Welcome to New York! Did you remember to pack a helmet?

A block to the east of this building...


...near the entrance to Bryant Park you'll find these two beauties.

That fella on the right is the new headquarters for Bank of America. I'm not a big modernist but I actually like that design. At least it's not just another upended glass cracker box like its neighbor to the left. It has some interesting contours and angles.

Here’s a close-up of the façade of the Bank of America building.


Those dark spots? Those are boarded up windows where the panes of glass fell to 6th Avenue during construction! This occurred on more than one occasion. It happened at this time last year and I don't understand why they haven't replace the glass yet. I remember coming out of work and being horribly annoyed because I couldn't walk down 43rd St. I later found out that they had to block off the area because it was raining windows.

My favorite quote from the linked story:

“I saw the glass fall,” said Ana Contreras, 40, a roasted-nut vendor who runs a stand at 43rd Street and the Avenue of the Americas. “I was sitting right here.”

And then, proof positive that Ana is a true New Yorker:

Ms. Contreras said she was seated on a milk crate under an umbrella next to her vending cart and was unafraid as the shards of glass fell around her.

Because everyone knows that a vendor umbrella is the best protection against a plate glass window that's plummeting to earth at a high rate of speed.

The previous year, eight people on the ground were injured when a bathtub-size steel bucket full of debris fell from the roof of the same building.

Not long after these incidents, Bank of America purchased the detritus of the collapsed Lehman Brothers, which was the first step in pulling BoA under water.