Street Art Sunday: Endangered birds

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.

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Street art Sunday: Fridiego

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In honor of the Frida Kahlo exhibit currently on display at the Brooklyn Museum, I present . . . this strange and unsettling mural in Prospect Heights (on Park between Vanderbilt and Underhill).

While I’m not actually a huge fan of Kahlo’s art, and am bemused by the cult-like following that’s sprung up around her, there’s no denying her creativity, her capacity for self-invention, and the fascination of her too-short life. This mural honors all those things, I think.

Presidential apartments

The Woodrow Wilson

The Woodrow Wilson

Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway is notable for a number of reasons. It is the world’s first “parkway” (the word was coined to describe it), designed by the prolific Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux and constructed in the 1870s as part of a grand vision – never achieved – to link Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and other green spaces together via a network of tree-lined, Parisian-style boulevards.  From its source at the magnificent (if terrifying for pedestrians) Grand Army Plaza, the parkway flows past the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the Brooklyn Museum and the Brooklyn Children’s Museum before it takes a dog-leg and turns into a much more workaday artery (less like Paris, more like Buffalo) at Ralph Avenue.

Come Labor Day weekend, the parkway will be transformed into an ear-splitting, bejeweled, befeathered and beflagged West Indian carnival. (Summertime in Brooklyn is bracketed by two festive excuses for public semi-nudity, June’s Mermaid Parade in Coney Island being the other one.)

Eastern Parkway is a fun street to run because the two malls that parallel the main traffic lanes, originally intended for horses and carriages, are now given over to pedestrians and cyclists (who seem less crazy here than in many other parts of the borough).  You can run long, uninterrupted, relatively uncongested blocks between avenues while taking in the view. Continue reading