a new york shade of color

In this week's New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has a little gem of an essay about Jerry Shore's photographs of unbeautiful New York. Among other things, he observes:

Shore had an original sense of color, and he didn’t mind playing with his realities to bring it home. Almost every Shore photograph is organized around a bright panel or pole of red—a distinctively New York red, not a sunset or a tropical red but an emergency-call-box or fire-station or athletic-socks red. (He seems to have carried a paint can of the red he liked with him; some inauspicious walls suddenly appear covered with it.) But mostly he found it where he went looking for it: the Shore red appears on diners and aluminum siding and, above all, in ads on lampposts and walls and bits of scrap metal and the signs on Texaco stations.

which amuses, as it brings to mind a recent conversation with a photographer friend who was discoursing upon "New York yellow" (a yellow of taxicabs and traffic signs, nothing so natural as the gingko tree leaves we were observing).

So in the spirit of both, some notes of Brooklyn red (mostly a kindlier, brick-faded shade) culled from the pictures my crappy digital camera and I gathered while wandering around in the sunshine this week.

the enchanting police/fire call-box post at the end of my block


one way across fifth avenue


geraniums in a park slope window box


and not to leave Manhattan out entirely--

a lower east side synagogue resurrected as a center for the arts