A new morning. A new week.

I know most of us dread Monday mornings but sometimes, when you’ve had one of those weekends, it feels quite good to start out fresh. There’s something to be said for new beginnings, even if they do come with the beginning of the working week.

To help ease you into this particular Monday morning, I give you a glorious celebration of the resilience of New York and New Yorkers by the New York City Ballet, filmed at sunrise on the 57th floor of the new 4 World Trade Center (4WTC) building.

I was living in New York when the global financial crisis hit in 2008. The impact was almost immediate, and very tangible. A couple of months into the crash I took a walk with the dog around my neighbourhood and took photos of the shops that had recently closed down. It was one of the saddest series I’d ever made.

Some of these places were New York icons. I would think to myself, “Imagine what those walls have witnessed. The conversations, the secrets, the stories.”

Then recently I came across artist Candy Chang’s Looking for Love Again interactive art project, and it reminded me of that walk.

The project focused on a building in Fairbanks, Alaska, which had stood vacant and silent for more than a decade. But once upon a time, this building had pulsated with life. It had been both an apartment complex and a hotel, and it housed a lot of memories.

Chang wrapped the building in a giant plea, “Looking for Love Again,” and invited the people of Fairbanks to share their memories of the building on two big blackboards that were nailed around its walls.

“A lot of family memories stayed here for 30 day! Waiting to have my son who will be 17 years,” someone wrote.

And another: “In memory of my grandparents Rudy and Mary Hill Dad Jay Hill Uncle Jack Hill who built this building with lots of love and hard work.”

And this one: “Remember when the Pipeline Club was on top & women could be ‘guests’ but not ‘members’?”

And simply: “A place 4 ppl to live their dreams and be happy.”

Buildings play such an integral part in our lives. There’s a reason we have a saying in English, “if these walls could talk…” Just imagine, for a moment, if they could. Oh the stories they could tell!

All images from Candy Chang’s project used with permission, from Civic Center.

I have always wanted to do this.

(Photos, video and concept from Improv Everywhere)

Also, RUDE FOOD! (I’m writing about the Magic Pudding on English Muse) >>

I was lucky enough to spend more than a year in New York, and I loved every second. This video brings back so many warm and wonderful memories.

A Year in New York from Andrew Clancy on Vimeo.

Next, I think I’d like to live a year in Paris.

If you could experience a year anywhere in the world, where would it be?

Have you seen these photographs? This is downtown New York in the early 1940s, photographed in colour. Does it look real to you?

While World War II raged on distant shores, an amateur photographer from Indiana, Charles Weever Cushman, took a holiday in New York. He took his holiday snaps on a rare and expensive Kodachrome camera, in colour.

Somehow this doesn’t quite seem real to me. Maybe it’s the soft, hazy, vintage wash in some of the pictures. Or maybe it’s because I’m just not wired to picture life in the 40s in colour. Not real life, at least, just movies.

And yet here they all are, these New Yorkers from decades before I was born, going about their lives, walking the streets I walked, entering the doorways I entered. Suddenly, generations of the past are just like me. I feel connected. Neighbourly, almost. Who knew our grandparents’ lives were lived in colour?

Take a look through Cushman’s incredible collection here. He travelled widely, throughout the US and Europe, and seems to have always carried the trusty Kodachrome with him. It is only by an extreme act of self restraint that I haven’t posted in multiplicity of urchins on farm gates from the 1930s, all captured in that oddly unsettling colour.

Remember iPods, antique iPhones without the networks: remember those things?

I wasn’t an early adopter but can I tell you, when I was given my first iPod that baby changed my life. Suddenly, my days had a soundtrack. Even something as mundane as walking to work became a swim in an ocean of my favourite music.

But have you ever wondered what anybody else’s soundtrack is? Tyler Cullen hit the streets of New York to open up the city’s soundtrack.

I saw this great “Say something nice” video over on Black Eiffel on the weekend, a public project sending positive vibes out into the city of New York. And of all times, I reckon New York could do with some positive vibes right about now. I hope it brings a little bit of positivity to your day, too.

I had all kinds of happy stories planned to tell you in my post today, but I find I can’t do it, because my heart is breaking a little bit for New York.

As I type, the whole city is being battered by a slow-moving hurricane that, the last time I saw the news, was the apparently size of Europe. Is that even possible? Could I have misheard? It’s terrifying. New York is not set up to withstand hurricanes. A week ago the east coast suffered an earthquake (thankfully, my friends in Richmond Virginia are ok, but others are not).

And on Thursday, I found out that the apartment I used to live in in SoHo – filled with many, many good friends – burned up in a fire earlier this month. I feel so saddened for my SoHo friends and neighbours. Thankfully, none of them were harmed in the fire. But some lost absolutely everything: their homes, their possessions, everything from clothes and toothbrushes to travel mementos, wedding certificates and family photographs… as they rushed from the burning building in terror at 2am. Today, my friends are still homeless.

I have all these conflicting emotions: I’m grateful my friends weren’t harmed; deeply saddened for their loss of everything they value and everything they need; so glad that other friends recently moved out of the building; relieved I wasn’t living in the building at the time; and selfishly at a loss because 68 Thompson Street, that place in my mind that has represented the epicentre of my homesickness for New York for 18 months since I left, no longer exists.

Now, I am wishing upon every lucky star in the sky that my friends make it through Hurricane Irene unharmed, too.

Yesterday while out shopping for printer toner I came across something a lot more interesting: a surveyor’s map of New York, drawn in the winter of 1766.

I couldn’t stop staring at it.

Did you ever read Tom’s Midnight Garden as a child? It is a beautiful story. When an old grandfather clock mysteriously strikes 13, Tom goes outside his grandmother’s flat to find that it has been transformed into a beautiful garden. He has been taken back through time, and urban congestion melts away into trees and clover. That is how I felt while looking at this map of NYC.

I lingered in the shop, entranced, and traced my fingers over the drawing. The New York traffic, buildings, people, even the very streets faded and vanished and I stood in an unfamiliar garden, blinking and trying to find my bearings.

There, somewhere in those green fields, or perhaps closer to that river (where did the river go? Does anyone know about a river around about West Houston today?), now stands 68 Thompson Street, the place I used to call home.

Yet nothing of what I know exists on this map. None of the street markets where I would buy cheap art and jewellery, none of the tiny basement venues where I would go to hear my talented friends sing, none of the restaurants where we would eat and drink and laugh and celebrate. There is no such thing as West Broadway, let alone the little cafe on the corner of West Broadway and Grand where I met the man I now call my husband.

It is all forests and a patchwork of fields.

I can recognise Bowery, called Bowery Lane, which merges into something simply labelled “Road to Albany and Boston” (written as Bofton). In what we now know as Downtown, there is a short road called Broad Way. It ends at a little triangle square of green in which is written “The intended Square or COMMON.” You and I know this square better as City Hall.

The map cuts off at Greenwich Village, and the only named road up there is labelled “Road to the Obelisk.” I did a bit of research. A little later, this road was also known as “Monument Lane,” and until the 1770s, it did indeed lead to an obelisk, a memorial to British Major General James Wolfe, who died in the Battle of Quebec. Today you’ll recognise this lane as Greenwich Avenue, and the site of the obelisk (now long gone, nobody knows exactly when or why) is Jackson Square Park.

Is this all boring you? I am so taken up in the magic of a world I know but completely don’t know, that sometimes I forget I’m a bit of a nerd about these things, and not everyone shares my passion for finding links to the past.

I’ll stop now. I promise to resume our regular programming tomorrow.

ps. You better believe I bought the map (it’s a facsimile not an original, so I didn’t have to sell Mr B’s firstborn to buy it).

What you’re seeing here is Sam the Tweenbot, and I’m willing to admit he is EVEN CUTER than the vintage pink robot called Mavis that I gave Mr B on our first Valentine’s Day as a couple. And Mavis is pretty adorable.

Artist and designer Kacie Kinzer set this little guy loose in Washington Square Park, with his destination printed on the flag so that passers-by could help him if he got into trouble (read: fell into a pothole, ran into a bench, got stuck in a bush). Here’s a video of his journey.

Tweenbots from kacie kinzer on Vimeo.