This poster stayed with me after I saw it in Sunset Park earlier this week. Today, I went back to 45th St and Fourth Av to snap this picture. (And grab some barbacoa de chivo while I was at it.)
“Don’t make eye contact” is standard advice these days. Passing someone on the street? Don’t make eye contact. Pressed tight against a stranger on the subway? Don’t make eye contact. And for heaven’s sake, if someone seems distressed or asks you for money . . . don’t make eye contact.
Needless to say, the more different the other person is from you, the more important it is to avoid looking them in the eye.
Today I went to Jackson Heights/Elmhurst, hoping to pick up a couple of books at Barco de Papel. It was closed when I got there, so I wandered a bit, killing time. Lunch, perhaps? There was no shortage of options, with Colombian and Ecuadorian bakeries duking it out on every block, taquerias and cantinas aplenty, and sidewalk vendors squeezing oranges and frying empanadas. Somehow, though I got it into my head that I wanted Mexican mariscos, as they’re scarce in my part of Brooklyn.
It turned out they were scarce in that part of Queens this afternoon, too. Esquina del Camaron Mexicano, right next door to the bookstore? Temporarily closed for renovations. Mariscos El Submarino? Also undergoing renovations, and the guy working outside was vague on whether they’d open for lunch a bit late, a lot late, or not at all.
Determined to salvage something from my trip on the 7 train, I stopped at the juice stand attached to a Colombian bakery – “La Gata Golosa” – for the most ridiculous thing I could think of, which was a raspado. (That’s not quite true – a cholado would have been even more ridiculous, being essentially a raspado with the addition of chopped fresh fruit and a literal cherry on top, but I know my limits.)
I spent much of January in Ecuador, mostly on a pair of birding trips organized by Brooklyn naturalist, artist and general bon vivant Gabriel Willow, but with some time on my own as well. In Qiuto, I stayed in the neighborhood of La Floresta, drawn by the food – from street vendor tripe in Parque Navarro to the ultra-high end tasting menu at URKO – and also by the street art. As you can see by the mural above this post, the latter was pretty spectacular.
It’s awkward, even intimidating, to restart this blog after one of its periods of quiescence – especially one as long as this. Let’s see, my last post was in . . . January? Gulp.
It’s not as though there was anything particularly dramatic about this Brooklyn Sunday. The suffocating heat has loosened its grip ever so slightly, but by the time I’d run and biked my way from Park Slope to Prospect Heights, I was soaked in sweat. I had let the availability of CitiBike “Bike Angel” points determine my route. For the uninitiated, the corporate parent of New York City’s bike share program is Lyft, a company that knows a thing or two about motivating non-employees, and I’ve allowed myself to be sucked into their Bike Angel program, whereby riders earn credits, membership extensions and cold hard cash by shuffling bikes from overstocked stations to ones where bikes are in short supply. It’s manipulative as hell, and a source of cheap labor, of course, but it also gives me a couple of hundred dollars a month, and meshes nicely with my much-reduced running program. I trot along, picking up and delivering bikes along the way, and call it a workout.
So it was the prospect of a 12-point (triple bonus points, baby!) drop-off that took me to the corner of Underhill and St. Johns Place, where a seemingly eternal construction fence around a ruined building has been a magnet for street art for years – long enough to earn a listing on Google Maps. It’s the “Underhill Walls,” evidently.
Not another Brooklyn blog 