Astoria, Ahoy!
Let's spend the day in Queens!
Ok, I know last week I said I was trying to take it easy, but that was before I remembered I had some fun plans already made for the weekend! A couple of my Wowza pals planned a little Astoria outing and I hate to admit it but I do not spend enough time in Queens, so I was totally down for the hang. The day ended up being cloudy and downright blustery, but we didn’t let that bring us down! It was worth the 3 trains I took to get into the neighborhood, but also why the fuck do I need to take 3 trains to get from Brooklyn to Queens? We’re right next to each other 😩
Anyways, exciting news for next week: It’s the 1 year anniversary of Big City, Little Friend! 🥳 🎉 🕺
I can’t believe I’ve been writing this for a year now. I am truly so appreciative of everyone who reads all of the words that I vomit out into this newsletter each week. I love when you send me emails saying nice things and telling me places to visit. So far no one has sent me an email saying mean things, but I think if I stay on the internet long enough it’s bound to happen!
Next week I plan to highlight some of my favorite issues from the past year. This is partly because it made sense to do this on the 1 year anniversary and also partly because I’m creating a Trash Lunch & Learn for my office and am planning to go so fucking hard on it; they are not prepared. If you want me to teach your office about trash and recycling, hit me up!
I would love to hear which past sections you loved, which ones you hated, which ones might warrant a revisit. Peep the index and let me know which topic should come out from behind the paywall. Should I even keep doing a paywall? I honestly hate keeping sections “private” but I also would like to be paid a little bit for all of the work I do? Email me, leave a comment, send me a message on Substack, send a carrier pigeon - I would love to hear from you.
1. Noshing 😋
A couple weeks ago I shared a link to the NYT 100 Best Restaurants in NYC. I’ve been to [and written about] a few (Shopsin’s, S&P, Great NY Noodletown, Mercado Spain, Zaab Zaab, and Eyval). After my trip to Astoria, I was able to check one more restaurant off that list - AbuQir. They don’t have a website and they definitely don’t have a menu, which made eating there feel like a bit of an adventure.
The space is pretty small and unassuming and I learned from this old NYT article that it’s named after “a fishing village on the eastern outskirts of Alexandria, Egypt, overlooking the bay where Lord Nelson laid waste to Napoleon’s fleet in 1798.” Astoria is generally known for having excellent Greek food (and I did acquire fucking phenomenal baklava from Yaya’s later in the day), but AbuQir is located on a little stretch in Astoria known as Little Egypt. This area is home to folks from Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, Palestine, and other countries in that part of the world. But you want to read about the fish…
I’m not a big seafood person, so I really arrived here not knowing what to expect and friends, that is not the way to arrive at AbuQir. Remember when I said there’s no menu? You need to walk up to the fish counter, point at the fish you want, and tell the nice man how you want it cooked. This is not suitable dining for anxious people so bring an extrovert with you! Wayne and I did some googling before approaching the counter and had a general idea of what to ask for, so now I want to pass that knowledge onto you.
Before we even get to the fish, you need to know that they offer a few sides and apps that there is literally no way to know about. We ordered the eggplant in garlic and oil and wow was that a good choice. There were literal piles of chopped garlic on top of fat ass eggplant chunks, which is truly the way all eggplant should be served. They also serve eggplant sauteed with tomatoes or in baba ganoush and you can ask for sides of pita, salad, or rice to go along with these. We opted for pita which was super fluffy and delicious.
But the fish is what you’re here for so be prepared to point at stuff and tell the man how you want it cooked! We asked which whole fish he recommended for amateurs such as ourselves and he pointed to the bass or branzino - we opted for bass for literally no reason other than I was standing closer to it. You can have your whole fish grilled, fried, or blackened (and probably other ways that I don’t know about tbh) but everything I read said to get it blackened so we did. It arrived looking crispy AF and to our delight it was filled with a little veggie medley of celery, tomatoes, and dill when we began digging into it. Just be sure to watch out for bones! We picked around the big ones but tbh I think I just cronched on the little ones and figured my body would sort it out.
To round out our meal we also ordered scallops (grilled) and the largest shrimp that you ever did see. I love scallops and don’t eat them often because of Lorenzo’s shellfish allergy and these ones were so good! They were super soft and buttery and just soaked up all spices and juice that they were served in. My dining companions split the big shrimp (shrimp weirds me out) and said it was fabulous. I mean, just look at it.
But the pièce de résistance was the price we paid for our meal. We literally had no idea how much anything we ordered would cost and were delightfully surprised when our total came out to a solid $100 to be split 3 ways. That included all of our fish cooked various ways and the drinks we grabbed from the self-serve fridge - I got an amazing lemon mint soda that I will be forever searching for.
2. Exploring 🛼
When in Astoria where else do you go but the Noguchi Museum!
You won’t learn much about Isamu Noguchi’s life in the museum, so I recommend reading about him on their website - and definitely download the Bloomberg Connect app to help you explore the museum if you, like me, love to read every little plaque. He had a very interesting upbringing and journey to becoming an artist - bouncing around from the US to Japan, studying pre-med, eventually taking up sculpting as a hobby, and that’s just the basics. However, you can absolutely enjoy wandering around the museum if you just like looking at nice stuff.
The lobby of the museum is very quaint and serene, with tinkly music playing and incense burning. Admission is a reasonable $16, but you can also check to see if free tickets are available on Culture Pass. The museum was also pretty cool about letting us back in later to visit the gift shop after we left and realized we forgot to see it. Make sure you ask about any tours being offered - we didn’t think to and missed a very cool one by mere minutes 😭
I knew that part of the museum was outside, but I didn’t expect the first section to basically be missing a roof in some parts! It was particularly jarring because it had been raining on and off all day and I guess the sculptures just get rained on a little bit and that’s ok. This gallery actually contains Noguchi’s later works and as you travel through the museum you’re traversing his life in reverse-chronological order. There are absolutely no plaques or numbers anywhere to let you know what you’re looking at, so that Bloomberg app is super helpful in identifying and learning more about the pieces. Some of them had fun names like Deepening Knowledge, Ding Dong Bat, and Entasis of a Pentagonal Helix! The app also contains blurbs from Noguchi explaining his inspiration and meaning for the pieces.
Upstairs, the museum had a really cool exhibit called Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within. Takaezu dabbled in lots of mediums and this exhibit featured a lot of her ceramic work, which I loved. After completing my ceramic course I gained a newfound appreciation for the medium and some of the stuff Takaezu made was just bonkers. The forms, the colors, I simply could never. A really sweet touch was that a lot of the ceramic work was displayed on fluffy rugs that the artist also wove. I dream of one day having fluffy rugs in my home, but my cats are not compatible with such nice things.
The museum itself is pretty small and I think we saw everything in well under 2 hours. We tried to visit the nearby Socrates Sculpture Park but were unfortunately met with a big empty field while they were in between exhibitions 😅
3. What’s Good 😎
This weekend just happens to be both Earth Day and 4/20, so there is a plethora of “green” stuff happening.
Car Free Earth Day is on 4/20! A bunch of streets across all boroughs will be closed to traffic and feature activities, performances, the whole shebang. Additionally, CitiBike will be offering free unlimited 30-minute rides using code CARFREE24 in the Citi Bike app. I’m very bummed that the Park ave loop around Grand Central isn’t one of the closed streets this year - there’s no pedestrian path there so car-free day is actually the only time you can get up close and personal with GCS!
Art Shack in Bed Stuy is celebrating Earth Fest on 4/20 with free clay activities, a ceramic sale, and an upcycling station in which they’re asking you to “stump us with an appliance you think no longer works.” Challenge accepted.
For folks who want to plan ahead, grab your tickets today to attend next weekend’s Sip n Swap at Precycle in Prospect Heights. A cool $20 includes access to the swap, 2 carbon neutral beers from their sponsors at @fattire / @newbelgium, sustainable snacks, as well as a fireside chat.
If you’re looking for the other kind of Green activity this weekend, stop by Skewville in Bushwick to attend their Build-A-Bong Workshop on 4/20. As long as you BOYB and pay $35, one of their bong-ologists will turn your household item into a smoking device. Shibby!
Remember Flaco the Owl? May he find peace in the big owl’s nest in the sky. Well, the city is trying to pass Flaco’s Law: this would change how the city mitigates its rat population by using rat birth control for the rodents instead of poison. Flaco (and tons of birds, cats, dogs) die each year with rodenticide in their systems, so this might be a way to control the rat population and not harm other animals while doing so.
4. Learning 🧠
You already know this next section is going to be more about Astoria, so let’s talk about how Astoria got its name. It’s obviously named after the Astor family, right? Well sort of. So they must have lived there? No. They owned the land then? Also no. Did they like, build stuff there? Negative. So why the fuck is Astoria named Astoria??
I’m gonna take you guys back, all the way back to 1664 when John Hallet “bought” the land of present-day-ish Astoria from the Native Americans living in the area. Hallet lived there long enough for the area to take on the name “Hallett’s Cove” before his farm was destroyed by Native Americans and he fled the fuck to Flushing. But while he was there, Hallett’s Cove was a sleepy little town of mostly farmland far away from the hustle and bustle of the city, which at that time was really only the southern tip of Manhattan. Also there are a million different spellings of “Hallett” floating around so I’ve simply chosen one and stuck with it, much like choosing a preferred spelling of Hanukkah.
Fast forward to the early 1900s and now rich folks are moving in and building their McMansions all over the place. One of those rich folks was Stephen A Halsey, a fur trader. And here is where our connection to John Jacob Astor begins! Astor was also a fur trader (and is the reason the Astor Place subway station is adorned with beaver reliefs) and Halsey considered him a pal. So when Astoria started becoming more of a town and less of a collection of random farms, Halsey figured he could tap Big Daddy Astor to invest in the neighborhood. In return, the area would be named Astoria, in honor of John Jacob Astor’s generous donation.
The only problem was John Jacob Astor didn’t give a shit about Astoria. My dude was the richest man in the world and couldn’t care less about lending his name to a random ass town in bumblefuck Queens. I should note though that Astor wasn’t a total tightwad; in 1838 he announced that he would donate $350k to build a public library. And it was actually after that announcement that folks realized how much money he apparently had to blow and started coming after him for donations. So Astor changed this to a $400k bequeathment of funds upon his death and that is how we got the Astor Library (first official NYPL branch, this is now The Public Theater)
This all happened around the time that Halsey came a beggin for money, so that might be why Astor was less than enthusiastic about donating to yet another schmo. Halsey did eventually convince him to donate a measley $500 to the town, 0.00125% of his $40 million net worth. And Halsey and some other friends of Astor fought for Astoria to retain his name even though his donation was pretty shit. Word is that JJ Astor never even stepped foot in Astoria, though he could see it from his penthouse across the river in Yorkville.
And so that is how Astoria got its name! It’s named after a rich dude who did not care about it, let alone ever visit it. How aspirational.
5. Watching🍿
I fucking binged the new Fallout series on Amazon over the last week and loved it. The show has garnered largely positive reviews and is already greenlit for another season. I never played the game, although I have sat on the couch and scrolled tiktok on my phone while Lorenzo played, so I may have absorbed some information through proximity. I will definitely refer to things by the wrong name though so if you’re a Fallout nerd don’t come for me. You don’t need to know much about the game to enjoy the show.
The Fallout tv show follows our hero Lucy who grew up in a post-nuclear world in the safety of a Vault Tec vault. Everyone left topside is pretty much some version of a nuclear zombie or a ruthless criminal trying to survive in the wasteland. The first episode did a great job of setting up what would essentially be the mysteries of the series: why was Lucy’s dad taken, why did that criminal know Lucy’s mom, who dropped the bombs, what the hell is life like topside? As far as I know, this is a totally original story that simply contains elements taken from the games, so there are quite a lot of easter eggs if you know what you’re looking for but the mystery is a mystery even to folks who played the games (which is cool!).
I was very impressed with how amazing everything looked. You already know I hate it when productions get lazy and just make everything CGI - the “fix it in post” mentality. A lot of this show was very obviously CGI, but there seemed to be enough practical sets and effects to keep the actors somewhat grounded in reality, even if it wasn’t actual reality of course. It was also super clear that the showrunners were fans of the game, or at least gave a shit enough to do their research. As we were watching, Lorenzo was constantly pointing out easter eggs and little bits of lore to add to my viewing experience. It was like watching an MTV pop-up video IRL (people of a certain age will get that reference).
The actors also looked like they were having the time of their lives despite existing in a nuclear wasteland. Ella Purcell (Lucy) was a perfect vault dweller turned raider. A question posed early in the series is “Will you still want the same things, when you’ve become a different animal altogether?” and Purcell does an amazing job showing us Lucy’s journey from adorkable Zooey Deschanel clone to wasteland-battered raider while still maintaining a sense of innocence.
No one had any doubt that Walton Goggins would absolutely slay as The Ghoul. I love that we got to see two sides of his character through flashbacks and I am so fucking intrigued as to where his wife and daughter ended up after the bombs dropped, especially since it’s revealed that his wife was behind the mayhem! They used just the right amount of makeup/CGI on Goggins’ Ghoul so that he looked badass and not like a botched plastic surgery job.
The one character that I couldn’t really get down with was Aaron Moten’s Maximus, the guy in the robot suit. It’s not the actor’s fault, because I think he played the douchey man-child character to a tee. I feel like the writers just made Maximus too unlikable and nothing he did really redeemed him for me. The best villains are the ones where you can sort of see where they’re coming from: Magneto, Thanos, the Hamburglar. Maximus just kept making the most selfish decisions (hurting his best friend, letting his knight die, lying fucking constantly) and Lucy, my girl, what do you see in this guy??
If you enjoyed the nihilist take on the end of the world in The Last of Us, if you enjoy the gore and real-life dialogue in The Boys, and if you thought the first season of Westworld’s mystery was good, you will like Fallout. Enough of the mysteries were solved by the end of the first season so that I felt satisfied and excited for more. But the end credit scene has Kyle MacLachlan skipping away into the sunset and ending up in New Vegas, setting up more mysteries to be revealed.
