This picture from March, 2000, shows two payphones outside the Krash Dance Club in Astoria.

Krash was a popular gay bar and night club which closed some time ago, later becoming a fully nude bar called Riviera. A lot of folks in Astoria do not seem to realize that Riviera is a nude club, assuming it just a re-branded version of Krash. I was incredulous myself when I first heard of it. I thought full-bore naked lady clubs existed only in outlying rural areas, miles from schools and playgrounds. That just shows how little I know about these things. Riviera is 3 blocks from the Frank Sinatra School for the Performing Arts and directly across the street from Playground Thirty-Five.

This picture shows the same view of this street corner in November, 2009.

Whatever the status of this establishment, the payphones outside Riviera are gone, their former positions ironically seen here being stepped on by a passing cell phone user behind an overflowing garbage can which has a habit of jumping out of its decorative cage. A monstrous satellite dish still sits on the roof of Riviera, summoning what signal? Probably none. Countless of these concave platters, mostly useless relics, crown innumerable roofs in this and other cities.

All the remains of these phones is some post holes in the sidewalk, remnants hard to distinguish from other pock-marks and splatter of urban detritus.

I originally posted the first picture into my colluvies of pictures from the year 2000, a year which represented a purportedly epochal turning point at which machines would assume control of the universe — that is, if you believed a certain cadre of paranoid numerologists and indolent COBOL programmers.

Y2K is known to have incurred little if any substantive damage to the fiber of our culture, but while the anticipation made the non-cataclysmic midnight hour seem anticlimactic I think the attention drawn to potentialities of 01-01-00-related computer errors nipped a storm of minor problems in the bud. And by “minor” I do mean minor.

I was at corporate in those days and found myself here, pretty much on this spot, staring into telnet windows waiting for my dial-up connection to the Internet to unleash a flame-thrower in my face on its path of destruction across all computing devices.

No calamities occurred except that some Perl scripts started reporting that it was the year 100. I proudly keep “Year 100” time stamps on the Sorabji.com What Are You Doing? archive from 2000.

New Years Eve is my favorite holiday. Lacking politics and religion it is a happily arbitrary holiday that everyone can agree on. Since youth, even before the Y2K doomsayers, I imagined that Times Square on January 1, 2000, would be a place of apocalyptic importance, and that “The Year 2000” (as many people still refer to 2000) was a goal in life past which anything seemed possible.

It’s amazing how stupid some things seem in retrospect.