Posted: January 31st, 2010 | Filed under: Manhattan, Out Of Town, Queens
I always liked the view from the rooftop parking garage at The Shoppes At Northern Boulevard, otherwise known as the place where there’s a Chuck E. Cheese on Northern Boulevard:
The Employees Must Wash Hands sign at the Forest Hills Trader Joe’s is funny, and a departure from the usual generic version:
St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan has been in the news a lot lately. The 60s facade of its 36 Seventh Avenue building is charming, for a hospital:
The whimsical birdhouse-type contraptions at McCarthy Square in the Village don’t look as if they’re Parks Department-approved, and that’s a good thing:
Another iteration of a Barneys ad on the side of the building next to the Tiles For America display in the West Village:
The Ace of Cakes guy was at the Beard House:
The Tribute in Light from a corner of Long Island City:
Maxwell’s in Hoboken:
On the way back from Hoboken, I noticed an ancient paint “ghost” under about 250 paint layers on the 7 train tracks in the 5th Avenue-Bryant Park subway station. It’s not there anymore (or it is, just under a new layer of paint):
Posted: January 29th, 2010 | Filed under: Out Of Town
A return to the Ocean Grove/Asbury Park part of the Jersey Shore, where we’ve been going every Labor Day since 2006. It’s nice because it’s not like the other kind of Jersey Shore that the rest of world gawks at now on cable television, and the accommodations, especially in the guest houses in Ocean Grove, are reasonable. Ocean Grove is quiet and Asbury Park (which is right next door) is fun, so it’s kind of a great place to spend the weekend. Plus it’s accessible via NJ Transit train, so it’s perfect if you don’t have a car (we happened to have cars this time, but one of the vehicles in our party got stuck for hours at the Holland Tunnel, so the train is a big plus).
Anyway, we visited a couple of new places — Jimmy’s Italian Restaurant and Clancy’s Tavern, where we easily attained the top score on the Erotic Photo Hunt:
New pages for the new water park along the boardwalk in Asbury Park, that little firehouse in Ocean Grove and that war memorial across from Rite Aid Ocean Grove.
We ate at the Americana Diner in Shrewsbury on the way in and the Broadway Diner in Red Bank on the way out. The Broadway Diner in particular was pretty great:
Here’s the stuff we returned to . . .
The weather wasn’t great over Labor Day, but we got one good day in at the beach in Ocean Grove:
Bowling and masquerading at Asbury Lanes:
Checked in to see what new mural was up on the plywood at the Casino along the boardwalk in Asbury Park, where renovation work is still happening:
Figured out where to tan in the Convention Hall along the boardwalk in Asbury Park:
Got a beer or two at The Stone Pony in Asbury Park:
Earned another T-Shirt at Pete & Elda’s in Neptune:
And finally, we added a special page for those Banner Tow Planes that buzz up and down the shore after trying to figure out where to put this picture, which we took from the balcony of our hotel in Ocean Grove:
(The Exxxotica Expo advertised on the banner — classy thing to advertise at a family beach, by the way — is featured on one of those ridiculous “NSFW” photo galleries the Village Voice likes to post to ramp up their page views. Ugh.)
Posted: January 28th, 2010 | Filed under: Queens
Two visits to Flushing Meadows-Corona Park to the 2009 U.S. Open, one a work-related trip Jen made and the other the night session on September 3, including separate pages for the Sharapova-McHale and Roddick-Gicquel matches:
Toward the end of the match they’ll give kids passes go down courtside, which is a generous thing to do. Once they find all the kids they can, they’ll let anyone else go down there. We only got to see the last couple of points, but the perspective courtside is really cool:
