Famous Ankles

My latest posts have been about my wanderings out and about Brooklyn on Saturday, August 18th.  Here’s another.

What can I say?  It was a busy day.  I still have two or three posts left that cover the weekend.  It may be for the best because this coming weekend’s weather may not be quite as accommodating as last weekend’s.  In any event, I sure hope it doesn’t include another mugging.

Anyway….this post isn’t about next weekend, but about my Park Slope (Brooklyn) wanderings.  Where we left off, I had managed to aimlessly wander around the ENTIRE PARK!!!!  What was I thinking?  I’ll tell you what I was thinking:  “I need to get to Grand Army Plaza and get something to eat.”  Ahhh, sophisticated thought processes on display there, eh?  (Truth:  it’s a big park, but it is walkable.)  When I finally did spot Grand Army Plaza, it was a moment of pleasant relief.

Grand Army Plaza is a huge area built up and around a plaza and it is grand, indeed.  The centerpiece of the plaza is the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch.  (But to confuse you, there’s a Grand Army Plaza in Manhattan, too.  It’s where the Plaza Hotel is, right at the southeast corner of Central Park.  Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza is at the northern tip of Prospect Park.  Both parks, as noted in my earlier post, were designed by Frederick Law Olmstead.  Maybe he had a thing about grand armies…)

Here’s a pic of the arch.

It is part of Park Slope, but it seems more or less a place all to itself.

I’ve been there before and each time, there’s been a Famers Market.  You can see part of it at the bottom of the picture of the arch.  NYC is big on farmers markets.

I was pretty tuckered out when I got to this point.  I did notice the Brooklyn Public Library just to the side and just had to go in.

It’s pretty nice inside, but not quite the New York Public Library, which has an entry beyond compare.  I still owe you a photo regarding my Brooke Astor post.  Soon…

Oh, there doesn’t really seem to be any places there that I wanted to eat; so I went a few blocks back to 7th Avenue and found the Tex-Mex place I mentioned in the Park Slope post.  It wasn’t worth walking the few extra blocks.  Well, I’ve gone further for worse, so no real complaint.

-H

As part of my planned Saturday wanderings in Brooklyn, I decided to take a quick look into Prospect Park.  It turns out to be far more of a look than planned.  I essentially walked the entire perimeter of the park.  It’s a big park and I got pretty tired during the walk.

I reached the park after going through Park Slope, which is just to the immediate west of Prospect Park.  I think I was on 9th Street and I did enter at the Lafayette entrance.  I don’t know if that’s the actual name, but there’s a dedication to him at the entrance.

The area just inside the entrance was set up for a big birthday party for a little kid.  Happy Birthday kid…whoever you are.

Frederick Law Olmstead was the primary architect of both Central Park and Prospect Park.  They are very different, but they both share one feature that even Famous Ankles can notice:  complexity and diversity of the areas.  Neither park can be described simply.  You can’t take in the parks at a glance or even with a dozen different perspectives.  They are designed to have distinct areas, each with its own identity and, usually, a distinctive name.  In Central Park, you’ve got such places as the Great Lawn, the Sheep Meadow, the Ramble, and Poets’ Walk.  Prospect Park has lots of names, but they don’t strike my ear as familiar as those in Central Park (whose places I had heard of before moving to NYC).  That doesn’t make them any less attractive.

The most immediate difference I saw between Central Park and Prospect Park is the lack of fences in Prospect Park.  Central Park has a lot of fenced-off areas; or at least areas that are fenced off at various times during the year.  I wandered for a while in Prospect Park before I saw my first fenced-in area.  It’s an equestrian area where two women were taking horse riding lessons.  There were also two instructors, one of whom seemed to enjoy yelling at one of the riders.  It wasn’t English…but in NYC it can be anything.

I continued walking and ran into Prospect Park Lake at the far south tip of the park.

It looks like Goose Heaven to me.

And that leads to a second difference between Prospect Park and Central Park:  wilderness areas.  As beautiful as Central Park is, there’s very little unplanned space in it.  At times, it seems that every blade of grass is planned.  Central Park has an area called “The Ramble” (an old favorite of mine) which is relatively “wild”.  But even it is very well planned out.  In contrast, Prospect Park has lots and lots of “wild” areas.  (I saw an interview where a Park employee said they had the last true forest in NYC.)

Okay, the last seems pretty planned, but it wouldn’t look that way in Central Park.

The biggest difference, at least for me, is really the people.  On a weekend like this one, Central Park is usually much more crowded.  There are a lot of runners/bikers in the streets in both places, but I don’t think Prospect Park had more than a relatively small fraction of that population in Central Park.  I did note that the hilliness of Prospect Park made some of the bikers and rollerbladers go a lot faster than anyone I’ve seen in Central Park.

But, both parks were done by Olmstead and there are lots of similarities.  I’ve mentioned the “sections” that both parks consist of.  They both also have a number of tunnels in the walking areas.

They both have “boathouses”.  In Prospect Park, it’s near the Audubon Center.  Central Park’s boats are individualized (you rent them and paddle yourself).  What I saw in Prospect Park included a sort of micro-cruise ship.  Here’s that boat coming under an overpass (unique to Prospect Park, too).

It’s tiny, but it is powered by something other than oars.

Okay, but there’s one thing that Prospect Park has that Central Park doesn’t:  the Long Meadow.  Stretching from Prospect Park Lake in the south to the northern tip, the Long Meadow is a grassy open area several hundred yards wide and who knows how long.  It meanders all over the place and is a combination Sheep Meadow and Great Lawn and beyond.  In Central Park’s Sheep Meadow, people often just cluster to sunbathe.  In the Great Lawn, they play organized sports (reserved times and everything).  In Prospect Park’s Long Meadow, they do both and anything else they feel like.  It’s nearly perfect.  I can hardly say enough in its favor.

The last picture is from near the northern tip of Prospect Park.  At that point, you enter back into Park Slope.  That area is Grand Army Plaza (the subject of another post).

-H

My Saturday wanderings started with a very popular and prosperous part of Brooklyn:  Park Slope.

If you’re financially sound and new to NYC:  Park Slope calls.  And a lot of people are hearing that call.  There are definite reasons for that.  It’s a nice area with beautiful buildings and a magnificent, terrific, wonderful, beautiful park right next to it:  Prospect Park.  I’ll be posting separately on that.

Okay, for those people who don’t know Brooklyn:  Park Slope is probably just a couple of miles east of Manhattan’s Financial District (that’s at the southern tip of Manhattan).  It is easily within reach of Manhattan because of a bunch of subways plus the Brooklyn Bridge.  It’s a bit north of Coney Island, but it is so far from Coney Island, in a cultural sense, that they practically aren’t on the same planet.

Park Slope is the home of a lot of artists and performers, as well as oodles of the non-hoi polloi (I love getting technical).  The prices range from sub-Manhattan to Manhattan equal.  The sub-Manhattan prices are in places that call themselves “Park Slope”, but don’t quite share the same zip code(s).  The area is quite hilly (that’s the “slope” part) and apparently lays claim to being the area of the story “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”.  Well, there are lots of trees in this part of Brooklyn.

The area has a lot of brownstones and rowhouses and the like.  Here are some on 7th Avenue, which seems to be a main commercial drag in Park Slope.

And a few more.

The thing I love to point out (this is my jealous side) is to look at the window air conditioners.  The buildings are old, magnificent, often expensively remodeled, and incapable of handling central air conditioning.  You see it all over Manhattan, too.

The houses below are magnificent.  They’re on 9th Avenue about a block away from Prospect Park and are probably way, way, way outside any price range I’d ever consider.

Yeah, they’ve got the occasional window air conditioner, too.

Some of the buildings have some interesting art.

There’s even some small art.  Here’s a bit of tree protection (probably protecting it from dogs which doesn’t bode well for the art).

Okay, Park Slope is a terrific looking place.  But is there more to it?  Sure, but my other impressions are so minimal that you can take them for what they’re worth.

The Park Slope Coop (I prefer the more correct “Co-op” to differentiate a cooperative from a chicken house) is an interesting throwback to the 1970s.

The place is busy and filled with non-standard foodstuffs.  It is also a little dirtier (although not unsanitary) than I like my grocery stores to be.  It has the real feel of the 1970s cooperative food store that I used to go to long ago.  But that’s not for good reasons.  There are lots of little repairs that need to be done (as in “we’ve got more important things to do rather than repair a few tiles or re-paint a wall”) and the displays are unprofessional.  I used to do some retail and it’s always a good idea to pull the few remaining items to the front to make the display look full and flush.  At the Park Slope Coop, every single can was pushed as far back as it could go.  And almost every line of product wasn’t fully stocked.  It isn’t for nothing that Whole Foods is doing so well:  they’ve got the co-op feel and selection types down pat, but they’ve done a lot of professionalizing of their appearance.

On the other hand, as I went it a pretty loud woman (apparently just in a boisterous and happy mood) greeted an old friend with the statement “I just finished my film shoot.  It was intense, man!”

Another Park Slope image in my mind:  lots of stoop sales (people putting out homewares for sale, but having no yard, put it just off the building’s stoop).   I saw about four stoop sales in three blocks.  My favorite:  a family had out a wide variety of stuff.  Not a great quantity, but a great variety.  It included two mannequins, an accordian, and an old PC.  I took a picture, but it came out poorly, so won’t be shown.

And they did have a great flea market that day.  It appears to be a weekly event.  I thought it was pretty good.

It included furniture, coins, typewriters, old watches, original art, and (most poignantly) family photos.  The quality appeared generally on the good side, so it beats most flea markets hands down.

There are lots and lots of real estate offices.  As usual in NYC, all of them have posted “for sale” and “for rent” samples on their front windows.  Most of the offices actually have a number of their postings marked “SOLD” or “Under Contract”.  I don’t know how true/timely they are and think that’s just to drum up interest on the part of sellers.

I had lunch at a little Tex-Mex place.  Not worthy of any note, so I won’t.

Overall, Park Slope is ethnically very caucasian and middle American.  I don’t think I heard any foreign languages on the street, but people and events were actually very muted.

-H