You Know You're a NYC Geek...

...when you look at this ad, and say, "Hey, that's Lincoln Center. But something's really weird." First of all, I think the perspective of the apartment relative to the backdrop is screwed up (photoshopped in?). But I know Lincoln Center... that's the part of town I'm in a lot, given that my sister and my friend Air Force Guy live right around there... and those streets don't look right. I'm familiar with this view--this is from my sister's condo balcony:


Aha. Google Maps aerial view to the rescue: they mirrored the photo for this ad--check out which building has the curved wall 'doghouse' on top.

Anyway, I was feeling a bit nostalgic recently, and I looked up my birth certificate to check exactly where I was born. Like I've mentioned before, I was born in Brooklyn. Turns out it was: Park Slope (New York Methodist Hospital). Man... that just about ruins any street cred that I had going on, doesn't it? ("Straight outta Park Slope, Crazy motherfucker named Batman...") (with many thanks to BirdJen for introducing me to Nina Gordon's acoustic cover of 'Straight Outta Compton')

Despite that location providing the image of an overprotective Jewish yuppie mom, Park Slope in the early 1970's was pre-gentrification--it was probably on its way downhill at the time. One of my few memories from growing up in Brooklyn was our trash getting set on fire on Halloween, and my dad running in and out of the house refilling a bucket of water to put the fire out before it spread. That and the hexagonal paving stones in Prospect Park--to a two or three year old, it was pretty amazing to see these non-square shapes that fit together in a repeated pattern... probably made too much of an impression on me.

Hey, I was born 3.5 miles from the World Trade Center site.

Man, I miss New York.