#city borough

[slavik1983]

Unused train tracks.

[loving-jack-kelly]

jack kelly would definitely have opinions on if people from yonkers can say they're from nyc or not. he looks like he just ate a lemon trying not to say "actually yonkers is a suburb and not part of the city" whenever he hears somebody answer yonkers to the question where in the city are you from. quaking with rage when somebody says they grew up in the city and then name a yonkers neighborhood. he thinks he's so normal about being a new yorker but he is not and he is incapable of pretending no matter how hard he tries.

[dontstandmedown]

i need the improv comedians who are playing dungeons and dragons in my laptop to stop making me cry/stay up until 3:45 am

[hasarjunadoneanythingwrong]

…it’s a city

[periodically80s]

[thomasthorstensson]

co·​hab·​i·​tate

[meisterdrucke]

Blackman Street, Borough, London by John Atkinson Grimshaw (1885, Gemälde)

[18catsreading]

Pete: if you're gonna fuck with me publicly, at least make it original

Kingston: Picasso is art, this is bullshit!

Ricky: this building is not up to code!!

Brennan: Kingston's approval in this moment fully heals your broken heart.

[sentientcitysmackdown]

Hello yes I would like to know about TCWB NYC's natural and unnatural defenses. How do these personifications deal with monsters, AI-controlled steampunk battlebots, and streets that rearrange themselves to squish people to death.

I'm treating 'smackdown' as meaning we need to know who wins in a fight and my instinct is Mburg but I'd like to know more about Your Guys

Alright buddy, *leans back, cracks knuckles*, you wanna go? Let's go. To quote the book itself: "New York will not take attempted murder lying down."

Ground rules, for those who haven't read The City We Became (read it):

-When a city has enough pull on the collective consciousness, or something cool and metaphysics-y like that, it becomes alive, and chooses an avatar. Or avatars, in NYC's case.

-Every city must also do battle with the Enemy when it becomes alive. The Enemy has, historically, been just a mass of strange white tentacles, a shapeless sort of monster, but recently it's begun using more subtle ways to try and destroy living cities. (A city is made alive by it's people and by how people know it. New Orleans was killed in Hurricane Katrina because people stopped thinking of New Orleans as anything but "the city that got hit by Hurricane Katrina.")

-City avatars can use "constructs" to fight. This looks like different things for different avatars! Some examples: Manhattan, borough where money talks and bullshit walks, literally throws money at the problem (the Enemy) when it appears, buying the land around him back from the Enemy. Brooklyn uses music. At one point, Queens smashes a New York snowglobe into a monster, which knocks it out. They can also channel the collective feelings of New York into power-ups--Manhattan channels annoyance over traffic into something that lets him destroy some of the Enemy. Staten Island uses get-off-my-lawn-y-ness to physically fling the other avatars away from her.

-And then, there's the fights on a city-wide scale. This is a scene in the ending of The World We Make and it's fucking awesome, so awesome I'm gonna put it under a cut because if anyone has read this far and is feeling like they want to read the books themselves, I kinda don't want to spoil it.

Helicopters. Not cop helicopters: reporter helicopters, channeling the power of the press. (It mentioned the Village Voice and I nearly cried.)

And then? A fucking mecha! Steel and skyscrapers and MoMA art for armor! Central Park as a heart and fists made from the concrete and rock underlying everything! It blurs the lines between reality and city-reality, so New York City itself remains intact, but yeah. It's a giant mecha. Like Power Rangers but even more awesome. I would be remiss not to mention the fact that Bronca--the Bronx--is Lenape, and so it also has a Lenape war club, for their oldest inhabitants.

Also: pigeons. And rats. And cockroaches. Gross, and extremely powerful. (And really funny.)

And on top of all this, they can attack conceptually. They channel everything that makes New York New York into their attacks. And, (obviously), they win, eventually.

So, yeah. I'd say New York stands a hell of a good chance in a battle. (Now could we see that reflected in the polls?)

[dadaonice]

Manhattan island

[sometimeslondon]

The Groomsmith in the tunnel leading to Borough Market

[wanderingnewyork]

The #Borough_Hall_Station on the Nos. 4 and 5 lines, #Brooklyn.

[mothmiso]

Wales 2018 (2) by GRAHAM DICKINSON

Via Flickr:

View from Conwy Castle.     

[ihavebeesinmybrain]

the least realistic thing about the unsleeping city is that people living in queens, staten island, and harlem would all regularly be traveling to hang out together

[thomasthorstensson]

Searching

[pwnicholson]

Yankee Stadium by Paul Nicholson