek. The two largest universities in the city were Columbia College and New York University, the upstart democratic institution founded in 1831 and at that time, somewhat the opposite of today, committed to educating promising students from all classes of society. Professor Charles Anthon of Columbia published A Classical Dictionary in 1841. The New York Review, in a tone somewhere between admiration and disparagement, described Professor Anthon's volume as an effort to establish American Classical scholarship at a level "as may not blench in presence of European rivalry."

Besides Columbia and NYU, Princeton was not far away across the Hudson River, and educated many of New York City's upper crust; others attended various other institutions of the Ivy League.

Dream Log: Monkey Love In NYC

I dreamed I was living in NYC, where I lived 20 years ago, and seeing a woman I knew 20 years ago. In real life, 20 years ago, she and I fooled around a a couple of times, and I liked her and she seemed to like me okay, but we never really clicked. In the dream, we had been fooling around for a while, and things were beginning to get really good. We were talking about this other guy she saw now and then, a former NFL player and currently a personal trainer, and she told me that she had decided that she didn't want to date him anymore, she just wanted one boyfriend, just me. I had already earlier come to the point of wanting only one girlfriend, her, so now it was official: we were going steady. We were in a restaurant, making out for a moment or so when we thought no-one was looking, when we talked this out. We were a little giddy.

The strange thing is that she and I were both monkeys. In real life I'm a human being, about 6'3", and when I knew her she was a human being, maybe 5'6" or so, but in the dream we were little monkeys, each of us not much bigger than an average cat. My Mom and step-Dad were in the dream, my Mom was still alive, the two of them looked middle-aged, and they were both human beings. Her Dad was in the dream and was a human being. All of the people in the dream were human beings except for my girlfriend and I. We could talk, and all of the other people treated us like people and like there was nothing unusual about us, but we were monkeys and we could climb like monkeys. After we left the restaurant we walked down the sidewalk for a while on our hind feet, holding hands, trying to appear calm but bobbing our heads in happy excitement over being officially a couple now. In my head I felt like I was doing handsprings and singing with the accompaniment of a big flashy orchestra. After a short stretch on the sidewalk we zoomed up the side of a building and raced along some ledges stories above street level. I don't know which borough we were in, but it was an area which hadn't yet been gentrified which contained a lot of tall early-20th-century buildings.

We dropped down into a pizzeria where we were always welcome -- literally dropped down into it, the way we usually came in: unfastened a screen over the skylight, came in, re-fastened the screen behind us and then dropped down from the ceiling.

I don't know whether we were actually related to the people who owned and ran the pizzeria (again: all human beings. All the people in the entire dream except us were human beings, there were no other monkeys in sight), but they treated us like family. (Literally, not in that cheesy fake way you see in Olive Garden commercials, but not, unless I'm gravely mistaken, in Olive Gardens.) Next to the cash register there was some sort of chart in which the status of the people associated with the place was recorded by some sort of shorthand signs. Somehow we were updated in the chart to an exclusive relationship. Somehow they had found out the decision we had made a half-hour ago blocks away. The bald guy behind the counter (my uncle? Her uncle? Or like an uncle to us?) saw us looking at the chart and said, "Don't worry, we know you don't want to tell your parents yet. They won't hear it from us."

How did they know we didn't want to tell our parents yet?

After we had been in the pizzeria for a few minutes her father came in, looked at us and tried not to look disgusted. Tried, but failed. He was a tall wiry guy with thick short salt-and-pepper hair who looked angry every time he saw me. He didn't like me. That was okay with me. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I felt like it was his job, as my girlfriend's father, not to like me until I put in a lot of high-quality work to win him over. It seems to me that to a good father, his daughter is always his little girl, even if she's got 12 grandchildren of her own, and anybody who comes around messing with her is to be harshly discouraged. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, or worse, but this seems to me to be the natural order of things.

He walked over to us. My monkey girlfriend hopped up onto her human father's shoulder and he gave her a kiss on the cheek. Then he looked at me, looked away in disgust and anger, forced himself to look almost in my direction again, and said to me, "Look. Obviously, you two are starting to get serious --" How did everybody know?! " -- and, well. She's a smart kid. If she can stand you, then..." He turned away, and, almost with his back to me, he patted me twice on the back.

This was far and away the most positive reaction I had ever gotten from him and it felt wonderful. My monkey girlfriend was also pleased by her father's reaction. With a hand clamped over her mouth she climbed onto his back so he wouldn't see her reaction to his reaction, with her other fist she pounded the air excitedly.

The next stop was my Mom and step-Dad's apartment. (In real life they never lived in NYC.) As we came into the apartment from the window my Mom called out from the kitchen, "Congratulations on going steady, you two!" I ran with all four feet into the kitchen, jumped up onto the kitchen table where she was seated, and stared up at her. In real life, as a human being, I stood head and shoulders taller than her. In this dream, as a small monkey, she and my step-Dad were sitting on kitchen chairs, I was standing on the kitchen table, and I still had to look up. "Mom," I asked her, "how does everybody know we're going steady?" Mom just said that it was obvious, and didn't explain any more than that.

Dream Log: Real And Unreal Cities

Like many other people who have spent most of their adult lives in big cities, I grew up in rural areas, dreaming --literally and figuratively -- about big cities. Since I had spent very little time in big cities, my childhood dreams about them were, of course, quite unrealistic. For some reason, many of my dreams about big cities still have that same unrealistic quality, featuring a lot of really gorgeous-looking extremely-big buildings which have never existed.

Shortly before I went to bed last night I saw the latest episode of "Homeland." The episode was set mostly in Berlin, as is most of the current season of the show, and partly in Amsterdam. The establishing shots of Amsterdam, the wide-angled shots of downtown areas, clearly were really shot in Amsterdam. While watching the show I wondered how many of the scenes set in Amsterdam with Claire Danes and other major cast members were actually shot in Amsterdam, and how many back in Berlin. I was thinking, if that's fake Amsterdam shot in Berlin, it's pretty good fake Amsterdam.

Then this morning it occurred to me to wonder how many of the scenes set in Berlin might actually have been shot on a Hollywood sound stage, or in Canada, or Pittsburgh, or wherever. Part of the reason that more big-budget movies and TV are shot in southern California than anywhere else is because the area offers locations which can look like anywhere on Earth: the polar regions, the tropics, the Sahara, mountains, prairies, ancient Egypt, the moon -- you name it. And for over 100 years Hollywood has just kept on getting better at looking like anywhere. It used to disappoint me after I learned that so many movie and TV locations were faked. Now I just see it as one more aspect of film-making which can be done well or poorly, and I appreciate it when it's done well. Many movies set in NYC and shot in LA look much more like NYC than many shot in NYC. That's a fact. If any director has made a really good and convincing movie set in LA, with lots of exteriors, which was shot entirely in NYC, that director is an awesome genius. It's a lot more difficult than the other way around.

So anyway, I went to sleep thinking: Real Amsterdam? Fake Amsterdam? And maybe subconsciously I was already thinking: Real Berlin? Fake Berlin? (Clearly, a lot of it is real Berlin, including a fair amount with main cast members. I'm just wondering whether the Berlin in the show is 100% Berlin.) And I dreamed about a very unrealistic-looking Cologne, Germany. Way too many skyscrapers, and most of the other buildings were also unrealistically tall. Germany doesn't do skyscrapers the way the US does. 14 of the 15 tallest buildings in Germany are in Frankfurt, which gives it a skyline rivaling that of Cleveland, and not rivaling Chicago or NYC, or even LA.

So yeah, this dream-Cologne had an entirely unrealistic emphasis upon the vertical. Even in the dream I thought, Hey, is this Berlin or something? But the city in the dream was much more rife with skyscrapers than the real Berlin or even the real Frankfurt. It was more like the real Hong Kong, skyscraper-wise, than anything in Europe. (East Asia is doing skyscrapers even more than the US, these days.)

And the dream was mostly about a friend and me walking up and down and around on open-air staircases on apartment buildings way, way up in the air, among glassed-in skyscrapers, in nice short-sleeves weather with gentle breezes, visiting people who had big luxurious apartments with spectacular views of many skyscrapers all jammed together in an entirely unrealistic downtown Cologne. It felt a lot like we were flying.

Skyscraper Construction In New York City Since 1997

Why since 1997? Because I haven't been in NYC since 1997. I lived there for a few years. It hurts, hurts, hurts to think of seeing the city without the twin towers, which were there every time I was there, beginning in the 1970's when they were still pretty new. Besides being huge they are... They were. It hurts. They were unmistakeable, grabbing the eye from tremendous distances away when the view wasn't obstructed by other buildings -- in many places in Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn the only far-away thing you can see is the sky -- or weather or hills.

But I gather that that loss isn't the only great change in the skyline which would confront me if I went back. On the first page of the 2010 edition of the AIA Guide to New York City, a terrific book by the way, Norval White and Fran Leadon inform us that "September 11 was followed by an unprecendented building boom." I hadn't known that. But I've surfed around and seen some recent photos of Manhattan and, yes, things do look a bit different. On Skysraperpage.com, a nifty site with lots of drawings of the world's tallest buildings, already built, under construction, proposed and more, drawings all to scale next to one another, I refined the search to buildings in New York City, New York, United states, since 1997, and I see that since I've been gone, 3 buildings over 1000 feet tall have gone up in the city (2 according to this website, but I'm counting One World Trade Center as done and they're not counting it as done yet.), 7 over 800 feet, more than 25 over 600 feet, more than 50 over 500 feet. If we expand the search to include buildings under construction we see 6 buildings over 1000 feet, 13 over 800 feet, 37 over 600 feet and Ohmygosh over 500 feet. Yes, things have been happening. The AIA (American Institute of Architects) Guide gives pointed and interested opinions of buildings, but not necessarily always much idea of their size, so the Guide and Skyscraperpage.com sort of compliment each other.