Gotham archipelago

We’ve been exploring some surprising corners of our city near and far over the past couple of weekends, mostly on the water. Everyone knows about Manhattan Island, sold for $24 of junk jewelry, but there are many other less heralded isles that make up this city, hidden in plain sight.

Last weekend, tipped off by the newspaper, we traveled by ferry and bus to the Snug Harbor campus on the northwest side of Staten Island. I’d vaguely heard of this site before, but had never actually made it. It’s an expansive set of buildings and grounds, founded in the 1830s as a self-sustaining community of retired sailors. A bequest paid for the dormitories and common buildings, many in a handsome Greek Revival style. The place today has the look of an unkempt college campus, as the buildings have been repurposed for many uses, or left alone. One white-columned building is now the new home of the Staten Island Museum, a homely collection of art and curios. The opening weekend celebrations were very much a local affair, but it was a good reminder of the borough’s oddball history and at times fractious relationship with the rest of the city.

On the ferry ride back we say among some Jehovah’s Witnesses from Louisiana. We gave them directions and they gave us tracts.

This past weekend another island was on the menu: Roosevelt Island, which I had even less experience with. It was sure a pleasant and interesting surprise! This very skinny island sits in the East River between Midtown and Queens. It serves as a resting point for one of the Queensboro Bridge’s three piers, but the bridge deck is high above the level of the low-slung island. Access is only via one very deep subway station, or the aerial tram. The subway station was closed, so we had to take the tram. What a nifty ride it is! The old-fashioned cable cars swoop one at a time high above the city to a height of twenty stories, affording magnificent views up and down the city, before dropping quickly down to the terminus on the island itself.

The island is extremely skinny and mostly straight. We were there for a race, and the route along the waterfront promenade allowed for magnificent views of the river traffic and the two skylines. It seems close enough to Midtown to toss a baseball, and yet the sky is wide open above. There are many new, fancy looking apartment buildings (progress is slowly replacing the prisons and mental hospitals that were the historic use of the island) but at the northern end we saw some older structures and even a small lighthouse. There’s even a Starbucks! I hope we can return soon and visit the Four Freedoms Park at the southern end.

We’ll always have London

We ended our trip with two days in London, managing to see many neighborhoods and attend one special event. We stayed at the same hotel near Paddington station as we did last year for a quick getaway to the airport.

On Friday afternoon we went to northeast London to the main site of the Olympics in 2012. Readers may recall that we attended three Olympic matches live, but none of these were at the Olympic site. Some of the sports facilities remain for use by professionals or the community (or both). The landscape has been slightly reworked as a park with wildflowers and playgrounds, and the Olympic Village been refitted as affordable housing, with more construction and amenities to come. We took a short boat trip through the waterway that goes through the former industrial district. With its history of upheaval, Britain has a lot of ruins and a lot of new construction; it was intriguing to observe a community in transition before our eyes.

On Friday evening we met a friend from New York who was also on vacation, and we saw a play at the National Theatre on the South Bank, a very lively area on a Friday night but offset by the dramatic river views alongside.

Saturday was cool and cloudy, and we strolled through markets, parks, and department stores for a weekend feeling. In the evening, the weather being good, we fulfilled a plan to gather a picnic from Sainsbury’s and head to Hyde Park for the Last Night of the Proms event. The gathering of 20,000 Brits felt like the heart of empire as it finished with a singalong of patriotic songs and fireworks! There were also several hours of live music beforehand, a Sound of Music singalong, and lots of goofy outfits involving the Union Jack. I bet very, very few other attendees were American tourists, but it felt like the absolute best place to finish our trip.

It seemed fitting to spend our final morning on Sunday at the matins service at Westminster Abbey. As we were wrapping up our trip with a walk through Trafalgar Square, barriers and banners were out for the conclusion of the Tour of Britain bike race, which would be finishing up there that afternoon. I saw the look on Dave’s face and it echoed my own feelings — there is always something more to see, one more experience to have. This time, we don’t know when we’ll next be back, or how Britain may have changed when we do. But we both feel like we leave just a little bit of our hearts behind every time we have to leave.

In the Olympic Park, the Orbital sculpture is still an arresting sight. There are plans to add a giant spiral slide. The stadium to the right, used for the opening and closing ceremonies, will reopen soon as a pro soccer venue.

Inside the Olympic Aquatics center, whose dramatic shape resembles the inside of a wave or the belly of a whale.

The diving pools, where young British medallist Tom Daley is said to practice for the next Games!

The Camden Market in north London teems with food vendors of all kinds.

Although many of the derelict old buildings are being replaced by fashionable condo buildings, the rougher, quirkier edges of the Camden Town neighborhood have not yet been sanded off.

England jaunts: Codes, Laughs, and a Crab

For the middle of our England trip we each selected one day to do as we wished. For Dave, this began with a two-hour bus ride from Cambridge to the town of Milton Keynes, which is certainly a different type of community than the mostly old medieval settlements we are used to! It’s a planned town with grids and radial streets, all parking lots and office buildings down one very broad main street. We arrived beside an enormous mall, the like of which I have never seen this side of California, but on a gloomy day it was not unpleasant to make our way through it, stop for a quick lunch among the Milton Keynesians, and be on our way just one stop over to Bletchley Park.

Now famous as the setting for The Imitation Game, this former secret codebreaking site has capitalized on its mystique and declassification popularity with informative, multi-media interpretation for visitors and is a intriguing introduction to the realm of early computing, wartime secrecy and cryptography, and the logistics of breaking all those codes. This is more up Dave’s alley than mine, but the sun came out during our visit, there was time for tea, and I appreciated all the background and reminiscences from the staff who worked there, many of them very young women.

They had to kick us out of the early computing museum — guess which one of us was the straggler– and we zipped back to Milton Keynes for part two of this strategic visit, which was a nice dinner at a Zizzi chain restaurant followed by an evening of stand-up comedy by an Irish comedian we like, who was appearing at the town’s very pleasant, modern theater that night.

After a jog the next morning up and down Milton Keynes’s arrow-straight high street, we were on our way south to Brighton. This was my choice; although we once spent a weekend at another Channel beach town, Bournemouth, I was curious to see a famous landmark in this city, the Brighton Pavilion. We were fortunate to have the very best weather of the trip on this day, all sunshine and blue skies as we walked along the beach, went on the pier, and took a sunset Ferris wheel ride.

The Brighton Pavilion, though, was certainly a memorable location. Pavilion is misleading — it was built as a small palace, albeit primarily for the private use of George IV, prince regent, and for giving parties rather than housing a family or a court. The outside is an eye-popping fantasy of Arabian and Indian elements (the white, mishmosh facade of It’s a Small World comes to mind), while the inside is an over-the-top pastiche of Chinese styles and decor. No photos were allowed inside, but the public spaces, including a dining room with a 1-ton chandelier shaped like a dragon, still impress after 200 years. It is a Vegas-casino scale of personal style. George IV was a ridiculed prince and an ineffective king, but I started to feel a little sorry for him and his overcompensation, a little desperate to impress and bring the fun even into his later years.

Brighton also has a lot of coffee houses, cute boutiques, public art, and clubs. It’s a little bit of a San Francisco sensibility by the sea.

We had dinner that night at a hip seafood restaurant called Fishy Fishy. Although all the other diners were partaking of fish and chips, we plunked for paella for me and Dave perhaps rashly ordered Singapore-style crab, which was served with a messy sauces and required many tools, six napkins, and half an hour to do justice to.

The next morning we had a very enjoyable run along the promenade walk and at beach level before allowing ourselves a traditional English breakfast at our boutique hotel.

The parklike grounds and the formal house beyond it were the environs of some of the most classified codebreaking of Word War II.

Some of the rooms of the main Bletchley house have been furnished in wartime tableaus.

These unassuming “huts” at Bletchley Park were hastily built for teams of cryptographers and operators of the huge computing machines that worked through the daily codes.

The city of Brighton seemed a bright and sunny resort, with many gardens and whitewashed Georgian exteriors.

The gaudy facade of the Brighton Pavilion brings together a fantastical array of styles.

The lavish guest entrance to the Brighton Pavilion.

A little-heeded warning on Brighton Pier, with the stony beach and Ferris wheel beyond.

September song: England past and present

Another September, another trip to England for us as we carry on a five-year streak of Anglophilia. We fill in the gaps the other 51 weeks of the year brushing up on British news, television, and history, so we can maximize our “holiday” with favorite things and checking out the latest changes.

Just during the week of our visit, something old and something new happened: the Queen became the longest reigning British monarch, surpassing the extent of Queen Victoria, and King George III before her. A few days later, just down the road in Westminster, a new leader of the opposition Labour Party was named, a 70-something socialist and anti-monarchist who refuse to sing the royalist national anthem. Up north, the leader of the Scottish National Party is talking already about a new separation referendum. History in these islands plays a very long game.

With most of our headline sightseeing long over with, we decided to spend our eight-day trip focused on southern England and prioritizing our very favorite places (and foods!) with some carefully planned outings to intriguing places we hadn’t made it to before. Although we tried to make this a relaxing trip, “relaxing” for us involved taking a bus or train journey almost every day and sleeping in a different bed almost every night! But we are efficient packers and enjoy traveling by train and checking out new places to stay.

Arriving on Saturday morning the 5th after an overnight flight, we spent the first three, coldest days of the visit in mostly quiet settings. We went directly to Oxford for a concentrated visit with old friends and a slow tour of favorite pubs, including our beloved Trout. On Sunday we went to service at our former parish church and reconnected with many familiar faces. After a brief detour to London, we went on to Cambridge via Liverpool Street Station, one of several glorious Victorian train stations which are lovely to look at and excellent for people-watching!

We had never visited Cambridge while we lived in Oxford, less from rivalry than because there is no convenient transit link between the two. Classes were not yet in session and the town honestly seemed pretty sleepy and dull compared to Oxford’s bustle. It seems to have many more windy little lanes and alleys, but the colleges seem more open and outward-looking than Oxford’s with their high-walled quads. The city is also more integrated with its river, the Cam, and it does have to take the prize for best punting views, as the river goes along the back of many colleges and is crossed by many scenic bridges.

We stayed two days in Cambridge with our friend Ann, formerly of Oxford, in a large house she rents one small room in. The large grounds also feature a flock of glaring sheep, a flock of geese, some pheasants, and access to the river and a little boat! So we rowed ourselves (OK, they paddled, I took pictures!) a mile up and back through the historic center. I did have to help out twice when we unexpectedly had to portage around a weir (now there are some words I don’t normally use in conversation!)

Ann took us into a quirky museum of polar exploration that is a memorial to the valiant, if perhaps misguided, adventurers who perished in the cold North or South, and also to the top of the city’s church tower for some splendid views. We also went on a long country walk to the nearby village of Grantchester, where we had tea in an orchard and local brews in a pub garden. The village gives its name to a popular TV mystery series, and we saw evidence of its filming both in Cambridge and in the village church itself!

The river route through the city of Cambridge shows you the view called The Backs, which is literally the riverfront “back” of many college buildings and gardens. The backsides are still quite elegant, so they must have been built with this vantage in mind!

A dramatic view from the tower of St. Mary’s Church in Cambridge, with the Pependicular Gothic masterpiece of Kings College Chapel on the left, and the Neoclassical fantasy Senate House (head offices of the university) on the right. And lush green lawns everywhere!

Seeing Cambridge by boat is a must, and its many low bridges and heavy river traffic make the smooth ride potentially dangerous. We went by canoe.

We had a proper country walk through grazing lands, which included many “kissing gates” (seen at left) and stiles, both practical ways to keep the cattle where they belong but allow for farmers and ramblers to get through.

On our Cambridgeshire countryside walk, we saw a melancholy sign near this field that explained that the low-lying meadow used to be flooded for ice-skating in the old days, so a lamppost was put in to light up the rink. The skaters are long gone, and now cows use it as a scratching post!

Our destination was an outdoor tea garden called The Orchard, and that’s exactly what it was!

One of the many thatched houses in the village of Grantchester, as well as the burgeoning autumn hedgerows we saw throughout the land.

City gardens

This summer, which has mostly been a very local one, we have had the opportunity for many visits to two of New York’s fabulous botanic gardens, islands of greenery and quiet amid the hot and smelly city.

A long subway ride north takes us to the New York Botanic Garden in the Bronx. This summer a themed exhibit highlighted the art of Frida Kahlo and the flowers of Mexico, in an indoor/outdoor display. The water lily pools — frozen over on our last visit, December 31 — had many lovely blooms.

We can walk over to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden whenever, and we’ve taken advantage of our membership this year. The amenities for visitors have really been enhanced over the past decade, and special events and attractions seem to be driving an engaged community involvement. We were caught in a thunderstorm in the children’s garden recently, but the weather was perfect for a special visit on one of the members’ nights last week.

September’s coming

The muggy evenings are drawing in, the window of the corner discount store is full of fresh new backpacks, and the cold case of CTown has been stocked with pumpkin beer. 2/3 of the way through August, and while the thermometer holds on to summer numbers, the signs of the neighborhood point toward fall. We heard the last concert of the Celebrate Brooklyn performance series last week, and now the canopies and rigging have been dismantled from around the park bandshell, a pile of stacked fencing all that is left of the songs of the summer.

The pods on our front tree, once green little beans, are hardening up, while the quinces out back are becoming rosy and ripe. A second flush of roses on the long, untended vines in the backyard reach toward new heights, and sunflower stocks are in front yards and deli displays.

It seems our New York neighbors have marked the end of summer by a mass decampment to less odorous locales. From the Metropolitan Museum to Central Park to the hip dining spots of Brooklyn last weekend with a visitor, there was plentiful room to enjoy the city (except in Times Square, which would can never be described as quiet or restful, at any season or hour.) The subways at commuting times are markedly less squished. We’ve had frequent thunderstorms, with a tantalizingly cool breeze to follow.

Weekend on the water

Cicadas are buzzing outside my window, and August is truly here. The end of summer seems in sight, and the time to hustle and enjoy it is nigh. I’m not a huge fan of summer in the city, but I’m usually too drowsy in the heat to do much about it. This past weekend, though, I took full advantage of these heady blue sky days and embarked on some al fresco adventures.

On Saturday, the auspicious first of August, I participated in a long-planned venture north of the city to celebrate my dear friend Nicole, along with her other two bridesmaids. We tootled along in a Kermit-green Zipcar through the tortuous traffic of three boroughs and finally motored serenely along the Taconic Parkway for an excellent lunch in Beacon, 80 miles north of Manhattan, then nipped across the bridge for embarkation on a Hudson River cruise. The narrated cruise led past several moldering estates (note to millionaires: name your manse a “castle” and you are asking for trouble” and down to West Point, then looped back. Photographs could not do justice to the verdant hillsides rising on either side, the pleasant river breeze, and the fairytale puffy clouds in the azure summer skies. This is my new recommendation to all New York visitors!

In the evening, we followed the directions of a woman reeling in a kite to some delicious ice cream at a dairy stand on a rural road. A simple pleasure for most people, but an exotic treat for this quartet of city girls!

Admiring the Beacon waterfalls with Nicole and Alison

Above the Beacon waterfalls with Nicole and Sarah

This lonely, anachronistic lighthouse or dock guards the south shore of melancholy Bannerman’s Island

With Saturday spent nearly all on the road or on the river, Sunday felt like starting over. We went jogging in the park — time to start training for the next 10K! — and then took the A train out to Rockaway Beach in the afternoon. The main attraction of this beach is certainly not the journey, which is circuitous and often prolonged, but the intriguing food in the snack stand. You can get Uzbek pirogies, lobster rolls, and Vietnamese noodles with a kale shake on the side, but we lined up for Bolivian nachos and empanadas before trekking out to the sand. Since last year, a nice portion of the boardwalk has been restored. The beach seems cleaner and the horizon is more open than on the Brooklyn beaches. All kinds of New Yorkers are out here, all shapes and sizes, all enjoying a beach that’s in the same jurisdiction as the Empire State Building. It’s taken a while to get out this summer, but we’ll definitely be back.

Heart of Empire (State)

A couple of weeks ago, I took a brief sojourn out of the shining-hot metropolis and visited the green west and center of New York State, a restful and educational trip also calling at many friends and relatives.

Although an ambitious cross-state route had been nixed, Mom and I made a modest circuit from Buffalo to Ithaca and around to Rochester. The old landmarks of the Finger Lakes and the Erie Canal were our guideposts. Red barns, tall corn, and sunflowers lined the way.

On our first day, we drove the Thruway and then dipped down along Cayuga Lake, passing many homely vineyards and pulling over at Taughannock Falls and then across the street at the lakeside park, where both fish and mosquitoes were biting. We pressed on around the bend to the city of Ithaca and had a late lunch at famed Moosewood Restaurant before climbing a steep gorge trail up to the Cornell campus. It was a hot day, and I envied the people we passed taking a dip in the many waterfall pools! We stayed the night in a very quaint B&B stuffed with bric a brac. Its yard was alive with animals and birds, and when we returned after dark the lawn was like a carpet of fireflies.

The 1800s Hound and Hare Inn

The many winged visitors of the inn’s birdfeeders were a cheerful sight, but we made a more serious effort to see wildlife at the Cornell Ornithology Lab down the road. I was very impressed by the well-designed facilities of the center and indoor viewing atrium, even though we saw nary a sapsucker on our nature trek though its Sapsucker Woods.

The welcoming atrium of the Cornell Ornithology Center

Nature had its own plans for us that afternoon, as a huge thunderstorm barreled down on us just as we started to leave town. After plowing through one flooded road, we took shelter from the storm at a Friendly’s, and sure enough the day cleared up and we continued up the east side of Cayuga Lake, through many quaint old towns and on to Fairport. After seeing the outside of Victorians all day, we got to dine in one that evening, albeit on Italian food. After a sunset walk on the street where we once lived, our long and strange day ended by being turned away from two hotels full up with Hill Cumorah participants before finding a place to lay our heads.

The last day of the trip brought more familiar faces, as well as a long-desired visit to Susan B. Anthony’s home in Rochester. We had passed through Seneca Falls the day before, and I’ve worked on not one by two books about Susan B. this past year, so the destination was apt. The guided tour was well done and it’s easy to imagine Susan in the well-restored residence.

Intruding on the eternal tea party of Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass

From one island to another

We were watching “1776” yesterday morning with our blueberry pancakes — a hallowed tradition — and noted that the approaching Battle of Long Island mentioned in its final moments was fought just a few steps away from us, on lands that are now part of Greenwood Cemetery, Prospect Park, and Brooklyn Heights. But rather than dwelling on the original times of independence, we saluted America’s youngest state at a nearby luau party! We went at the invitation of a Hawaiian friend, whose hula troupe hosted the event as a fund-raiser. There were ample food and decorations to augment the homespun but heartfelt performances of dance, chant, and ukelele music on a backyard stage.

We returned home for a cook-in of burgers, then took up our friend Nicole’s offer of viewing the city fireworks from her west-facing balcony. For an hour after dark, we had a Cinerama view of pyrotechnics reaching from Staten Island to Queens, as well as central viewing of the main New York show from the harbor and the East River. Magnificent!

Despite the many patriotic events in the city, including those national-standard fireworks, many of our fellow New Yorkers seem to have gone away for the holiday and the traffic on sidewalks and streets has been noticeably light. There was a markedly small crowd onboard the Governors Island ferry this afternoon, and for the first time I was able to claim one of the red hammocks nestled in the wildflower hills of the central island.

First fireflies

If the first fireflies of the season weren’t clue enough, the patient lines in front of Uncle Louie G’s Italian ice counters around the neighborhood tell us that summer is here. We’ve had some cool and gloomy days, which seems dull until the blazing heat rolls in and we wish for them back!

We began the weekend with the New York Philharmonic performing on the lawn in Prospect Park, to a crowd of thousands awash in rose and Trader Joe’s snacks. The chatty, multi-generational parties gathered on picnic blankets around us might have been surprised to note there was a musical performance taking place, but everyone enjoyed the clear, starry evening and the fireworks display.

On Saturday, we took some guests over to the West Side and the hip new Whitney Museum of American art, at the terminus of the elevated High Line Park. Yesterday we stayed around our neighborhood, for church, a street fair, brunch, and a visit to the rose garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The roses seemed a bit worse for wear after several recent rainstorms, but we got surprisingly up close to two fearless young red-tailed hawks.

Later in the day, the temperature inside All Saints Church had risen considerably, and so had the heat of the music, as an evensong service was presented in a Latin jazz mode by several well-known musicians who live nearby. I’ve never heard such sounds in an Episcopal church, or maybe anywhere! There’s always something familiar and something new to enjoy around here.