February’s Snowy Wallop

February in New York City packed a snowy wallop, but we hardy Big Apple types shoveled and sloshed our way through — one major snowstorm early in the month that dropped nearly two feet of the white stuff upon us, another the following week that was less big but still not small, and a few additional dustings and flurries.

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I don’t mind being under house arrest in my Brooklyn apartment, which is just as hygge as could be, filled with books yet to be read and an inexhaustible streaming supply of music and movies.

hyg·ge/ HOO-guh A quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being (regarded as a defining characteristic of Danish culture).

I managed to get out for neighborhood rambles, ever mindful of the importance of ultraviolet rays to one’s mood, not to mention a respectable step count in lieu of the gym. I met friends for hot toddies at St. Julivert in Cobble Hill and Lavender Lake, on the shores of the Gowanus Canal, below, and cheered myself up with weekly tulips.

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What’s gratifying is that it looks like many of our local restaurants, some of which have invested tens of thousands to build plywood-and-plexiglass structures where coated, hatted, scarved and masked diners huddle under heat lamps even in sub-freezing temps, are going to make it through. The city has announced that the makeshift dining cars will be allowed to stay into the foreseeable future, a distinct and dramatic change to the streetscape.

Toward the end of the month, the worst happened. A dear friend of forty years died unexpectedly, casting everything in sorrow. The world lost an extraordinary soul, loving and clever, an accomplished origami artist and baker whose creations in both areas were works of visual art. She and I were besties when our children were small, pushing strollers together through the streets of Brooklyn Heights. Our families celebrated Chanukah and Halloween together, and camped out at Hither Hills in the summer. We stayed in touch after her family moved away, spending hours on the phone back when you could only stray as far from the device as its curly cord would reach. Our conversations and correspondence were marked by our pleasure in communicating with each other, and her always witty, always honest take on things.

I dedicate this post to Ellen, who was a devoted reader of my blog. After my last post, in January, she emailed to thank me for the “beamish” (bright, cheerful, optimistic) entry, writing “Love seeing your perspective, hearing your voice  — missing both Brooklyn and you!” The feeling is forever mutual, my friend <3

New York, City of Restaurants, Bent but not Broken

When I think back on this sad time (assuming I survive it), the above image will always evoke the Covid era in New York City for me.

Bar Tabac, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn

The art, by Jorge Colombo, appeared in The New Yorker magazine last summer as part of a series titled, prematurely as it turns out, “The City Recovers.” In this view of Tribeca at night, I see melancholy and unnatural quietude, as well as the courage that has been required of the city’s restaurant owners to just get by.

James Restaurant, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn

There are any number of heartbreakers, aside from the human toll, of this virus’s effect on my home town. It’s brought New York to its knees. People are fleeing for the suburbs. No wonder, with schools opening, then closing, on a mayoral whim, because of an arbitrary number. The glass towers of Manhattan have been standing mostly empty, their millions of square feet of office space unoccupied and unneeded, perhaps forever. Broadway has been dark for the longest period in its history. The subway ended its century-long tradition of 24 hour service. Ridership is a third of normal, while crime has gone up, a result of the mentally ill going uncared-for elsewhere, the NYT says.

Bountiful produce from James Restaurant, Brooklyn

All of that worries me when I consider the city’s future, but it’s the restaurants I find most touching — their desire to stay alive, their ingenious reinventions as greengrocers and purveyors of raw ingredients, their cute promotions (show us your ‘I Voted’ sticker and we’ll give you a free cookie!) and makeshift arrangements for outdoor dining. The set-ups range from ever-more-elaborate plywood structures with rudimentary roofing, partial walls and seasonal décor like hay bales, pumpkins and baskets of mums, to orange traffic cones and clear shower curtains as space dividers in two former parking spots.

Miriam, Park Slope, Brooklyn

They seem to be meeting with varying degrees of success. Some of the impromptu sidewalk cafés, attached to restaurants that lucked out by being located on a pleasant corner, attract lines for Sunday brunch. My local high street, Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights, has many good restaurants — Olmsted, Maison Yaki, Amorina, White Tiger, Alta Calidad and more — and they all seem to be hanging in there. But many others report that they’re struggling, and the city may lose half its eating establishments by the time this is done. New York’s restaurant stock is a collective institution, of generally excellent quality and unimaginable variety, and it mustn’t be allowed to disappear.

Vanderbilt Avenue, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn

The city has now extended outdoor dining year-round, but I fear for those half-enclosed huts, even with heat lamps, when winter winds start whipping around the corners. I’ve occasionally wondered why New York doesn’t have a thriving sidewalk-café culture like Paris. Then I remember: I’ve been to Paris in mid-winter, and it’s not that cold. Not by New York standards.

Fifth Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn

I have a bulletin board on which I tack the cards of places I’ve gone and want to remember, almost always for their atmosphere (I rarely remember what I ate). There’s Cotenna, a hole in the wall on Bedford Street in Greenwich Village, into which a friend and I once stumbled on a rainy afternoon after a movie, and sat for hours at the end of the bar. Wild Son, on a sunny industrial block near the river, where the food was so healthy and fresh and the bartenders so friendly and the margaritas so tart and well-priced. Jones Wood Foundry, the nearest thing to a cozy, unpretentious British pub on the Upper East Side. Not only haven’t I been to any of these favorite spots lately, I’ve only been to Manhattan twice since last winter, both times for doctor’s appointments.

Shore Parkway, Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn

Here in Brooklyn, I wonder how Café Paulette on Fort Greene Park and Cobble Hill’s Henry Public, with its tin-ceilings and marble mantels, and the quirky June on Court Street, are faring. I hope they’re all doing a booming business in take-out and delivery, and I look forward to rediscovering them on the other side of the vaccine. Myself, I’ve dined inside restaurants not at all, outdoors maybe five times, and have rediscovered home cooking. (This is as well in some ways, as I had been in the longstanding and very expensive habit of eating out practically every meal, and balance was needed.)

Vanderbilt Avenue, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn

I imagine the city will eventually come back, will glitter and sparkle once again, like it did after September 11, like it did after Hurricane Sandy, picking up where it left off and continuing on its way, like the shape-shifting organism New York City has always been. ##

The Itinerant Urban Gardener

IT BEGAN when my daughter moved into a Prospect Heights brownstone with a struggling pine tree in a barrel  out front. Each time I visited, I eyed the dead branches, wishing I could take a pruner to the thing and tidy it up. One day, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I told her, “I’m going to prune that pine. If your landlord says anything, tell him your mother is an itinerant urban gardener who goes around pruning people’s shrubs unbidden.”

While my East Hampton house is rented out, I’ve been getting my gardening jollies catching up on maintenance in the yards of my buildings in Boerum Hill and Cobble Hill. I ride around with a wooden box of garden tools in the back of my car — a hand rake, lopper, pruner, shovel, gloves, trash bags. When the urge to garden strikes, I’m ready. But I can see how this could get out of hand. Last week, I was walking along a Park Slope sidewalk and saw a lovely Japanese maple in a cobalt pot in someone’s front yard. It was full of weeds. My fingers itched to reach over the iron fence and pull them out, but I restrained myself. One recent morning, in Philadelphia to visit my son, I went out in my pajamas at 7AM and pulled 2-foot-tall weeds out of cracks in the sidewalk in front of his building … and the building next door.

Soon, I’ll have my half-acre to play with. In the meantime, I stealth-garden on other people’s property and enjoy what they’re doing with their window boxes, tree pits and containers. They’re doing a lot; it’s an encouraging sign of the times.

Below: March of the pots, a trend I’ve spotted this year for the first time. This is good news. In decades past, they might well have been stolen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Above: Window box explosion in Philadelphia’s Queen Village neighborhood. Below: Ivy and seasonal containers decorate a carriage house in Old Kensington.

Below: Orange cosmos and white gaura have burst through the iron fence around this apartment building in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, seeding themselves in cracks in the sidewalk.

Below: A proudly tended Brooklyn tree pit with petunias and variegated hosta.

Leaf Peeping in Brooklyn

SEEMS TO ME THE FALL COLORS — peaking late after an unseasonably warm October — are more brilliant than usual this year. Here in Brownstone Brooklyn, there’s no sense one needs to go up to Vermont or the Hudson Valley to be fully satisfied on that score. Above, Underhill Avenue in Prospect Heights. Below, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden — my favorite urban refuge –in its autumnal glory.

Brooklyn the Beautiful

WITH DAFFODIL FOLIAGE PUSHING UP in the front yards of brownstone Brooklyn, the winter of my content is coming to an end. I’ve enjoyed this uninterrupted two-month spell of  life in my ever-amazing home borough, where you see things like the movie shoot, above, on Prospect Park West, when you go out for your Sunday morning walk.

We’ve had our bit of snow (that’s the cherry orchard at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, with the Brooklyn Museum in the distance, above, as it looked a week ago Friday, and the view from my front window, below).  I’ve caught up with old friends and gobbled down some culture (the Matisse show at the Met, the Museum of Arts and Design, French lessons on Saturday afternoons, even an afternoon at the ballet), though not enough of either.

And at long last, I’m in sight of a closing date on the property I’m buying in East Hampton. On Friday, the house passed its inspection for an updated Certificate of Occupancy, meaning, the Town deems it safe to live in (and that the backfilling of a derelict swimming pool, which I oversaw last month, was done to their satisfaction). And this afternoon I got an email from the seller telling me he is “putting together a crew” to move his two boats and the accumulated furnishings and stuff of 30 years out… this week.

Ye gads. It’s really happening! This means that after weeks of lying on the sofa, leafing languidly through books on Japanese landscaping and ripping pages out of decorating magazines, I’ll soon be putting in actual hard labor. All too soon, perhaps. Am I ready to plunge full-tilt into cleaning, painting, gardening, renovation? It makes me want to settle back on the couch with “The Art of the Japanese Garden” and a cup of tea. I’m already reflecting nostalgically on this temporary period of being a one-home person. I haven’t missed the Long Island Expressway one bit.

Soon enough, I’ll be in the woods, at the beach, breathing country air and enjoying country silence. Meanwhile, I’m appreciating the beauties at hand, like the freestanding mansions of Victorian Flatbush, above and below, where I went earlier this week for the annual ritual meeting with my accountant.

Mostly, though, what I appreciate is my Prospect Heights pied-a-terre, below, where I’ve been cozily cocooned. Its cheery yellow walls never fail to boost my spirits, and its two south-facing windows have served my houseplant collection well.

As the days lengthen, then, onward to what’s next.