Friday in Manhattan

The early morning walk down Broadway to catch the express train

 It was a day at work in Harlem. In one room I was in the kids were writing about "Technology now and then". In a previous session one of the boys was writing about MP3 players and was wanting to know what had been before them. The kids thought it through a little and came up with CDs and stretched their digging back in time to come up with records- one student asked "What are records?"
This got me thinking about records and my experience with them...
A while back (like a year or so) I did a post about the first record I got which was a 78, one of the hard shellac recordings. Until I was doing a little research I'd forgotten the following aspects of the records...
Such 78 rpm records were usually sold separately, in brown paper or cardboard sleeves that were sometimes plain and sometimes printed to show the producer or the retailer's name. Generally the sleeves had a circular cut-out allowing the record label to be seen. Records could be laid on a shelf horizontally or stood upright on an edge, but because of their fragility, many broke in storage. (Wikipedia)
The thing I remember most is that they were hard and my first record was given to me by dad and it was My pony Whipstick. I wasn't a horse crazed little girl in fact was a tad nervous of them but the music was a great sing along.
My first record that I remember buying for my own record player was Deep Purple- Dark side of the moon. I didn't "need" to buy records before then as I have older siblings who bought records and the only place to play them was on the record played in the lounge room and that wasn't going to happen very often. I really only played records when I was doing my "jobs" for the week of dusting and vaccuuming the house. Needless to say I didn't recount all this to the student who would have become even more bewildered.
At one stage another student commented that before they had ways to play back music (hadn't thought of records and such quite in those terms) they used to go to the theatre to hear music!

Did the long way home walk again- five days this week!

The Lincoln Centre is close by and this closed amidst controversy or at least much complaint- the rent was too high

The final obvious part of the bump out- the sign came down