My New York Walkabout
December 22
I began my New York walkabout by trekking from Prospect Heights to Boerum Hill and back. The borough has been getting dubbed the new Manhattan, maybe since Miranda went to live with Steve in Sex and the City to raise the kid. The idea is blah blah the park, cheaper rents (not anymore!), Park Slope Food Coop. The uberhipster factor encompasses Williamsburg, DUMBO, Red Hook, the first of which depended on the then-unreliable L train when I left NY for New Mex, and was mainly orthodox. Now, I understand, no one over 20 can typically be seen on Williamsburg streets. While the look of the shops in Boerum Hill was decidedly upscale, from our street in Prospect Heights (left) the walk to the subway involved passing Richard Meier's 1 Grand Army Plaza, a building that neighbors across the street have dubbed glass theater and which had an astonishingly high vacancy rate in September.
The trains to Manhattan now ran mostly on time (can't speak for the L). The 2 or 3 from Grand Army Plaza lets you step across the platform at Nevins Street. There you change to the 4 or 5 to exit at Astor Place (after again traversing the platform for the local at Brooklyn Bridge). This nifty stair-cut made my social life as lower-east centric as ever. Think Stan Mack Real Life Funnies, and the cartoon about which longhair hadn't been north of 14th Street longer.
If you look south from Astor Place the new view is heavily informed by the excellent Thom Mayne (Morphosis) building for Cooper Union, a grand piece of new architecture called by the powerful Times critic in June "a bold architectural statement of genuine civic value." ("Genuine civic value" constitutes high praise I suppose.) As a design plan the elevator skips certain floors, which instigates impromptu meetings on the stairs, a public-ideas-starter if there was one amid design students, profs and others visiting CU. Conrad says that's called skip-stop in architecture and is an idea that Le Corbusier had. Here's Eva Hagbert's view of the same building (below, the Thom Maynes at left, the Cooper Square Hotel at right, as shot from the bus.) 
The next block Cooper Square Hotel (design: Carlos Zapata Studio) merited a trip inside. It opened a little more than a year ago as a 21-story building that in its plan to overhang neighbors' roof gardens had met with opposition that led happily to Zapatas redesigning to keep the tenement in mind. Nice building, good move. We were well treated by the doormen and management and went upstairs to take in the bar and the glass corner (with view of neighbor), but later had occasion to remark with friends that occupancy rates must indeed be down. I would pick this one if I could afford it. I do not even enter the Gramercy Park Hotel anymore.
Tremendous tireless walking is of course a factor of life in town and so the question always of where can you eat? for not a fortune? and where can you sit down and enjoy a ruminative break from the hubbub of the streets (fantastic, amazing, neverending pleasure)? While finding poached eggs with spinach or a cappuccino of the kind only De Robertis or Veniero's produces?
The 8th-9th Street axis gives you Mogador, Cafe Orlin, and the street of talented designers who have stayed in place through thick and thin, including Jill Anderson (fashion designer) and Gregg Wolf (jeweler).
St. Mark's Books (standup theater) is of course still itself full of incredible bargains, postcards and poetry in the back. And worth a look for the magazine section to see what's still around. The smart-provocateur book of philosophy I am now reading, First As Tragedy Then As Farce, by this guy, called my name there. I maybe got my wallet pinched there too. I didnt get to the New Museum this time, about which the New York art blogs have briefly tussled over a show that Jeff Koons will curate in February. The tempest has to do with that the paying patron on the museum board who has Koons curating his collection for the museum is also a major patron of Koons. Inside, outside, any way you want it. Maybe that's what the Urs Fischer tongue which reportedly is motion-activated and only sticks out at you when you get close enough to feel it means to say. Have to wait til Feb to see what Koons does with other peoples' art.
December 23
JB and I decide to tackle Chelsea and the Robert Bergman photo show at Yossi Milo, before she needs to stop to buy her godson a fencing weapon. Through a brilliant tactical stroke of real estate JB lives on Bond Street, in a loft that boasts a great thing, elevator architecture. The address is next to the Herzog & De Meuron building, a study in green and swoopiness. JB has lived here since there was a garage nextdoor and all else on Bond Street, toward Bowery, was a radiator shop and a dojo. During construction an artist projected the running shadows of all the rats set loose by the process on the white sales banner of one of the multimillionjillion new buildings. The NYPD never could figure out who it was. Now the piece is just another urban legend. The elevator mural is real. I am delighted to say I rode three floors down in this.
I'm going to leave the description of the art we saw in Chelsea for Friday. But a sneak preview winks at: Yorkshire. Doctor Seuss colors. Van Gogh hatches. Name that tune.
December 24
Because every New Yorker and certainly me has a food writer hidden inside let me briefly regale those of you still reading with tales of the Brooklyn Larder (Flatbush Avenue) and Union Street Market (7th Avenue). The Park Slope Food Coop is member only but enviable, yes, at least I guess so. We passed it en route to the Korean fish market where I shopped our vuelve la vida of red based fish soup with saffron and tarragon at a Korean fish market called Ocean. In retrospect I forgot to make the garlic toasts for the soup, but the tang of the Atlantic hissed through freshburst clams and a cod-flounder plump base. As a first course Raffetto's Ravioli now packaged for those fortunate few as plump combines of wild mushroom and truffle, or squash--both varieties sans cheese--was every bit as great as I remembered when I used to haul it from Houston and Thompson to 14th Street east in then walkabouts. Speaking of clams? The white pizza kind? Betcha you don't know what is. But because there is a food higher power at work in my world I looked up directions for Frank Pepe's Pizzeria in New Haven (online), and we made it in time at 20 before 10 a week ago Monday. OMG. This is an experience for which memory serves and is not jaundiced by time. The most incredible crust. Cut on the bias into long thin and medium wide strips and served on wax paper on a perfectly oblong tin cookie sheet. With a pitcher of beer a dream of heaven. And enough to take us (designated driver and the two chattering classes) back down I 95 south where, at the start of our trip, we had still seen the outlines of Sister Corita on the Boston gas tank.
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