In da clerb, we all fam
Oh a pox? How delightful a pox!
Sorry for the slightly later in the day issue - work has been surprisingly busy (as in, I’ve had to actually do work). I’m writing this issue from NYC Drawing Room because I got a surprise remote day and let me tell you, the vibes are prime for newsletter writing. Today’s issue details my experience playing fun little games at Lawn Club and also gets into some of the possibly haunted history of Roosevelt Island.
This weekend I’m super excited to visit the Cloisters (fall is the perfect time to go), attend a Yom Kippur dinner with friends, and take a lil trip to Sleepy Hollow. I’m on challah baking duty for dinner and I’m also making apple butter with the bounty of apples from a few weeks ago that I simply cannot finish. The plan for Sleepy Hollow is to go for a morning hike in nearby Roosevelt State Park, grab lunch somewhere (maybe Bridge View Tavern again?), and follow that up with a cemetery tour. Ya girl just wants to do fall stuff!
A few years ago my friend invited me to join her bocce team; we met every weekend in Sunset Park and played in a league. Friends, this is the only sport I’ve ever played and I’m happy to report that my team came in dead last - in the entire city. There was a team of Italian boys from Bensonhurst who had an unfair advantage (the advantage was being Italian and from Bensonhurst), but I digress. Even though we lost, I had a lot of fun and I learned that bocce is a great sport for people who are bad at sports.
Thus, I organized a Wowza Hangout at Lawn Club in FiDi. At first glance, Lawn Club seems like a great place to have a corporate team outing. It’s got all of the essential elements - individual spaces, food and drinks delivered right to you, and lightly competitive games. And it actually would make a great place for a team outing if that’s what you’re looking for! But I was surprised that I also really enjoyed it as a non-corporate activity.
You have a few different options up front when booking:
Outdoor or Indoor Gaming Lawns: These are the most versatile and are what I did. You can switch between lawn pong, bocce, cornhole, ladders, beersbee, and kan jam.
Croquet Lawns - A couple lawns are just set up for croquet. And unfortunately no, there were no references to Heathers.
Putting Pool - This was maybe the most unique - it was basically a combination of billiards and mini golf. This is what I would want to try next time.
We requested for our lawn to be set up with bocce, so that’s what we started with. When we arrived, the staff showed us to our court and very excitedly told us that they just got in new glowing bocce balls, so we got to play surprise glow bocce! The balls were a bit lighter than your standard bocce balls, so if you’re a purist you might want to go with a standard set. Our lawncierge also took some time to explain how to play bocce and let us know to grab her if we wanted to switch games out at anytime.
I may not have won bocce all those years ago, but after a few rounds I was the champ out of our group! We took a quick snack break here while deciding what game we wanted to play next. A server comes around every so often and the space actually has a pretty decent menu. They have a ton of different beers available and you can get individual or group cocktails (and mocktails). The food options were also surprisingly solid. We shared chicken fingers and mozzarella bites, but they also have burgers and salads and various sandwiches in addition to lil snackies.
We all agreed that kan jam looked too intimidating, so lawn pong was our choice for the next activity. Our lawncierge rolled a bunch of trash cans over, arranged them in a triangle formation, and handed us bouncy balls. It’s basically beer pong, but bigger, and it was very fun, but also quite the workout!
It took all of us a bit to figure out the best way to tackle the physics of lawn pong. Ultimately, the trick is to really lob the ball up high so it goes into the trash cans, but not too high that it hits the ceiling and shoots straight down. I went with a solid underhand throw because my overhead shots were quite frankly, garbage. I’m 5 ft tall; I can’t create height where there is none! We also agreed that single bounces were allowed and that was a good strategy for covering both distance and height. We played lawn pong for a solid 45 minutes and were all sweating by the end, but it was the perspiration of victory for me and my teammate!
I feel like Lawn Club actually fills a very NY-specific niche. Most of us don’t have yards; maybe we have a shared rooftop. And even then I don’t think anyone is investing in keeping 12 big garbage cans clean enough to play lawn pong or stocking up on croquet accoutrements. Sometimes you just wanna kick back with your homies and throw balls into various holes and Lawn Club lets you do just that.
Each of their lawns cost roughly $100/hr (depending on the day/lawn type) and allow up to 11 participants. The music they played was upbeat, but not too loud for this Old Person™. They also had a couple more secluded areas with private bars that would honestly be great to book for a party. If you’re a winter birthday person, this is your chance to do summer stuff in the winter!
I previously waxed poetic about my love for Roosevelt Island and while it’s true that the island is now a pretty idyllic place, it wasn’t always that way. Like many of the little islands dotting the waters around NYC, Roosevelt Island has a pretty nasty past. Due to their natural seclusion, islands were often the places that civilized society sent their castaways, and NYC has more than a few islands that were filled with folks suffering from all forms of ailments: physical or mental, real or make-believe. So are there places on the island that are haunted? Some folks think so!
First up, we have the ruins of the Renwick Smallpox Hospital on the south end of the island. Fans of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movie may remember this location from the final fight between Spidey and Green Goblin (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Raimi’s Spider-Man movies are a love letter to NYC). And even though the building is now crumbling and being held up by supports, it is absolutely beautiful and is the only landmarked ruin in NYC. The hospital opened in 1856 and was built in the Gothic Revival style by James Renwick Jr, so it actually always looked like a creepy haunted castle.
Despite the availability of a smallpox vaccine in the mid-1800s, NYC was still subject to large scale outbreaks. All of the sources I found attributed this to the large amounts of immigrants coming into the city that were not vaccinated and arrived carrying the disease, but I’m a little suss on the whole “blame the immigrants” angle. In any case, the hospital was “treating” 7,000 patients each year and in the 100ish years that the hospital was in operation 30,000 deaths occurred there. This is no surprise because the “treatment” was to just throw all of the sick people together and have them wait out the disease in absolute agony. Anyone who died there did not experience anything close to a peaceful death and the bodies were allegedly burned and dumped into the East River.
So is the Renwick Smallpox Hospital haunted? Residents of the island have mentioned hearing strange noises and seeing lights from within the building, but that feels pretty tame considering the horrors the occurred there. I’ve visited the ruin a few times, and the only thing I’ve ever seen inside them was a cat that disobeyed the “do not enter” signs. Maybe I need to go at night when the spirits are more restless.
Roosevelt Island was home to more than one bastion of human suffering though; in my earlier post about the island I mentioned The Octagon. While today it’s a mass of luxury apartments (with studios going for $3700+ 🫠), the Octagon was originally the entrance of the larger NYC Lunatic Asylum and was built a bit before the Smallpox Hospital in 1834.
The Asylum was originally opened with good-ish intentions; it was one of the first institutions for the treatment of the mentally ill in America. The soothing, natural surroundings of the island were thought to help with the rehabilitation of the patients, which was a contrast to how most asylums were simply restraining and locking folks up. Unfortunately, the asylum quickly became overcrowded and the level of treatment degraded disastrously.
The patient population quickly swelled from 800 to over 1,700 and they were often just fed bread and coffee for meals. Even worse - most of the people in there weren’t “crazy.” The majority of the patients suffered from ailments such as “hysteria”, “can’t speak English”, and “is a woman.”A lot of the patients were also simply "friendless and poor," and had no one but the state to care for them. This is not to say that people with/without certain ailments deserve different treatment - everyone deserves to be treated with dignity - but plenty of people shouldn’t have even been in there and that certainly led to the overcrowding and poor conditions.
“The insane asylum on Blackwell's Island is a human rat-trap. It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out.”
― Nellie Bly, Ten Days in a Mad-House
Nellie Bly famously got herself committed to the asylum in 1887 to expose the horrible conditions the asylum would close shortly thereafter in 1894. The Octagon would remain operational for a few more decades as part of the Metropolitan Hospital until 1955 and by the 1970s the whole place was in shambles.
Like I mentioned, the site would be remodeled and open as luxury apartments in 2007. Apparently the building doesn’t like to play up their less savory history, though residents have mentioned some mildly spooky encounters; mostly banging and dogs barking at things that aren’t there. I’m not sure this counts as a haunting because all apartments kind of have unknown banging sounds and my cats are always staring at the ceiling wide-eyed when nothing is there, but if anyone deserves to be haunted it’s someone who’s paying $3,700+ for a fucking studio apartment.
Finally, we have one more possibly haunted site on the northern tip of the island - the lighthouse. A patient of the asylum, John McCarthy, managed to escape one day in 1872. He believed that the British were due to attack and thought it was his duty to build a wall to protect the island. He started building a wall out of clay from the river and it’s unclear if it took asylum workers a while to realize this was happening or if they just sat back and thought “let’s see how this goes” because McCarthy had a nice little wall going before we was returned to the asylum. His crusade reminds me of how I would spend snow days as a kid - me and my friend thought that if we could build a big enough snow wall in the street, the bus wouldn’t be able to make it down and we’d get another day off from school. We only ever managed to build a speed bump, but the intention was there!
While John McCarthy didn’t actually build the lighthouse, the warden of the asylum remarked that McCarthy "is very assiduous, and seems proud of his work, and he has reason to be, for it is a fine structure, strong and well built" and proceeded to bribe him with fake money to give up the fort. The lighthouse was built in 1872, by prison labor of course, and James Renwick (of the Smallpox Hospital) served as architect. It actually did serve a pretty serious purpose though because the water off the north end of the island was known as Hell’s Gate because it was so dark and caused lots of ships to run aground. Though McCarthy isn’t officially regarded as the lighthouse’s architect, you can find a rock nearby that he etched a message on:
This is the work
Was done by John McCarthy
Who built the Light House from the bottom to the
Top All ye who do pass by may
Pray for his soul when he dies
And if that shit isn’t creepy enough, folks say that they’ve seen light emanating from the now defunct lighthouse, as well as ghostly apparitions wandering the area. I’ve been here during the day a few times as well and the only creepy thing I found was an abandoned tricycle (which to be fair, is actually very creepy).
Are you hot and single? (yes, you are) That Dinner Thing and Little Poutine want to play matchmaker! Get ready to Meet Your Match on Friday October 18. All attendees will take a quiz and, after sharing a delicious meal, your matches will be revealed! I keep seeing these dinners all over tik tok and they look so fun.
If you also want to go to The Cloisters this weekend, I recommend visiting on Oct 13 because they’ll have a bunch of Dia de los Muertos activities going on!
If people sometimes confuse you with Timothee Chalamet, you may want to enter this lookalike contest coming up on Oct 27 in Washington Square Park. The prize is a solid $50, which is almost enough to buy one distressed t-shirt at a thrift store in Bushwick.
I am devastated to tell you that FOB Brooklyn is closing at the end of October. They’re an amazing Filipino restaurant in Cobble Hill and I’m sad to hear that they’re closing so soon after we lost Purple Yam. Why must this city take so much from me? If you go (and you should) you must have their cornbread bibingka and sisig.
Wanna know what’s on your ballot this November? The City made a great guide that breaks down all of the local ballot proposals that you should definitely be voting for. I got my mail-in ballot last week and already sent in my vote!
Halloween is quickly approaching and in addition to the classic Village Halloween Parade, there are a ton of spooky events happening around the city!
Here’s a list of dog Halloween events! There is truly nothing better than seeing little doggos dressed up and I am so happy that the Tompkins Sq Halloween Dog Parade is here to stay. There are dog parades on Oct 19 and Oct 26.
6sq ft also put together a great list of free/cheap-ish Halloween events for the month. A lot of these are also kid and dog friendly, but on Halloween aren’t we all just kids who wanna demand candy and spray each other with shaving cream?
In weird news, the earth is experiencing a solar storm Thursday and Friday this week, so if your technology is acting up that may be the reason! Will it make the subways run faster or slower? That’s anyone’s guess! Also yes, this is the plot of the Nic Cage movie Knowing.
Immediately read the title in Ileana’s voice 😂 I need to check out Drawing Room and Lawn Club sounds so fun, bookmarking it for my next double date!
And so interesting to read about Roosevelt Island’s past, I’ve visited a few times and always felt unsettled there but chalked it up to it being a crumbling building, fascinating that it has such a past.
Ilana’s***