These are kids’ sandals, really, but I started noticing them on various stylish grown-up ladies in the city, and they have proved to be a great little summer investment. They’re designed to be worn in & around water (hence the name) but they’re surprisingly comfortable for running around town in the summer, a season that, after all, kids have figured out best. They’re less than $40, and you can get them here.
Corn. Tomatoes. Basil. Peppers. Lime.
This was an adaptation of this Bon Appétit recipe, to which I added the grilled peppers – and, not pictured, a couple of hot Italian sausages. The title is not quite accurate, as I think we can all agree that the actual Platonic form of the summer salad should be prepared outside, on a charcoal grill, on a deck overlooking a sparkling lake. Continue reading
Astoria Pool, summer 1940
This is my current desktop image. I love all the high-waisted swimsuits. And that beautiful bridge? I’m planning to get married underneath it, in the park just a little beyond the pool. (I wrote about the pool, in its modern dress, last summer.)
[there are no photos of me running. For good reason.]
Well, the heatwave itself (apparently we’re on wave #3 for this summer so far) isn’t the draw, so much as the feeling that is starting to build that I don’t just want to run, but I feel bad if I don’t. I’m starting to like the focus, the rhythm, the achievement, and the very literal burn. I’ve run every now and again in the past, but I was a champion excuse-maker (bad weather, bad shoes, bad timing…). Of those, the only one that I’ve actually taken steps to solve is the bad shoes/equipment. It made a huuuuge difference to go down to JackRabbit and get fitted, on a treadmill, for proper shoes to correct my inward-leaning arches. Nagging ankle and shin pain? Gone. I feel properly supported and secure.
A ribbon hanging off the flag at our local public school
I’ve never lived through truly extreme weather – I’m from Southern England. The most dramatic storm I remember was the 1987 gale that downed trees and caused a lot of damage in the southeast, after weather reports scoffed at any danger. It gave my eight-year-old self nightmares whenever the wind made tree branches scratch my bedroom window. Since living here, extreme weather has been more frequent, but it’s always worse somewhere outside New York. I watched Katrina footage like I watch scenes from war zones – without being able to wrap my head around it by reference to any memory of my own. The stories my midwestern friends tell about racing tornadoes in their car are as alien to me as the weird green color that they say the storm turns the sky. So I had no idea how to react to Irene over the last couple of days – was this overreaction? Or sensible precaution? We wouldn’t really need a flashlight and a bathtub full of water and canned foods, would we? Continue reading
the pool and the hellgate bridge
I’ve lived a 15-minute walk from this pool for two summers now, and yesterday was the first time I’ve got it together to go for a swim. The pool is open 11-3 and then 4-7 every day, and I was there for the evening session. It was the first hot and sunny day after a few days of heavy rain and gloom, so it was busy – I assume it’s always busy – but it’s huge, so even with several hundred kids playing all over, it didn’t feel overcrowded. The whole experience was unexpectedly nostalgic and moving for me; the bare-bones locker rooms with their turquoise-painted open-fronted changing booths took me right back to the municipal pools and lidos that I grew up visiting, and the feeling of curling your toes on the scratchy wet concrete floor, hopping the puddles and enduring the dankness and dark corridors for the sake of emerging into the light and the blaringly bright poolside.
overlooking the concrete bleachers
It’s not easy to swim laps since most people are hanging out in groups and playing, carving out little corners for themselves by the ropes that bisect the pool or at the edge of the water, but if you persist in your mental lane they’ll move out of your path. The place has all the democratic charm of a busy park on a sunny day, but concentrated and intensified by the excitement of the water.
the vast pool, looking over to the snack bar and picnic tables
The pool is a glorious monument of WPA architecture, stunning in its proportions, its generosity, its sheer presence. Nothing temporary or cost-cutting cramping its style. It opened in the summer of 1936 on the Fourth of July, making it the oldest outdoor pool in the city. Although it’s free it feels lavish, and as I lay drying off on one of the white plastic recliners in the sun I couldn’t help feeling like I was getting away with something.
would you look at those lines and curves?
London in flames – in run-down streets of betting shops and ‘designer’ sports-clothing stores and mobile phone stores and other primary-colored, low-ceilinged, fluorescent-lit businesses that are our strip malls, the glass-fronted boxes on the ground floor, sometimes, of elegant Victorian buildings or more often, of short-sighted postwar developments which tore out city centres in favor of these decentralized and depressing little corners. London is an atomized city and always has been; it’s a conglomeration of mini-towns and high streets and it sprawls until it touches and merges with a bigger nexus on the outskirts, a Croydon or a Bromley, and peters out. Those outskirts – the Medway towns in Kent, Essex – those are places you never hear about, although one possible origin of the murky slur ‘chav’ is the town of Chatham, in Kent. And this is the most exciting thing that may have happened, ever. Come on, who doesn’t love a good fire?
People are a little nervous today, but defiant – an attitude that tends to define Londoners, especially those who live in the affordable corners of the city that tourists don’t visit – Streatham, Peckham, Wood Green, Lewisham, Lee, Woolwich, Hackney, Dalston, Bethnal Green – which is to say, most university students, most artists, most teachers, most nurses, most ordinary working people without banking jobs or trust funds. Gentrified Brixton, once a place synonymous, to non-Londoners, with rioting and violence, was an afterthought, not an epicenter. Our London Too and Riot Clean-Up are the hashtags of the day.
Towards the rioters/looters, disgust and frustration seem to be the prevailing emotions, and a kind of despair. Sympathy for the family of Mark Duggan and the members of ‘his community’ – the preferred term of well-meaning politicians and police who don’t seem to realize just how alienating it is to imply, over and over again, that ‘his’ community is not simply THE community – sympathy for the 16-year-old girl allegedly beaten by police in Tottenham, sympathy for the men in Hackney venting rage at years of racist policing – sympathy has evaporated in the smoke of burning buses and burning buildings.
As night follows day, rioting follows the election of a Tory government, said one Twitter-wit late last night. But it’s clear that on the whole, these looters are perfect little Tories. They’re not resisiting a system that excludes them but capitulating wholly to its values – you’re out for yourself, you’ve got to take what’s there, your status and your worth are measured in the stuff you own. Carrying out a pair of boxfresh trainers or a flatscreen TV over the shattered glass underfoot, you’ve won.
Of course (sympathy stirs again) it’s not like they have any other option – Tottenham, where all this kicked off, has the highest unemployment rate in London. And the inchoate anger against what these kids, raised on procedural dramas from a foreign country, weirdly call the ‘Feds,’ is perhaps less violent than that against ‘rich people’ – another enemy offered up by one looter explaining himself on camera.
I think for most ‘rich people’ – which really means, I’d guess, stable people with jobs or education or secure families or all three, who aren’t treated as nascent criminals wherever they go – the reflexive horror is the violation of a basic survival instinct. Don’t shit on your own doorstep. You’re the ones who are going to pay for this, whether in prison time or probation or the vitriol of your neighbors or the sinking of your heart at the sight of your own environment trashed. And the shrinking of opportunities, and the redirection of resources away from you, and the hardening of the nation’s attitudes toward you, so that they will applaud more government money going to ‘law and order’ and less to ‘community outreach,’ never mind that it’s more expensive in the long run to keep arresting you than it would be to give you somewhere to go and something to do.
It’s insanely hot in New York right now, even for my lizard-blooded self, so it’s not exactly hammock weather. But last weekend, which was warm, overcast and breezy, was perfect for a little riverside lounging. We snagged one of the little row of hammocks in my new favorite park, Gantry Plaza State Park in Long Island City, and, well, it was a pretty nice way to spend a Saturday afternoon. The hammocks are low to the ground and pretty swingy – it took some shifting about to get comfortable, and you have to be fairly in synch if you’re going to share. But it’s worth it. Come on, it’s a HAMMOCK.
Handy tree for chaining the bikes
Smarty-pants hammock-sharer
Cloud-gazing from the hammock
End of the line
Hot day to be walking the length of the High Line, now it stretches all the way from Gansevoort to 30th. The park is so much lusher and fuller than I’ve seen it, bordering on overgrown in some places. Beautiful flowers, sculptures and architecture all the way up – the new section isn’t as wide, and the lawn area is tiny, so it feels more like a promenade than a park. But who doesn’t love a good promenade? The views, people watching, and now food options are great – I had an absurd, but delicious rhubarb and chai-flavored ice lolly for $3.50 (sorry, People’s Pops, but where I’m from that’s not an ice pop. They are long and thin and bright blue and come in a plastic wrapper. They are decidedly not gourmet.)
People's Pop
The 30th street end is great, because you can see where the line extends, and what it looked like when it was genuinely overgrown, not landscaped and polished.
New & old High Line
It’s definitely grittier this end, since you’re getting down into the Lincoln Tunnel entrance rather than the swanky-pants meatpacking district.
30th & 10th Ave
But enterprise is enterprise, and under the tracks, proving again that New Yorkers will eat and drink pretty much anywhere, there’s a new beer garden and food-truck-stop, Tom Colicchio’s The Lot on Tap.
Food trucks under the tracks
And hey, they have rosé on draft. Can’t really argue with that.
Beer & wine on tap
The season for Caesar!
Yes yes. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s – namely, anchovies, Romaine lettuce, parmesan and croutons. This is only ‘Caesaresque’ because there’s no egg in the dressing, but it’s a strong, hearty, garlicky way of getting your salady rocks off. And there’s none of that cloying creaminess that cheap restaurant Caesars come bathed in. It’s adapted (of course) from a Gourmet recipe on Epicurious, and will serve 4 as a main.
First, make your croutons. Melt 2tbsp butter with 2tbsp olive oil and three garlic cloves, roughly chopped over a low heat. Once the butter has melted, turn off the heat and let the garlic flavor infuse for 10 minutes or so.
Chop 1/3 baguette, or a similar amount of any chunky bread you prefer, into crouton-sized cubes.
Wash and chop one large Romaine lettuce and dry well. Leave to one side.
Coat the bread cubes in the butter/oil/garlic mixture and spread them on a baking sheet. Take out the garlic pieces first if you like, but they were pretty delicious baked in butter. Bake in a medium oven (350°C) for 10-12 minutes until golden and crunchy.
Butter, oil, and bread. For the salad.
While the croutons are baking, make the dressing. Mash together two anchovies and two cloves of garlic in a pestle and mortar (this would have been much easier if I had crushed the garlic first. I ended up picking garlic chunks out of the dressing. I used tinned anchovies that were rolled up around capers, as if there wasn’t enough of a kick already…
This salad lets you know it's arrived.
Transfer your anchovy-garlic paste into a larger bowl (efficient cooks will use the salad bowl they’re going to serve in. I only thought of this once it was too late.) Add 2tsp red wine vinegar; 2tsp fresh lemon juice; 1tsp Worcestershire sauce; 1 tsp Dijon mustard and whisk together. Still whisking, pour in 1/3 cup olive oil (you can use your judgement and tastebuds on the exact quantity.)
Add the lettuce and toss well to coat in the dressing. Add the croutons hot from the oven, the rest of the anchovies from the tin, and a generous sprinkling of Parmesan cheese. Dig in, and think of Rome. (OK, I know Caesar salad has nothing to do with that Caesar, but a very different man named Caesar.)
Not for the garlic faint-of-heart...
