Walk

I walked all the way back to the hotel. Forty-one gorgeous blocks.
from Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Sometimes when you look up in New York you are allowed to imagine the city as it was 20, 30, 40 or 80 years ago. I think what suprised me about this building was, in fact, the name: Hotel Lincoln Square.

There's a location (the confluence of North-South Columbus Avenue and diagonal Broadway), next to Lincoln Center, that is being called Lincoln square these days. There's even a Loews Theatre called Lincoln Square. This building, though, is about 10 blocks up-town, looking down on Verdi Square. Which is odd. Increasing the oddness: I assumed Lincoln square as a location dated from no earlier than the building of Lincoln Center (sometime in the early 60's -- just after West Side Story was filmed. The "sets" for the movie are in fact the tenements which had been evacuated prior to being torn down so the Center could be built). But this Hotel is older than that: the sign could be an attempt to garner some reflected glamor from the downtown location, but that seems unlikely.

Anyway. I liked the fire escape, the painted sign, the water tower against the blue sky. I would have taken a picture which got more of the water tower, but there was a women having a loud argument with herself in the ideal spot, and I thought she needed her space.