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June 27, 2006

Battery Park City

This is the walk we took on Sunday.

I had never been to Battery Park, so we started walking in that general direction after meeting friends for brunch in Tribeca. The path we followed falls into the category of places-in-New-York-I-should-know-about-but-don't. It's part of Battery Park City and is called, loftily, the Esplanade (map).

It's really well kept up and is embellished with benches, elaborate landscaping, observation points, a Water Taxi station, two mini-meadows, a high-end volleyball court, and a little harbor filled with boats. I'm pretty familiar with the path and piers along the West Side Highway, but I had no idea the walkway kept going--all the way to Battery Park. I also had no idea it was so tony. It feels a little like the people running past you with iPods might possibly be stockbrokers, and some of the boats in the harbor were larger than our apartment building.

It's a nice walk, though. It's right along the water, and all the extra money being spent on keeping things beautiful doesn't hurt. The Statue of Liberty, Jersey City, Ellis Island, and various sailboats and ferries are on view.

Derek said it reminded him of Disney--specifically, Epcot, where one might visit "New York" and see the Statue of Liberty in forced perspective. The railings and decks are newish and very clean, and there were a few Disney-appropriate tourists mulling about.

It doesn't quite have the old-school charm of the Brooklyn Heights Promenade or the Red Hook piers, but it's long on ammenities and is definitely the most polished of the three. And since I love being anywhere near the water, especially when it doesn't smell like sewage, I'll be back.

Posted by csageday at 12:05 AM | Comments (0)

June 25, 2006

Rainy Red Hook

Red Hook is pretty close to south Park Slope, so it's somewhat embarrassing that we hadn't been there until today. We had read and heard about Sunny's, Hope & Anchor, the Fairway, the barge, the arty things going on, and the crusade to bring back the trolly. We had been invited to hear someone's band play. But there never seemed to be an easy way to get there, so we never made the trip.

Finally, since we had nothing else to do, we drove there today. The recent Time Out article for Red Hook newbies was very helpful. The rain made things wet and deserted, but I was still very happy with what we found.

We started at Hope & Anchor, where the food took forever to come but was good. Next, we walked down Van Brundt and noticed signs of neighborhood yuppification. First, we saw "baked", an upscale looking bakery. Next, there was "The Good Fork", which reminds me of a Smith Street restaurant. In between, there was torn-up pavement, a Mexican deli, an empty lot or two, some sort of ramshackle outdoor market, a cool vintage furniture shop, and a variety of newish and falling-apart-old buildings. It reminded Derek of old Williamsburg. There are also old red brick warehouse buildings, which would have made for great photo subjects on a sunnier day.

As you get closer to the water, there are warehouses to each side, with endlessly repeating double doors -- these are in good shape, and the one to the right houses Fairway. You can walk past that and directly onto a pier, or to the Water Taxi station. Behind the warehouse to the left is a falling-down assortment of shipping and storage buildings. Rusting contraptions meant to unload ships, and two masts from an actual sunken ship, sit around as if their operators simply left one day and never came back. It's fascinating. I love old things, and these are huge, complicated, hulking old things. They're like the largest antiques in the world. I'm very jealous of the people who work in the studios in one of the warehouses -- they're right on the water, and they have this other-worldly landscape of 1860s industrial works to look at when they get bored. They can also see the remains of the trolly -- three cars are parked right on the water, on what seems to be a well-preserved track. The electrical wiring above the track is even in place. I can see why someone wants to get it working again -- I would LOVE to ride a trolly. I'm kind of pissed all the trollies that ran in the city are gone. They're so much more stylish than diesel busses.

Our feet were soaked, so we headed to Fairway, expecting a wide variety of food to make us feel better. It was a disappointment -- I'm not sure why. It was freezing, I couldn't seem to get a good recommendation from the cheese guy, and the produce isn't that great (the co-op has spoiled me). The little cafe has a very nice outdoor sitting area, though.

Finally, on our way home, we hit two more Red Hook landmarks. We visited the Valentino pier (launching area of the Gowanus Dredgers), where I saw a guy catch a humungous fish, and we got some tortillas and corn con crema (so good) at the stands set up at Red Hook Park. Next time, I'll go on a sunny day so I can catch some photos of those massive loading docks before Corcoran bulldozes it to make way for luxury condos.

Posted by csageday at 02:40 AM | Comments (0)

June 24, 2006

Wave Hill

I've been reminded, again, that New York City is rather large, and has many, many hidden spaces that I do not know about. For example, Wave Hill. Wave Hill has popped up in a friend's Flickr photostream many times in connection with photos of his kids running down a grassy hill. Because I am an ignorant and poorly-informed New Yorker, I filed Wave Hill away in my brain as the name of a grassy hill somewhere in the Bronx that looks vaguely like a wave.

Later, a co-worker of Derek's got a job at Wave Hill, so I surmised that it might involve a bit more than a grassy hill. In fact, it's a "public garden and cultural center" that has been open to the public for 30 years.

Derek and I went there after work one day last week (the aforementioned friend invited us for a sunset gathering) and discovered that it's a beautiful spot. A former family estate, it includes several buildings, a horticulture center, gardens, a beautiful expanse of green grass with adirondack-like chairs placed in twos and threes, and a terrace overlooking the Hudson and the Palisades beyond. The view is fantastic, especially when the sun is setting. It feels a bit like the Cloisters -- it's quiet, private, old, and there's so much greenery that it feels luxurious after you've spent a sweltering day looking at Manhattan concrete.

The grass seemed so inviting that I took off my shoes. On a walk from one building to another, we saw two rabbits. Not rats, not pidgeons, but actual wild brown rabbits. The first one we saw was directly in our path and didn't seem fazed by our approach. I thought it was a strategically-placed sculpture, but then it hopped away, and we noticed another one in the bushes. I'm still kind of amazed by that.

As we walked around, Wave Hill kept getting more complicated and impressive. One of the buildings houses art installations, and a beautiful and quite large knitted chandelier is currently on display. It was felted to resemble dark green vines and drooping pink flowers, and I highly recommend a visit for any crafty New York-based readers. Other exhibits explore how we experience our environment through smell, sustainability, and birdsong (the birdsong one was installed in the surrounding trees). A big old stone house at one end of the property has some gorgeous trees out front with big wide trunks. Apparently Mark Twain had a treehouse in one of them once. Here's a bit of history, with a photo of the view.

A downpour sent us into the conservatory (see photo, from Wave Hill website), where we found hundreds of plants. I am still upset about forgetting my camera -- there were so many unusual plants in there. We found cacti with leaves arranged like a rose bloom, plants with peach fuzz, and plants that looked nothing like plants at all. The herb garden out back included many familiar spice names (think Indian spices) that we'd never really thought about as living plants. (There's lots of information on the Wave Hill site about the various gardens and plants.)

Here's the visiting info. In June and July, you can have dinner and watch the sunset on "Sunset Wednesdays." We got lazy and drove there, but you can take MetroNorth (it's a $3 ticket or something like that) and easily walk from the train station. Too bad it's not closer to Brooklyn!

Posted by csageday at 01:42 AM | Comments (3)

June 14, 2006

MoMA Photos

Can I rant for just a little bit? So MoMA is all different and huge now, and there is a fantastic Architecture & Design area (with Apple products and subway signs and a Bic pen), and there are warehouse-sized rooms downstairs and famous paintings upstairs.

My favorite part of their collection, however, is the photography. What have they done with that? They've dedicated one of their less-glamorous, back-of-the-building mazes to the art, and they cram in whatever they can willy nilly. There's a little Stieglitz, a little Steichen, some Cindy Sherman, and some newer stuff all in the same room (or at least it feels that way). And it's crowded as hell. And MoMA owns tons of really fabulous photography. Why can't they showcase it better?

I'm so disappointed every time I go there, because I head straight for photography and then feel as if I'm on the subway -- people stand right next to me, and it feels like one of those cars where every ad is designed differently. If I'm lucky, there will be some great photography in one of the mammoth rooms, but you have to wander through random huge welded things to find it. Next time, I have to try ICP instead.

Posted by csageday at 02:06 AM | Comments (0)

Red Horse Cafe

I tried out the newly-opened Red Horse Cafe right up the block last week, since it's a prime candidate for morning coffee and self-indulgent pastry purchases. I'm quite attached to Naidre's at this point, but I have to walk up not-so-pretty 12th street to get there, and the Red Horse Cafe would allow me to change that route.

When I walked in, I noticed that a task force from the Tea Lounge had already staked out the leather couches to take advantage of the free wireless access (strike one). At the counter, a woman with 15 children or so seemed to be in some sort of endless negotiation about which cookie to get for which child, or which cookie should be split in two and be served on different plates for different children, or something like that. She took forever to make up her mind. There were two people behind the counter, and both seemed absorbed in helping her. Neither seemed quite confident enough to be the owner.

When I got service, I asked what the two available baked goods were, exactly. I know the place is new (I think this was the second day), but the woman I asked had to walk back around the other server and look at a piece of paper taped to the register. When she came back, she informed me that the scones contained cherries and chocolate, and the biscuit had cheddar and something else which sounded fine but not what I was in the mood for.

I looked at the scones again closely and was amused to find that they obviously had nothing to do with cherries or chocolate. They had blueberries -- the bits of blue throughout gave that away -- so I figured that they were either three-berry or blueberry and ordered one anyway (it was blueberry and it was good). I also got a cappuccino, just to try things out, and it was pretty awful (strike two, but hey, it takes 10 years to break one of those machines in, right?).

I went back to try their regular coffee yesterday, and I think I might have ordered from the owner. He seemed very nice, but pre-coffee, I'm not much for conversation. The coffee wasn't very good -- way to strong for my taste, which really doesn't bode well for future visits (strike three, sadly). The blueberry muffin was yummy, though. I'm rooting for Red Horse to do well, since it'll improve things on my closest corner, but I think they have some work to do. I really don't think a place with "Cafe" in the name can survive for too long without good coffee. But then again, there's Starbucks.

Posted by csageday at 01:29 AM | Comments (0)

June 09, 2006

Gymnastics Again

I still can't believe what I did the night before last, although I do have a constant entire-body soreness that is reminding me every time I sit, stand, or attempt to climb or descend stairs. I took a gymnastics class at Chelsea Piers (yes, this was inspired by Stick It).

Quite a lot has changed about in my physique in 15 years. And this class -- this was no class for adults wanting a nice and easy intro to the sport. Here's the description. Note the non-intimidating references to "all levels," "basic," and "beginner" -- it's all complete bullshit. I mean, there were beginners there, and they got special attention, but the class reminded me a great deal of a regular practice from my serious gymnastics days. The coaches were similar, too (they do not tolerate laziness! 10 push-ups, now!). In a way, this is good, because it's the real thing -- you absolutely get your money's worth. Still, I had fantasies about waltzing into a gym after 15 years with a big nostalgic grin on my face, ready to exchange reminiscences with coaches or dazzle a class of adults struggling to do a cartwheel. Instead, no one really cared -- we just went ahead with exercises. It occurred to me during the class that there must be thousands of ex-gymnasts missing the sport (a search for gymnastics videos on YouTube confirmed this later).

We started out with running around the floor, which was followed by a standard combination of warm-up and strength and flexibility exercises. What amazed me was how fast it accelerated, and how much the class could do. The warm-up morphed into handstands, then half-turn handstands, then handstands on alternating hands, etc. The pace was great, and I was slightly amazed and glad that these (younger-than-me, cocky-but-good-at-their-jobs) coaches were actually letting us do all this stuff. I mean, what if someone broke an ankle? But then again, we're adults, so we should know what our limits are, maybe? I couldn't believe I didn't have to sign a waiver and be interviewed at the door -- I half expected the office staff to review my state of health and refuse me entrance to the gym altogether.

I started to feel the extent to which I have let things slide about a minute into the opening run/warm-up. By the time we were done with handstands, my wrists felt as if they'd been run through a meat grinder. I wondered if the intense joint pain was anything like arthritis, or if perhaps I had arthritis. I wondered if I would be able to do anything else after the handstand activity that involved inverting my body completely. I was dreading the cartwheels. But the funny thing is, as each new form of pain announced itself throughout the two hour class (which felt like a six hour one), I was able to work through it by simply continuing to do whatever the coaches told me to.

The handstands were followed by handstand-rolls, then cartwheels, then one-handed cartwheels, then no-handed cartwheels (couldn't quite manage that -- I'd start out, then frantically throw out a hand as my head rushed toward the carpet), and then combinations.

One side effect of being an adult while tumbling is nausea. This makes sense. Normally, when flipped upside down and sideways and around quickly, one's stomach tends to react negatively, no? I didn't really expect this. What I expected instead was to rupture some tendon or groin muscle while doing a round-off or back-handspring, but, miraculously, that didn't happen. Instead, I felt that my wrists and ankles couldn't quite handle the impact, and my stomach couldn't handle something that had seemed so natural years ago. I was grateful that I hadn't snacked ahead of the class, and I had to limit water intake just to make it through to the end.

The simple floor exercises were followed by tumbling sequences with big squishy mats, then front flips (trampoline optional) into the "pit" (big injury-preventing hole in the floor filled with foam pieces). Then came the serious stuff -- the tumbling without life-saving mats. A few of my classmates (I should mention that a good deal of the class was made up of men, which I did not expect, but maybe it's easier to do all this stuff without boobs) went ahead with round-off backhandsprings. Gamely, I went along and tried to do one. Bad idea. The first thing I discovered, which I oddly did not discover in other activities, was that one cannot wear glasses during tumbling, as they will end up 15 feet away. The second thing is that I can't quite manage a back-handspring myself at my current age of 28. My arms can't do to do what they're supposed to, and my legs can't either, for that matter. In my mind, I've got it down perfectly, but on the floor I did the round-off fine, launched myself backwards, landed on my hands, and then promptly fell into a heap on the floor after them. The coach looked mildly concerned and said, "Better have a spot next time." When I got back to the line, a classmate (who I couldn't identify after that, because I did the rest of the class blind), said "I LOVE you! You have absolutely no fear!" which made me feel good, though the right assessment would be that I'm just really, really stupid and completely out of touch with my physical capabilities.

A good half hour was spent on tumbling. I kept doing round-off back-handsprings (with a spot), and taking breaks in between to regain some semblance of a normal heartbeat and level of nausea. My face was probably purple (this is what happens when I work out strenuously -- highly embarrassing), so I'm glad there were no mirrors. I desperately wanted to put my head on the cold concrete walls, but I thought that would have looked strange. Basically, I was in way over my limit, but I'm competitive and stupid and I really wanted to stick it out.

I was truly grateful when it was over. I haven't been able to walk any faster than a 90-year old since. I have gained some insight into the lives of people with impaired mobility (people move so fast! Toilet seats are WAY too low! There are at least 80 stairs in my commute!). I have avoided all kinds of bending-over in the past 48 hours, and I have to pause between steps. It's beyond pathetic. I feel great about having done it, though, even though my body is pretty messed up.

This person can do the round-off back-handspring with a tuck at the end and she's been out of the gym for 10 years -- it completely puts me to shame, but maybe if I can work up the courage to go back for another class I can work up to that (or maybe not).

Posted by csageday at 12:57 AM | Comments (6)

June 05, 2006

M is for Movies

We saw two films at MoMA last weekend, both of which were part of "To Save and Project: The Fourth MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation." I have to give Derek credit for the tickets -- he is always finding films for us to see at MoMA (and always getting tickets, since he can get them free). The last one we saw was introduced by Martin Scorsese himself (it was "The Red Shoes", a gorgeous film). As an added bonus, the crowd at these films is the most eclectic bunch of old-New-York characters we've ever seen (think crazy hair, outfits and glasses from the 70s, questionable social skills, and an I've-been-doing-this-since-MoMA-opened attitude).

First, we saw "Bunny Lake is Missing," a 1965 British film about an American mother's search for her missing four-year-old girl in London. It seemed to take some inspiration from Psycho. The plot has great promise -- especially since the mother is new to London and clearly out of place: the inspector investigating the disappearance starts insinuating that the girl may never have existed (psychodrama!). The audience hasn't seen the girl either, so this seems feasible for a little while, but the whole thing doesn't quite pull together. There are too many scenes that just don't seem believable, and the audience is given a few too many clues. The end is quite overdone. Unfortunately, a remake is in the works with Reese Witherspoon starring -- I can't really see much good coming from that.

Next, we saw "M" (1931), which was really extraordinary, considering its status as the first film with sound in Germany. It was written and directed by Fritz Lang of the fabulous "Metropolis". The cinematography was absolutely wonderful -- lots of odd angles and Orson Welles-like shots. Black and white film can be so elegant when contrast and repeating patterns or odd angles of city landscapes are used -- this particular style really appeals to me, possibly because I love black and white photography. It's a very entertaining film, too -- it deals with a series of murders of children that have terrorized a city, and the subsequent dual hunt of criminals and policemen for the murderer. The MoMA description says something about "German Expressionist cinema" -- I need to learn more about this (here's the Wikipedia description).

Posted by csageday at 11:56 PM | Comments (0)