Entries tagged with “Brooklyn Bridge” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York

The final season of the Sci-Fi Network's series Battlestar Galactica resumes tonight at 10:00 p.m., with the first of ten episodes that will bring the series to its conclusion.

The show is a brilliant remake of the late 1970s series starring Lorne Greene about a race of robots called Cylons who destroy all of humankind's colonies, forcing the few surviviors to embark on a quest to find their mythical home planet -- Earth.

The new series, which began in June 2005, is a gritty update that is one of the smartest "political" shows on the air today. Full of Biblical overtones with its lost tribes searching for a promised land, the series is also about the ancient struggle between the Greeks and the Persians -- between a polytheist culture and a monotheist culture -- with the added twist here that it's the humans who are the polytheists. ("Praise the Gods!") In addition, the new show offers a further twist: the robots have evolved so that many of them look identical to humans (that there is a robot at the right), and they believe that they're on a mission to do God's will in cleansing the galaxy of humanity -- or at least converting humanity to their fundamentalist point of view.

Another reason for readers of this blog to be interested in the show: one of its lead characters, a fighter pilot played by Katee Sackhoff, is named "Starbuck."  (In the original series, Starbuck was a man, played by Dirk Benedict, who went on to star with George Peppard and Mr. T in The A-Team.)

The show left us with a mid-season cliffhanger last June, in which the humans and a group of Cylons have in fact discovered Earth. But a promised land, it is not, as the episode's title, "Revelations," turns out to be a pun:


When I first saw this post-apocalyptic image last summer, I immediately thought: It's New York -- and a homage to the conclusion of Planet of the Apes, in which the protagonist (played by Charlton Heston) sees the ruins of the statue of Liberty and realizes that the planet ruled by apes on which he' thought he had been stranded is actually Earth after some future war. (You can see that scene here on YouTube.)

Compare the image above to this one of the Brooklyn Bridge:

In the intervening months, fans of the series have studied that image, looking for clues about the future of the series in it; apparently, many have also suggested that what we're seeing is a ravaged New York City.

But perhaps Manhattan won't turn out to be the island at the center of the world, as far as Battlestar Galactica is concerned. One of the special-effects gurus who worked on the Battlestar shot reveals that original scene was filmed in Vancouver. Check out his blog for an interesting account of the creation of the shot and a peek into the world of special visual effects.

We'll learn more tonight about post-apocalyptic Earth. If this sounds interesting to you but you haven't been watching the show, don't worry: you can still hop on board the Battlestar. There's a marvelous 13-minute recap available called "Catch the Frak Up" ("frak" being a swear word in the BG universe). The amusing video is narrated at breathtaking speed by Sackhoff and is available on the show's website, as well as on iTunes (free) and amazon.com (free and downloadable to your Tivo). And the first three-and-a-half seasons are available on DVD if you find yourself getting hooked!

The American transplant of the British series Life on Mars premieres tonight on ABC. The title of the series refers to the David Bowie song, which was playing on NYPD detective Sam Tyler's iPod, when he is hit by a car and suddenly transported back thirty-five years to 1973. When Tyler (Jason O'Mara) wakes up, the song is playing on an 8-track. Tyler returns to his station to find people whom he doesn't know: Chief Detective Gene Hunt (Harvey Keitel), Detective Ray Carling (Michael Imperioli of The Sopranos), Detective Chris Skelton (Jonathan Murphy of October Road); Chief Detective Gene Hunt (Harvey Keitel), and policewoman Annie Norris (Gretchen Mol), who becomes his 1973 love interest. His present-day (2008) love interest is played by Lisa Bonet, and the series mixes past and present through dream sequences. According to the Los Angeles Times, the opening episode "closely follows the model, not only in plot and dialogue but often in specific shots." The series, originally set in Los Angeles, was drastically reconceived after David E. Kelly dropped out and turned the series over to the producers of October Road and Alias. Only O'Mara returns from the cast that appeared in the pilot.

During a recent walking tour to Brooklyn Bridge, my Modernist New York class came across a scene from the series being filmed near the Brooklyn Heights Esplanade:




It was a kick to see the cars and clothes of my pre-teenage days. I'll be watching the pilot just to see Harvey Keitel do his thing. After that, we'll see: perhaps I'll add it to my TiVo's Season Pass list, where it can join Mad Men (set in New York in the 1960s) and replace New Amsterdam, another show that evoked New York's past, but was cancelled by Fox last spring.

Meanwhile, here's a preview of the series from the Los Angeles Times:

blast from the past -- Bowie as Ziggy:

I wrote earlier about Mayor Bloomberg's desire to reclaim parts of Manhattan for pedestrians. Starting today, and for the next two Saturday mornings, almost seven miles of Manhattan's streets -- from the Brooklyn Bridge to the middle of Central Park will be closed to automotive traffic from 7:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. as part of the "Summer Streets" program. The motto of "Summer Streets" is "Play. Run. Walk. Bike Breathe." The route runs up from City Hall, Lafayette to Fourth Avenue, then up Lexington, up Park Avenue after Grand Central Station, and finally across 72nd Street to the park.

According to the publicity materials for "Summer Streets":

This event takes a valuable public space - our City's streets - and opens them up to people to play, walk, bike, and breathe. Summer Streets provides more space for healthy recreation and is a part of NYC's greening initiative by encouraging New Yorkers to use more sustainable forms of transportation.

Modeled on other events from around the world including Bogotá, Colombia's Ciclovia, Paris, France's Paris Plage, and even New York's own Museum Mile, this event will be part bike tour, part block party, a great time for exercise, people watching, and just enjoying summer mornings.

There are three rest stops along the route, each of which has a full schedule of activities during the morning. It's a great idea, and I hope that some of you who are in town will be able to take advantage of it. Click here for a flyer about the event in PDF format.

Last week, Bryan wrote that he found Oliafur Eliasson's waterfalls "completely underwhelming." I've been thinking about that. Certainly they do not have the dramatic impact of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's 2005 project "The Gates," which swathed a wintry Central Park in orange fabric and thereby transformed its landscape. And I think that's the point: it's a big public art project that aims to be low key. Eliasson's project asks us to do a double-take: the waterfalls draw attention to parts of the cityscape that we rarely look at, that we tend to take for granted.

My wife and I took our children out on one of the Circle Line's half-hour tours of the waterfalls, which leaves from the South Street Seaport. The kids enjoyed the outing, but I think that getting on a boat with the deliberate object of seeing the waterfalls may not be the best way to experience them. It may be better to take the longer Circle Line harbor tour or even the full trip around the island, because then the waterfalls become just one of the sights to see rather than the main attraction. (If you do take the half-hour boat, get there early so that you're at the head of the line: the boat they use is smaller than the typical Circle Line boat and has limited outdoor space.)

I was rollerblading last Sunday by the Hudson River and paused at the Battery. Looking across the water, I saw the waterfall that Eliasson had erected on Governor's Island, and it made me pause and look -- and to scrutinize the island in a way that I never had before.


On Tuesday, my wife and I biked over to Brooklyn, taking the Manhattan Bridge first and returning on the Brooklyn. During the trip, we managed to see the waterfalls from above and from afar, and they became parts of the cityscape, even as they drew attention to areas that we would normally glance over.

And the waterfall at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge acts as a kind of footnote to the bridge (literally), drawing attention to the way that the bridge rises out of the water without detracting from the drama inherent in the bridge itself.



The Gates project was an event. In Oliafur Eliasson's Waterfalls project, it's the city that remains the main event. The Waterfalls are an homage to the interplay of built space and water that is a crucial part of the city's character.

Until it heads off to the fabled Giants Causeway in Antrim, Northern Ireland, Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy 2: The Golden Army is a New York film, like its predecessor, 2004's Hellboy. As I wrote in my post on Hancock, New York is still superhero central. (Though I'm told that Gotham City in The Dark Knight, which opens this week, is meant to be seen as a version of contemporary Chicago.)

In Hellboy 2, the elvish prince, Nuada (played by Luke Gross), emerges from under the streets of Manhattan to declare war on humankind. And underneath the eastern end of the Brooklyn Bridge is the troll market, which seems to be Del Toro's homage to the famous cantina scene in Star Wars: A New Hope (1977). Last Sunday's Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times featured an article about Del Toro's fascination with fantastic creatures and the diaries of artwork in which the inspiration for Hellboy 2 took shape. [Click here for a multimedia version of the article.]

In both Hellboy films, the title character (played by Ron Perlman) chafes at being kept out of view and hidden from "the outside world." He lives, after all, at the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Development, located in .... Trenton, New Jersey.