Yes, rabbits in Central Park. Domestic pets with collars and leads being given fresh air and a bit of a walk. This is Honey. This is what happens when you get to the 103rd Street section of Central Park. Be warned.
Category Archives: Environment
Learning a bit about Korea
A glorious sunny day and I take J to Battery Park. This is the park at the very tip of Manhattan, the place where everyone goes to get their boat out to see the Statue of Liberty. It is rammed with tourists but poor old Battery Park is still looking worse for wear many months after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy. Much of the park is cordoned off but there’s lots of activity going on to reconstruct it back to its former glory.
The park is host to many statues and at least two war memorials. The memorial to those who died in the Korean War (1950-53) is relatively new, having been erected in 1991 and is impressively modern. We were there for some time and very few people wandered over to this corner of the park, which was a shame, because it’s very thought provoking and a close look at the flags at the base of the memorial reveals some intricate mosaics.
I was so impressed I wanted to share it here. The first photo is the actual memorial, which is huge, you can tell from the size of the surrounding trees. Then below I have photographed three of the many paving slabs which come out from the memorial, like rays of a sun, to show how many countries were involved and how many men died, were wounded and those who were missing. The numbers for the US and for Korea are way in excess of anything I would have guessed.
There’s a macaw up that tree!
Yes, a green macaw, just hanging out in a tree in our local park. I ignore the protestations of E and her friend, when I humour them that ‘yes, dear, now off you go’, in a bid to continue an conversation without small children. Later, intrigued, we wander across the grassy part of the park and yes, there it is. A macaw, Chilling out on a deck chair next to a 60 something lady. ‘You bring him here everyday, do you?’, I ask, in an attempt to hide my bemusement at seeing someone in the park with a macaw. ‘Only on the weekends’ she replies. The bird goes nuts when a toddler gets too close and the owners say ‘he bites, get him away!’ Apparently he likes small girls, so he is happy when E is cooing over him and he’s saying ‘hello’ and other greetings. I ask them how they get him to the park, as I can see no cage or similar device. He sits on her shoulder and she walks to the park wih him. They talk like it’s the most normal thing in the world. NO IT’S NOT! Well, maybe it is in NYC but not in NW3, that’s for sure.
Medieval Manhattan
Ah, I hear you say, but America wasn’t really around in medieval times. Sure, that’s true, but it doesn’t stop NYC from importing treasures from Europe and displaying them in a made up castle in the far reaches of north Manhattan. I kept seeing reference to the Cloisters in tourist blurb and at the Metropolitan Museum but couldn’t quite imagine what it meant. So on a hot and sunny day earlier this week J and I ventured up the A line all the way to 190th Street, which is a very long way away. And naturally it also involved a ridiculous amount of stairs, curses to you stairs, but I think my arms are rather more sculpted than they used to be, so I shouldn’t complain, really.
John D. Rockefeller Jr funded the Cloisters that emerged from the grounds of Fort Tryon Park in the 1930s. An architect called Charles Collens designed the building to look a bit like a medieval monastery and actually included relics into the construction and I think he did a pretty good job. It’s the home of the medieval collection of the Metropolitan Museum. The cloisters themselves are tranquil and beautifully landscaped and great fun to tootle round if you are 20 months old but hopeless if you are the mother of the 20 month old trying to keep him off the plants, climbing the walls and stopping him from falling into the gardens 20 feet below. But besides that the interior is great if you like looking at really old stuff, medieval stuff isn’t really my thing, but we did get to see the 1930s bowels of the building as we got special dispensation to use the original staff lift to go back up to the entrance – too many stairs. Again.
Fort Tryon Park is a revelation. Snuggled next to the Hudson River, which is very wide at this point, it is an almost tropical haven from the density of the rest of Manhattan. It was hard to believe we were still on the island at all. I doubt many tourists get this far, but on a sunny, hot day, it’s well worth the trip.
Don’t sling that banana skin in the bin
In the last year we lived in NW3, our local authority introduced food composting. I was sceptical. I couldn’t imagine how it would work, with having a bin in the kitchen with food scraps, which is then transferred to a bin outside our house and taken away by the bin men once a week. Surely a recipe for rats? I was reluctant to start with but gave it a go and I was converted: the amount of food waste created by a small family is massive once you start actually separating it. I became a bit of a zealot with the food scraps and whilst R was hard to convince, eventually he was doing it too – apart from the odd rogue tea bag, which I rescued, much to his disgust.
So when we came to NYC I kind of missed this slightly OCD activity. I was delighted to read that Mayor Bloomberg is going to introduce food composting into New York as part of his last hurrah as mayor. There were some articles in the press here in the last few days talking about creating new facilities to handle the food waste and turn it into green energy and an estimate that around 10 per cent of the food waste would be composted. There are a range of recycling laws in NYC about paper, plastics etc and for now food composting will be voluntary, but possibly in the future the laws will mandate everyone to separate food waste. I was amused to see down on 14th Street, Union Square, a corner of the park dedicated to huge bins of food waste and some dedicated recyclers selling compost to passers by. Clearly ahead of the curve there.
See the New York Times for more info.
And there were over 5,000 ladies
That’s a lot of ladies running 10k in Central Park at 8am this morning. And today it included me. It’s hard for New Yorkers to run 10k as they have the imperial system here, so you have to think in miles until the final mile when they suddenly introduce metres! I was doing quite well until the final mile, but then realised that 10k is more than 6 miles and with the addition of metre signs, I got confused and I blame this for my pace slowing…
It’s great being in a race with over 5,000 other women and running along roads that are normally packed with traffic. Running past the Natural History Museum and other sights on Central Park West before entering the park felt pretty good, stopping traffic for us! I thought the park was pretty flat but apparently not. Someone seemed to introduce small hills at the top end of the park, the bit I don’t normally go to. And then there was a huge outdoor swimming pool that I’d never seen before, empty but worth noting for yet more hot summer days. What a great way to discover bits of the park. I finished in 56 minutes, so pretty good for me given how humid it was, but I’m in no hurry to do another. I looked aghast at the lady who tried to foist a leaflet for a half marathon in my hand – could she not see the colour of my face? 10k or 6 and a bit miles is more than enough for me.
It’s like looking for the end of the rainbow
Well, that’s how it felt when we landed in Dumbo and couldn’t find the end of the Brooklyn Bridge. How’s that for a bizarre sentence? Dumbo is a district of Brooklyn, so called because it’s Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Sounds attractive, eh? It’s surprisingly nice. We took the East River Ferry from 34th Street and chugged our way down to Dumbo, which seems to be more under the Brooklyn Bridge than the Manhattan Bridge, but Dubbo isn’t quite so fun sounding. There is a beautiful restored 1922 carousel called Jane’s Carousel, where your kid can ride for $2 a time and go round and round on a horse with an odd expression. Check it out at: http://janescarousel.com/.
The whole area has been redeveloped so that you can sit along the water front and admire the Statue of Liberty some way off in the distance; watch the helicopters flittering about taking tourists for expensive trips to see the great lady and watch the boats of all shapes and sizes make their way up and down the East River. It’s a lovely way to spend an afternoon, but only when it’s hot.
Walking along the Brooklyn Bridge has been on our to do list for a while, inspired by Miranda meeting Steve on it in a key episode of Sex and the City. Well, I was inspired, but I digress. And even though we were directly under it (and it is huge), we struggled to find the Brooklyn end of it. It just seems to go on forever. We could see the pedestrians on it, we could see the cars but we couldn’t figure out how to get on the damn thing. We keep walking along the side of it, traffic fumes mixing well with the heat of the day and eventually find a tiny set up stairs off a dank pathway underneath the bridge.
And because we had chosen a busy weekend to visit, it was packed. The pedestrian walkway is separate and above the road for the cars and you have to share it with cyclists. It’s a fine line between trying to pass the slowest, photograph taking tourist and not getting mown down by a crazy cyclist as they speed along their half of the pavement. And it doesn’t help that someone decided to wrap half the bridge in plastic, so you can’t even see the views most of the time. And did I say it was long? Yes, it’s very long at 1.1 miles or 1.8 km. No wonder it took 13 years to build it in the late 19th Century. And no, there is no crock of gold at the end.
Mini TARDIS
Dr Who uses the TARDIS to travel through time and space in an old fashioned police box, not seen in the UK since the last one was decommissioned in 1981. The boxes were originally constructed in the US in the late 19th Century and the idea took on in London in the 1930s when they cost 43 pounds each to install. Containing a telephone and a first aid box, they were intended for the public to use in an emergency at a time when there was no widespread use of telephones. Why am I writing about this? Well, I have been noticing little red boxes all over New York with Fire and Police on them. You can see from the picture below, one that is attached to a lampost; others are self standing, usually at the intersection of a street and an avenue. Lift up the flap under the word Fire or Police and there is a button to call the respective emergency service operator. Lots of these boxes went out of action after Hurricane Sandy because the electrics flooded and many have not yet been mended. I understand that there is a city law that says they have to be available and according to a City Councillor I heard speak recently, they are more reliable at getting you to a fire or police operator than calling 911. They seem very out dated for a modern world, sitting solemnly at the corner of the street. I’ve never seen anyone use one, but it’s reassuring to know they are there, just in case.
Brooklyn buildings
Impressive buildings outside of Manhattan? Why yes, there’s a couple in Brooklyn.
How about the Brooklyn Museum? Although its steps appear to be missing, replaced with a rather odd glass atrium out the front. It is a formidable presence, towering over the very busy Eastern Parkway.
Or the Brooklyn Public Library? Certainly not your average public library with gold leaf columns. Check out how tall the front is, when you see how tiny my mum looks on the steps. Those are big doors!
And the glorious Brooklyn Botanical Gardens nestled between the two. No pictures of buildings, just an oasis in the middle of urban car noise.
Watch your step
All along the streets of New York you’ll see cellar doors open, just like the picture below. How people don’t end up falling down them on a regular basis, I don’t know. They are used to bring supplies into restaurants mostly but seem to be open pretty much all the time.
I did a bit of research to see if there were lots of casualties, but all I could find was this:
nw3 to nyc 