This is a puzzle cache. The cache is not at the listed coodinates. You must solve the puzzle to get the final coordinates which is a short walk away.
This area is famous for being in the Martin Scorsese film "Taxi Driver" with Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, and Cybill Shepherd. De Niro plays Travis Bickle, a taxi driver, and this block is where the taxi garage was located, although it looks very different today.
Travis is a war veteran with PTSD and drives taxis to help him deal with insomnia and loneliness. He says, “Loneliness has followed me my whole life. Everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There’s no escape. I’m God’s lonely man.”
The philosopher Bertrand Russell is name-dropped in the film when one of the taxi drivers, Wizard, is philosophizing with Travis about becoming what you choose to do: "Look, a person does a certain thing and that's all there is to it. It becomes what he is. Why fight it? What do you know? ... You're like a peg and you get dropped into a slot and you got to squirm and wiggle around a while until you fit in." When Travis says that's the dumbest thing he has ever heard, Wizard responds, "What do you expect, Bertrand Russell? I've been a cabbie all my life, what do I know?" What's also funny is that in real life, a taxi driver picked up Bertrand Russell and asked him, "Well, Lord Russell, what’s it all about?" And Bertrand didn't have an answer either.
Yet, Travis is more reminiscent of another loner - the Danish existential philosopher Soren Kierkegaard - who is famous for writing about the personal passionate subjective experience of life. Soren broke up with his fiancé Regine because he felt a calling to God and couldn’t figure out how to love both of them at the same time. By the time he figured it out, she had married someone else. For the rest of his life he obsessed over her (from a distance) and died alone at age 42.
Travis and Soren were both God’s lonely men, both searching for meaning in their existence, both alienated from society. Soren wrote that “purity of heart is to will one thing,” urging us to will the good to unite our existence. For Soren it was philosophizing. For Travis, it was… well, you’ll have to see the film for that, but he says, “Now, I see it clearly. My whole life is pointed in one direction. I see that now. There never has been any choice for me.” Travis did, actually, have choices, and chose to point his life in a violent and morally flawed direction. Not what Kierkegaard had in mind.
Along this sidewalk, most lives are going to be pointed east or west, but you’ll have to orient your life (or your eyes, at least!) in a slightly different direction to find this cache.
Busy area with lots of muggles. Please use stealth!
The cache is outdoors. It in not in a garden, a plant, or a tree.
Congrats to SafariBabe for being FTF!!!