Tuesday was a rainy, rainy day. It rained pretty hard early in the morning, then was miserable and overcast and drizzly all day. I seized a midday break in the rain to take a trip to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which is a lovely oasis of green along eastern edge of Prospect Park, right where Prospect Heights and Crown Heights meet. Probably due to the fact that it was a work day in an already short week and the unfortunate weather (which I didn't mind a bit), the garden was sparsely populated and I had a lovely afternoon stroll.
The rose garden from above
Possibly the most perfect rose ever
The Cherry Walk
The Rock Garden
Chiles in the Herb Garden
Magnolia Plaza
Entrance to the Fragrance Garden
Japanese Garden
What a lovely place to spend the afternoon!
Wednesday dawned overcast as well, so I spent the morning working in E's apartment and pondering what I could do in case of rain. I decided to go exploring. I had heard about the lost City Hall Station, so I set off to find it.
I stood mid-platform at the Brooklyn Bridge stop and double-checked with the conductor when he poked his head out of the window to make sure everyone was clear of the train before closing the doors. He seemed to be just waiting for someone to ask about it. "Sure! Hop on!" He came out of his little compartment and warned me that the lights weren't on so it wouldn't look as good as it did in the pictures. He told me when it was coming and which side to look out (the right, as the train is going forward).
It's true that the station doesn't look as sparkly as it does in those pictures, and it really was too dark to get any pictures of my own, but it's all there. The arched entrance, the big "City Hall" in tiles on the walls, the overhead glass. Even in its current dingy state, it's clear that it's a beautiful station.
My friendly conductor asked if I was going to stay on the train and ride uptown. I really had no intention to do that, but neither did I have anywhere else to be, so I said yes. That seemed like the right answer. "Well," he said, "keep your eyes peeled between Brooklyn Bridge and Canal Street. You'll pass through the Worth Street Station, another one they don't use anymore. And there's another one at 18th Street. And if you get on the 1, there's a small station at 91st Street on the Upper West Side that's closed down, but you can still see it if you're looking."
What a fount of information! I was so fascinated by the City Hall Station and this lost underworld of the city, that I just rode around for a while.
I rode up to 28th on the 6, got off and walked to 33rd, got back on and rode to Grand Central, where I wandered through the dining and market halls to see what was on offer. (I didn't I walked across the street to the south entrance of the Grand Central/42nd St station and found this lovely old entrance inside the beautiful Chanin Building.
I rode back downtown looking for the lost stations, but I liked the tilework at 28th Street so much that I went back just to snap a pic. And I found another awesome subway entrance in a nice office building.
28th Street (obviously)
Astor Place is neat also, but the light in the station was really yellow, so the picture looks funny.
I checked out the other two "lost" stations on the 6 - Worth and 18th Streets - and they're there, just like he said. They're on the west side of the tracks, to the right as you're coming downtown. They're hard to see because all the windows on the train just reflect the lights from inside the train around all over the place. It's helpful to have a magazine or newspaper to shield some of the reflection. They're pretty full of graffiti, which is a shame, but there they are. It's amazing! It's like you get to see the old, sometimes glorious, sometimes grimy underbelly of the city - which, in fact, you are! It's so cool.
[As a semi-aside: there is some fun fiction about the development of this fine city, much of it by Pete Hamill. A couple that I've read are Downtown: My Manhattan (which is actually not fiction) and Forever, and I have but haven't yet read two more of his: North River and Tabloid City, so I'm not sure if those have as much historical development as Downtown and Forever. Plus there's Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin, which I'm reading now; it's set around the turn of the 20th century at the opening. There's Edward Rutherfurd's tome New York, which would take me several lifetimes to read I think, so I haven't tried. And a gazillion others, but those are what I can come up with right now.]
I took one more ride through City Hall Station, then hopped off when the train returned to the Brooklyn Bridge stop heading uptown, and did something I can't believe I've never done: walked the Brooklyn Bridge! I've driven it (okay, cabbed it), been under it on a ferry, taken pictures of it from both sides, but I've never actually traversed from one side to the other on foot - until now.
They just don't build bridges like they used to.
The nearly-completed Freedom Tower through the bridge cables.
Looking up from directly beneath one of the arches.
So over the bridge I went, for a fairly uneventful rest of the day. I stopped by a bookstore an grocery to poke around and pick up some foodstuffs, and went for another run through the park to finish out the afternoon.
Thursday was book day! I did a tour of a few indies before meeting L to go shopping. My first stop was McNally Jackson Books in Nolita. Of the three I visited, it felt like the most put together, the most organized, definitely the cleanest, but also still quirky and fun with a fabulous collection of notecards. My fave of the three. It was here that I picked up a book for E to read on the train: Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System by Raj Patel.
From there I walked uptown just a bit to Shakespeare & Co.'s Noho location. It's just off the NYU campus, and it feels like a college bookstore catering to its crowd. Almost the entire main floor is fiction and film studies, with a large portion of the lower level devoted to course books and playwriting (NYU is home to the famous Tisch School for the Arts, which explains all the film and drama books).
The last bookstore of the day was East Village Books, a used book store in the classic sense. Things were only vaguely organized, you could hardly turn around without knocking over a pile of books on the floor or teetering on the edge of a shelf, the owner (if that's who he was) didn't seem particularly interested in the fact that I was there or might buy a book, in fact, he seemed vaguely annoyed. As a consequence, despite finding a book that I wanted but really don't need (Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone by Eric Klinenberg), I didn't buy it.
Then I was off to meet L near her office in midtown for some shopping. After much consternation, we found her a new pair of jeans, then set off to reward ourselves with doughnuts for dinner from Doughnut Plant just a little bit south in Chelsea. What a delicious idea! We each got one: coconut cream for her, cashew and orange blossom for me. Then we split them, which made an already delicious idea doubly good.
I had a few minor pedestrian misadventures getting back home, but they overshadowed neither the doughnuts nor the fact that I found a wine shop still open at 10pm.
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