When Coffee Was King
Nothing lasts forever
I’m finally covid free! I spent a solid 2 weeks melting into my couch (and not because of the weather) because I felt like absolute garbage. For some reason you all liked my fever dream of a newsletter from last week, so maybe I should write while sick more often? While I’m no longer feverish, I have yet to fully regain my taste and my ability to taste sweetness in particular is completely gone. If you know me, you know this is actually very tragic because I love dessert 😭 Fruit is tasteless to me and most foods just taste bitter without that sweetness to round them out. So please pray for me and expect to see less food recs until my tongue starts working again.
Since I barely left my apartment the last couple weeks, today’s topics are slight throwbacks to a better (healthier) time! Read about my spectacular visit to The Rubin during my double museum day a few weeks back. It immediately became a top museum for me and is worth a visit. I would give it 3 Michelin stars if I could, but I can’t, so I’ll just give it 3 Eden stars. I also did some more research into the fabulous home I was staying in while cat sitting in Clinton Hill because it just smelled like it had history and it did! I go back and forth from wanting to live an absolutely minimalist life in a small studio to wanting to live in a lavish NYC mansion - there is absolutely no in between.
Clinton Hill is a gorgeous neighborhood in North Brooklyn that I’ve really been enjoying exploring more. It was originally called “The Hill” because of its high elevation, but was renamed “Clinton Hill” after the main street within its borders - Clinton Ave - which itself was named after Gov DeWitt Clinton. From what I can tell, Gov Clinton was a pretty decent dude; he helped organize the New-York Historical Society and was a major proponent of the Erie Canal, which had a huge impact on population growth and on cementing NYC’s status as an economic epicenter of the Northeast. But enough about DWC, let’s talk about what you can find on his namesake street - Clinton Ave.
The street as a whole is lined with beautiful fucking architecture in a variety of different styles; you’ll find Beaux Arts, Greek Revival, and Gothic Revival buildings just to name a few. But I want to talk about one building in particular - 315 Clinton Ave.
315 Clinton is known as the Arbuckle Mansion because in 1888(!) it was built for “Coffee King” John Arbuckle. John and his brother, Charles, originally inherited a grocery business and one of the items they dealt with was coffee. At the time in the 1860s, coffee was generally sold to folks fresh AF - that is it was still in its raw green form and folks would roast it themselves on their stovetops. In 1868, John filed his first patent for his coffee roasting method and, though he would spend 35 years refining it, began selling bags of pre-roasted coffee! Arbuckle’s Ariosa brand coffee launched nationwide in 1873 and soon became a household name.
By the 1880s the brothers’ business outgrew its Pittsburgh factories and they made the move to NYC. John initially bought a row house in Brooklyn Heights, but with all that coffee money burning a hole in his pocket, he eventually made the move to something more extravagant. He teamed up with architect Montrose W. Morris to build a Romanesque revival mansion on Brooklyn’s “Gold Coast” - Clinton Ave.
Arbuckle worked with Morris previously to build an addition to his Brooklyn Heights home and they further cemented their partnership with this ambitious new project. Arbuckle purchased the lot next to the newly built home for George Jennings (313 Clinton), the owner of a popular lace glove and mitt business (a very 1880s business, if you ask me). Morris built Arbuckle a huge brownstone complete with tons of little ornate details. One of my favorite parts of the building is the oriel window in the front, which just happens to be on the floor of my cat sitting gig! It’s absolutely wild to me to think that this home used to just house one family when now it’s carved up into nine apartments across its four floors. As a bonus, there is also a huge private backyard space that I would simply die for.
I’m not sure what, if any, bits of the building are original from 1888 but most things sure as hell look old AF. At least the apartment I stayed in had tons of beautiful wood paneling and floors that definitely looked like they’d seen some things. The woman I was cat sitting for also made sure to let me know that she tightened all of the door knobs before my stay because they tend to just fall off sometimes since they’re so old. Lots of the appliances and plumbing and whatnot are obviously new, but I am super impressed that a building this old, and in such an affluent area of Brooklyn, has managed to retain a lot of its original flavor. More of this and less weird modular buildings with colorful windows, please.
The Arbuckles would eventually engage in the great Sugar and Coffee Wars with the Havemeyers around the turn of the century (owners of Domino sugar). The Arbuckles actually came out on top; the Havemeyers gave up their coffee business and the Arbuckles were able to continue production at their Brooklyn sugar refinery, which allowed them to make boatloads of money by owning nearly every aspect of their business. John Arbuckle was one of the wealthiest men in Brooklyn, but records show that he was also quite generous. He took an old ship and turned it into a home for working men and women called the Deep Sea Hotel. He also established a vacation home in New Paltz called the Mary and John Arbuckle Farm, which he would allow his workers to use to take time off. And he gave kids boat rides!
John lived in his Clinton Ave home until his death in 1912. And yes, he actually died in that house so your next question (which was Lorenzo’s first question) is probably - is the house haunted? I don’t think so, though it’s hard to tell if the creaking and banging I heard in the home was ghosts or just doorknobs falling off. The house next door, 313 Clinton Ave, is said to be haunted though. That home belonged to Jennings, the lace guy, and apparently residents of the building have reported being locked in rooms, poltergeist activity, cold spots, etc. Since 313 and 315 Clinton are essentially attached to one another, I see no reason why the ghosts wouldn’t simply wander through the walls and get lost next door, so it’s possible I may yet encounter the ghost of Albert Jennings. The residents of 313 apparently host sick Halloween parties every year so someone please let me know if you know how I can snag an invite 👻
A few weeks ago I had a double museum day and I wrote about visiting The Whitney for the first time. Well, the other museum I went to that day was The Rubin! This is a somewhat niche museum that features art from folks in the Himalayas, so it was never really on my radar. However, it recently made headlines for announcing that it would be closing in October and “transitioning into a global museum model with the goal of bringing greater awareness and understanding of Himalayan art to more people around the world.” Now I am a huge proponent for remote work, but I’m not sure a museum can just go remote like this? I’m very interested to see how this will work because I was incredibly impressed with their exhibits and really can’t imagine how I would experience them via their global model.
There were two exhibits in particular that I really loved: Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now and the Mandala Lab.
A common way to organize artifacts in museums is to either display them all around a theme (hunting gear, cooking utensils, etc) or display them chronologically. This is fine, but honestly sometimes I get bored halfway through an exhibit because I feel like I’m just looking at a lot of similar things. I might not look at every single fork on display or I might just glance over a time period’s worth of stuff because it’s simply so vast. Reimagine asked us to, get this, reimagine how works are presented and contextualized. Modern art was presented alongside more traditional depictions and I thought that this was just so freakin cool and genuinely helped me understand both the traditional and modern pieces more.
One piece that I really enjoyed was the tangerine altar (above). I feel like we sometimes look at past traditions and find them silly even though there are a ton of habits we’ve held onto that have really weird origins (ie: Halloween, Christmas, everything to do with weddings). In the Himalayas, lots of folks align with practices that involve praying and leaving offerings at altars to honor those who’ve passed, to wish for abundance, etc. This delightfully orange altar imagines an alternate world in which tangerines have become extinct and so folks saved up a bunch of the old wrinkly fruits to worship them as a reminder of better times and hope that they can attain that abundance once again. This is hilarious, but it also perfectly illustrates my point that everything is about perspective! Is it really so unlikely that one day we may no longer have tangerines or other crops readily available and we’ll look to them with longing? I feel like I’m constantly hearing about how we won’t have coffee or chocolate for much longer, so I can see this becoming a reality in the not-too-distant future. Also, it’s just a really creative way to acknowledge a practice from another region and inject a little silliness.
My favorite part of the museum was probably the Mandala Lab. This was an entire floor of interactive exhibits! I’m constantly wishing I could touch art, run my fingers over a painting to feel the lumpy layers, feel the texture of the marble sculptures. If you like a museum experience that’s more than just looking at stuff, you’ll love the Mandala Lab.
Mandalas are Buddhist teaching tools that can be used to learn how to confront and transform feelings of pride, attachment, envy, anger, and ignorance. Through a deep, sustained investigation of these emotions, some Buddhist practitioners cultivate corresponding wisdoms and skills that help them shift their view of the world, themselves, and others. Each activity on the floor is designed to help visitors examine these specific emotional states.
I really loved the lab section that explored how Attachment impacts how we identify scents. There were a bunch of touch screens set up that asked us to smell a mystery scent, indicate the feelings we associate with it, and then try to guess what the scent was. At the end, the origin of the scent was revealed, along with a video of one person’s experiences connected to that scent. The idea is that the emotions and memories I connect with a scent are much different than yours, so we experience it differently. While it’s perfectly fine to hold onto these memories and attachments, it’s worth acknowledging and respecting those differences. Some of the scents were nice (flowers, rainstorm) and some were less nice (cigarettes, yuck). But of course I smelled all of them and watched every video!
The other interactive piece I loved involved hitting gongs, a decidedly unusual museum activity! There were gongs of different sizes and thicknesses hanging above a shallow tank of water and they all sounded very different. The activity asked us to imagine our anger and imbue the gong with it, hit the gong, lower it into the water, and imagine our anger dissipating into the tank as the water muffled the sound. I hit every single gong because I needed to find the one I liked the most (not because I was super angry, ok?) and I ended up with two favorites that just seemed to vibrate on the right frequency, ya know? All of the activities in the Mandala Lab were so well designed and I felt like I was really able to understand the Buddhist Mandalas through them.
If you’ve never been, you absolutely have to visit The Rubin before it closes on October 6. I’ve never been to a museum before that presented the art in such a unique way and it truly helped me connect with it so much more than if it was just presented traditionally. The museum plans to loan out their pieces once they close and take the Mandala Lab on the road, but I don’t think the experience will be quite the same. If you have a library card you can reserve free tickets to The Rubin via Culture Pass! Please trust me when I say it is totally worth it!
If there’s one thing NYC will do, it’s figure out ways to get you to pay more for food. Enter Union Square’s new Night Market. It’ll take over the plaza on July 18, July 25, and August 1 from 12-9pm (which makes it a night-ish market really). Of the vendors there, I’ve only tried Home Frite, which is a great option if you want to eat a giant portion of excellent french fries. There’s another vendor offering chocolate covered strawberries, but I’ve heard they’re super expensive and at this point what do you expect?
It has been ages since I’ve found a good clothing swap and I’m so excited that @howtobebrokeinnewyork is teaming up with @shoponpickle to bring us a swap this Sunday! I’ll be volunteering there, so come say hi and please bring lots of black clothes in size medium-ish for me to swap. Get your $15 ticket here.
This Sunday is also National Ice Cream Day! Fingers crossed my ability to taste sweet things returns this weekend because there are a bunch of spots giving out free or discounted ice cream. I would avoid the Museum of Ice Cream Sprinkle Pool and head straight to Taiyaki for their completely random Monopoly collab. Sugar Hill Creamery’s corn ice cream also sounds delicious! The butterbeer ice cream at the Harry Potter store is good, but it tastes much better in float form than it does on its own for some reason. And I’m kinda over Smorgasburg, but they’ll be having ice cream specials all weekend, too.
Do you remember when Restaurant Week was just a week and restaurants actually had good deals and it was a special thing? I feel like we have a restaurant week every month now and whaddya know, this month’s “Restaurant Week” runs from July 22 - August 18. You can attack restaurant week in one of two ways: do tons of research to figure out which place is actually offering you the best deal or just pick a restaurant at random and see what you get! I’ve done both (and had equal successes and failures), but here are a few options that I think are interesting:
Kintsugi and Kissaki are offering $60 omakase, which is a bit cheaper than usual. A tiktok account I like recently visited Kintsugi!
Hangawi is offering a $95 prix fix menu. This is not cheap, but I’ve been to their sister restaurant, Franchia, and it was hands down the best vegan food I’ve ever had. And Hangawi is supposed to be better.
Even Hornblower Cruises is offering a deal! You can pay $60 to ride a boat up the Hudson and scoop yourself some lukewarm eggs.
Drawing Room is now hosting Game Nights every Saturday night! They’ll help organize folks into game groups and you can play anything from their library or bring your own. Tickets are $20 and include an all day pass to the space on the same day.
Another artsy hangout coming up in Studio 45’s Picnic Pictionary Date on July 27. I really like that this place offers events and workshops on a sliding scale, so you have some options on how to pay. This event is really affordable - you can pay $10-20.
Eden, you babysat cats in John Arbuckle's house and said NOTHING about how much they love lasagna and hate Mondays?!!?
Great edition this week and glad you are feeling better! I live a block away from the Arbuckle mansion so it’s very cool to learn about its former owners. Also love the Rubin though I haven’t been in many years. I guess I only have a brief window to rectify that!