New York the eighth

There's a chance the hurricane currently besieging the Caribbean is going to collide with some nasty wintriness coming down from Canada, creating the weather equivalent of a liger that will unleash its wrath all over the East Coast early next week. My mission, therefore, is to get out and walk while the walking's good. And probably also to buy a raincoat.

Everywhere was so dark today. When New York does overcast, it does it right.

Balloon bendy fountain sculpture.

This is the Winter Garden Atrium. (Man that photo is crooked. I really need to see about getting my fake leg refitted.) I can't quite figure out its purpose - it's like a really under-tenanted mall. It's part of the World Financial Center, and pretty much all that glass was blown out during 9/11. Yikes.

This is the garden outside the Winter Garden...or something.

South Street Seaport is old wharves (or "piers", if you will) redeveloped into something like Wynyard Quarter in Auckland plus that mall on the Sydney waterfront. I had lunch at the place with the umbrellas because it's called Pacific Grill and, heh, ocean confusion.

This is down near City Hall. Those guys standing in the middle there seemed about to break into some b-boying (every so often one of them would bust a partial move) but their hype man couldn't pull a big enough crowd and nothing came of it. 

Yo B-Frank, what it is?

Later in the afternoon I went up to Rockefeller Plaza. It was so ridiculously familiar - like I'd been there before...in that same reality where Liz Lemon is my best friend.

Behold, yon flags!

  And yon ice rink.

And yon Art Deco embellishments.

I was a little underwhelmed by the NBC studio tour. We did go into Studio 8H, which is where SNL is filmed, and that was exciting, but, well, why do Americans have such a dorky sense of fun? Do they really enjoy being made to finish sentences in unison with a bunch of strangers?

We also got to go into the Today Show studio, which turned out to be the one where the hosts sit in front of a street level window. Yeah, that one. I recognise it from many 30 Rock jokes.