Famous Ankles

I’ve been going through Alphabet City recently.  In other posts, I’ll describe it a little better, but it’s part of the East Village.  I’ve recently been informed that the old timers reject the “East Village” appellation and prefer to remember it as the Lower East Side (which generally is used nowadays as the same general area, but only below Houston).

Anyway, I kept running into small community gardens in the area.  Calling them “gardens” isn’t quite right as they don’t let you grow your own stuff, but are set aside as greenery areas in the midst of a lot of four and five story buildings.

On Avenue A and 11th Street, I ran into the Open Road Park garden area…although it’s not much of a park nor much of a garden (at least not right now).  Note the sophisticated signage.

This one’s quite a bit bigger than the normal community garden in other parts of the area, but it really does fall into the general type of garden in most ways.  Look at the plantings (it’s winter and all is dormant, of course).

In fact, it is very deep and even has a greenhouse area.

Amazingly, and I mean that with a lot of feeling, they even have a tiny pond!

It isn’t much, but it’s real.

The area itself is so mixed.  Alphabet City has areas of great beauty and significant poverty.  But it does have a lot of places like this and, although not unique by any means in NYC, it made me very pleased with how NYC has shaped up.

-H

Avenue B has the nickname “Charlie Parker Place”. The jazz great lived very near Tompkins Square Park back in the days that living near there didn’t have any cache at all. The street itself is quite pleasant nowadays.

I was going on 7th Street and subsequently ran into Avenue C and found it…perfectly normal.

In honesty, I expected it to look perfectly normal.  This isn’t the 80s and NYC is really nice.  I couldn’t help thinking about what I had been told:  if you get to Ave C, you’re crazy.  Nothing crazy about this…except for me sightseeing in the cold of the day.

If you look closely, you’ll see a NYC rarity:  a two-way north-south street.  There are a few, but most are two-way for only a distance.  I didn’t get below 7th Street at this point, but I think it held true for all of Alphabet City.

-H

During my Alphabet City tour I saw a bit of graffiti, but nothing as big as Graffiti Church.  It’s located on 7th Street between Avenue B and Avenue C.

It’s actually a Baptist Church and the website looks interesting.  At some point, I’ll probably attend services, but I think I’ll let it warm up a bit first.

The building isn’t all that big, but it is relatively nice.

No graffiti on the church itself, but there is a little bit on the building to the right.

-H

In my recent wanderings of Alphabet City (part of the Lower East Side and also called the East Village), I ran into a number of vacant lots that had been converted into community gardens.  One identical link between them:  all seemed about the width of a former building that had been removed.  Maybe by being too derelict, or maybe they were destroyed in the bad old days and just needed to have the rubble removed.  Another link:  the imaginative use of the space by those that turned such an open area into something rather nice.

On 7th Street between Avenue C and Avenue D is one of those places:  the Sam and Sadie Koenig Garden.  I don’t know anything about Sam and Sadie, but they’ve got a nice community garden.

Maybe this is a representation of Sadie?  Probably not, but maybe in a poetical/artistic sense.

A sign on the fence says it is open Saturday and Sundays from 11am to 4pm or “whenever the gate is open.”  Ya gotta love that.  Being winter, it’s a bit sparse, but I don’t really think it’s a huge source of greenery at any time of year.  (Look at the shadows.)  And the next picture shows how very thin the place is.

Yeah, it’s about as wide as the truck is long.  But in NYC, you take your green spaces where you can find them.  And I really like the statuary and the little winding path.

-H