An eclipse and an earthquake waltz into NYC...
"Did you feel/see that?" asks everyone
It has been a week for natural phenomena. Did you all feel the earthquake? Did you see the eclipse? I absolutely love how unserious and jaded the world has become and really enjoyed the mass of memes associated with both. Also - please dispose of your eclipse glasses responsibly!
The last couple weeks have been super busy for me 😵 so I’m trying to commit to accepting no new plans in April. I absolutely love saying no to things, but the people pleaser in me automatically defaults to saying “yes of course, no worries” all the time and sometimes I hate that little bitch. I am desperately in need of more couch time and if you’re watching your calendar absolutely fill up, I recommend setting a similar boundary and doing the same. The things will still be there, or the world will end and they won’t and in that case it won’t fucking matter anyways.
1. Exploring 🛼
Since having a few cat sitting stints in Greenpoint, I can safely say that I have fallen in love with that neighborhood despite its lack of transit options. One of the most charming little spots I found was WNYC Transmitter Park. It’s a relatively new park having only opened in 2012. The spot was originally home to public radio station WNYC and was the site of twin antennas used for broadcasting from 1937 to 1990. Eventually these antennas fell out of use and the area was redeveloped into a park!
The park is fairly small, but it manages to fit in a bunch of really nice features. That cool mural is by two dudes named Patrick who make up an art collective called FAILE. There’s a nice playground for the kiddos and a long pedestrian bridge that juts out over the water. Apparently you can fish here too, although I would always be super sus of any fish caught in NYC waters. The waterway dock does offer some amazing city views, though. In fact, you probably get one of the best unobstructed views of both the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building here. From within Manhattan it’s tough to get a good view of these buildings now because 1) despite being skyscrapers they’re much smaller than some of the newer construction around them and 2) there is so much goddam new construction around them.
The park seems to be really well utilized by folks who live nearby, which we love to see. It certainly doesn’t hurt that there are a plethora of solid food places right around the corner, too. The nearby Jubilee Market is home to 20 Gram Cafe which offers a $2.55 smashburger. Taku Sando offers excellent katsu sandwiches. Lingo is an upscale Japanese restaurant that is on my to-try list. Bellocq is not only a villain in Indiana Jones, but also a very fancy tea purveyor. And of course my beloved Kettl is just a short walk away. If you find yourself in this corner of Greenpoint, Transmitter Park is an excellent little enclave that is just enough out of the way to feel like a secret only you know about.
2. Learning 🧠
You guys all know about the Titanic right? Big ship, “unsinkable”, currently at the bottom of the ocean? Also apparently kids these days didn’t know it was actually real and thought it was just a movie? I last saw the movie when I was like 9 so I wasn’t really in it for the history, I honestly just watched because there was an underground Titanic club in my class and I desperately wanted to be cool enough to join - I was not. But since moving to NYC I’ve learned that we have a ton of connections to this big ass boat! That’s right, this bitch is writing about the fucking Titanic.
I actually learned one of my favorite bits of info about the Titanic while riding the double decker tour bus around the city (which I actually recommend) and it has to do with Pier 54:
If you’ve visited Little Island, you might have noticed this rusty ass thing near one of the entrances and thought “eww.” Well, this just happens to be the last bit of Pier 54 that remains and Pier 54 just happens to be where the Carpathia dropped off the Titanic survivors! The Titanic was set to sail from Southampton England to NYC and, spoilers if you haven’t seen the movie, it didn’t make it. The Carpathia was making the opposite journey and rerouted when it heard the Titanic’s distress signal. 700 survivors were retrieved from the waters that night and on April 18 New Yorkers crowded the dock at Pier 54 hoping to be reunited with their loved ones.
Now with the Titanic being a famous luxury ship and all, she was carrying a lot of high profile passengers. All the money in the world couldn’t save John Jacob Astor IV from perishing on the Titanic (really, he was the richest man in the world). Diligent BCLF readers may remember a brief mention of Isidor Straus in the Double Egg Cream issue; what I didn’t mention then was that Isidor was a passenger on the Titanic along with his wife, Ida. Unfortunately they never lived to see Macy’s spiteful Million Dollar Corner because they went down with the ship. Ida refused to board a life boat without Isidor so they accepted their fates as the ship went down. The aptly named Straus Park on the UWS has a memorial dedicated to the couple.
Upon researching for this issue, I also learned that the city has another memorial to the Titanic that I’d walked right by without a thought - aptly named the Titanic Memorial Lighthouse. This structure was originally erected atop the old Seamen’s Church Institute near South St Seaport on the 1 year anniversary of the disaster. Since it was near the seaport, it largely functioned as an actual lighthouse. It had a time ball that would lower every day at noon so sailors could reset their watches; time balls used to be a big thing, not just on New Years. The top portion of the lighthouse was eventually moved off the roof and donated to the South St Seaport Museum and it’s been at the entrance of the Seaport ever since.
3. What’s Good 😎
Gansevoort Plaza is reopening for the season! They’ve got a bunch of fun activities going on this Saturday April 13 including live music, free food, and workshops. Will it be crowded? Yes, probably. But the vibes of NYC waking up for the spring are incomparable, so if you don’t mind crowds check it out.
Y’all know I love a good clothing swap and Bed-Stuy Clothes Swap is set to host a big one at the Brooklyn Museum on Feb 20! Tickets are sold out but they’re still looking for volunteers and you all know my philosophy on volunteering to attend events for free. Make a day of it and visit the museum and botanic garden while you’re there!
Head in the Clouds Nightmarket will feature 80+ AAPI businesses and only costs $8 for entry beforehand. Shop local in LIC on April 19!
Spring is mothafuckin springin and it’s time to level up your plant game with these 2 options
On April 20 the goddam Met Cloisters is having a plant sale. Like you literally get to choose a medieval garden-inspired plant cultivated on-site in The Met Cloisters greenhouse.
Stop by the Annual Seedling Sale at Yunhai Shop on May 11 to pick up some east Asian heritage vegetable and herb seeds, suitable for both indoor container growing.
If you somehow have the space for an entire tree in your apartment, you’re in luck! NY Restoration Project is hosting tree giveaways on weekends through May 12.
McCarren Parkhouse has a ton of programming that I feel like is slept on so I’d like to highlight a Disco Figure Drawing event they have on April 17. It’s a pretty affordable $40 and you’ll get to draw multiple poses while listening to disco and sippin on dranks.
I’m absolutely devastated that I didn’t hear about this sooner and couldn’t get a trivia group together by Friday - The Queens Museum has brought back their Annual Panorama Challenge! Groups will gather over the fabulous Panorama of NYC and take part in the largest NYC-themed trivia game. The winning team will have their name is etched on the Panorama Challenge Trophy housed at the Queens Museum, like no big deal 🥲
4. Noshing 😋
A new cafe opened up near my job in Ktown and I don’t know what it is but I love the name - Bunny & Bro. Their logo is cute, but also a little bit weird. And so is the art inside the space. Case in point:
Now I’m not a coffee person, so I enlisted Lorenzo to help me do some research and rate a wider variety of their items. At what point am I allowed to write off matchas as business expenses?
We each got different versions of their einspanner lattes - he got coffee and I got matcha. I’ve never heard the term “einspanner” before, but the picture looked tasty and worth a shot. According to the NYT, “Einspänner, in German, is either a one-horse carriage or a hot espresso topped with cool whipped cream.” I can confirm that in this case it is the latter, although the drinks were served cold rather than hot. And dear reader, they have soy milk here! I love soy milk, the texture, the flavor, and I hate how oat milk has proliferated across cafes; I will never be an oat milk person.
Both the matcha and coffee were really solid! I absolutely cannot stand when I get a clumpy matcha and I’m happy to say that Bunny & Bro whisked appropriately. Lorenzo said that the coffee had a nice sweetness to it, no doubt thanks to the dollop of cream plopped on top. You get a little wooden spoon along with your drink which I used to swirl a little matcha into a scoop of cream that went straight into my mouth hole. When I could no longer easily scoop blobs of cream into my mouth, I resigned to mixing it in and enjoyed a delicious creamy iced matcha. A goddam delight.
The cafe has a solid amount of seating and offers wifi, so it’s not a bad place to pop in to to get a little work done. It’s nestled on W29th St between 6th and 7th aves, so it’s both in the middle of everything but also kind of hidden on a lesser trafficked street. I plan to stop back in to try their London Fog!
5. Watching🍿
As soon as I saw the trailer for Monkey Man I thought:
And now I will give you my take on this movie using only images and gifs of Monkey Man from Hey Arnold. This is the shit you’re paying for!
Dev Patel wrote, directed, and starred in Monkey Man and at times I got the feeling that he might have been stretched a bit thin, but overall this was a really great movie. The story is fairly straightforward - kid watches mom get murdered, kid grows up and wants revenge, kid (spoiler alert) gets revenge. Lots of folks have called it a “Mumbai John Wick” and they’re not wrong, although the pacing of the film wasn’t quite as solid as the John Wick movies. MM was bogged down by a lot of flashback inserts, most of which showed us the same thing and didn’t really add to the story, but instead created breaks in the action that didn’t need to be there.
In the scenes where he was fighting, Patel was superb. Those scenes were absolutely Mumbai John Wick, although MM got his ass kicked a bit more than Keanu did. MM gets his name from the stories his mother told him about Hanuman, the Monkey King. In order to make money and get close to the people who killed his mother, MM dons a monkey mask and fights at a boxing club run by none other than Sharlto Copley. By making connections and just being generally sneaky, he eventually finds his way into an underground club that services the policeman who killed his mother. But this cop is working for an even douchier douchebag who is apparently based on the current PM of India. So MM sets out to basically kill everyone up the food chain.
Now I know nothing about India’s politics, so a lot of the nuance of this story was probably lost on me. There was a sort of strange side quest that occurred in the middle of the movie where MM is beaten down and rescued by members of a transgender community who are basically hiding out so they aren’t persecuted by the douchey PM. They help heal MM, but they also sort of teach him to fight? Even though he already knew how to fight? And also apparently all of the transgender folks here are like badass warriors with sick costumes at the ready and they join MM on his revenge journey? Like I didn’t hate it and I found the whole situation very interesting (apparently there’s an Indian God who is half male/half female), but it also sort of came out of nowhere.
Despite the middle of this movie sort of dragging, I really enjoyed it and think it’s worth seeing. It’s got something for everyone! Tons of blood and action for the guys, Dev Patel being sweaty and shirtless and constantly running his hands through his hair for the girls. Actually, was the point of this movie to convince me that Dev Patel is really, really, really ridiculously good looking? Because if so, this was 100% achieved.
