cherrypatter nyc

checking out spring is a seasonal ritual for me.  when we come down to dumbo, which is not all the time and usually more during the nicer months as that fantastic ship playground can get might cold and windy in the winter times, we usually focus on some kind of food treat (jacques torres or the brooklyn ice cream factory are our usual spots) and then something for the kiddies or just running around the pier with the best view ever, and then a little bit of something for us (or at least me) and that’s where spring comes in. 

springis a gallery with a  new show rotating through every few months, and then it is a little shop with a small collection of stuff that you must have or just want to have with an excellent range of price points.  i totally loved a few of the artists from this summer’s show lost & found that was curated by anna cosentino.  if this darn horse weren’t so pricey, i definitely would have come home with the not very practical lil hankie very burdened down posse by peter cole (pictured up top).  other pieces included works by ralph ball and maxine naylor and gregoire abriel’s works focusing on furniture made out of discarded materials.

spring’s regular stock is very good good for gift ideas for that very fussy someone that you must know or someone who would appreciate something that seems “of new york” whatever that might mean.   on the high end, there are angelica bergamini’s sassi rocks priced between $2,000 to $5,000 and  concrete planters by patrick weder.  on the more reasonable — at least in range — set of gifts there are trophie baskets by inna alesina,  rings and bangles by rosario merola,  jimmyjane threesome essential fragrances and even some new york post cards made for spring by steve butcher who is one of the two people (the other is anna who curated the show this summer) behind this fun spot.

spring also seems to have all the classic required modern design goods that a good design shop should have like the fruit bowls by harry allen, hand grenade oil lamps by piet houtenbos and the ceramic takeout containers by lorena barrezueta that i still cannot believe i have not bought. soon, i am sure. it’s always a pleasure to check out spring, just to see what is going on, and to maybe even find that perfect gift for someone or just me.  spring, 126 front street between adams and jay streets, brooklyn, new york, .

a year and a half ago i was subjected to two straight weeks of the great grand jury experience for new york state.  the highlight was that we all got to sit around in a very fancy building well stocked with delightful vending machines.  among the downsides — other than a lot of wasted time (why new york state thinks its necessary to have a grand jury system is beyond me) — were the food options in downtown brooklyn.  usually, with only an hour or so for lunch, our options were pretty meager.  i would either hunt down a hot dog vendor or maybe make it over to montague street for some semi-healthy fast food at chipotle. 

fortunately, we had a few days where we were given two to three hours off and that meant i could wander.  a few times, i went and had my favorite bahn mi at nicky’s and if it had been open, i am sure i would have hopped by brooklyn fare.  however, when i had a really long break sometimes i would venture further down smith street where i discovered cobblestone foods.  while mostly a take out market, cobblestone foods has some surprisingly excellent reasonably priced sandwiches ($7 each which includes a side or chips). 

the options include the most delicious lamb gryo with cucumber, onion, tomato and tzatziki sauce, or the tuna melt that is stuffed with tomato, onion and cheese. other choices inculde a pastrami reuben, a catfish po’ boy and a cubano.  cobblestone foods also has an even more filling lunch special where for $8 you can get a 1/4 rotisserie chicken with two veggies, a drink and a cookie.  and even better for dinner you could feed the whole family for $20 with a roast chicken, two veggie sides and rolls. pretty darn good.

cobblestone foods doesn’t have too much in the way of desserts but their cookies have been consistently good and fresh and sometimes — at least in the warmer months — they often have a pie.  service could definitely be friendlier (apparently some locals were unhappy when the shop took over from tuller’s so maybe there is some residue of that)  but it is certainly quick and efficient.  and while i fortunately am off jury duty for 11 years, at the very least i have now discovered a good neighborhood lunch option.  cobblestone foods, 199 court street near bergen street, brooklyn, new york, .

so we had a pretty excellent vacation.  with lots of cooking, hanging out with friends and almost no schedule, it was as relaxing as life can get with two little kids.  and i think we have finally settled on where all our next end of summer trips need to be – somewhere out in that area far out at the tip of long island.  the weather’s fairly reliable, the food is pretty decent (especially since we mostly cooked) and the people — well they are either super amusing with their fanciness or pretty down to earth and i can deal with that.

for this trip, we stayed out at a lovely little house in shelter island.  it’s relatively mellow out there with beautiful landscaping and lovely, pebbly beaches and mellow waters and it seems to escape that “hampton” vibe, whatever that is.  and s. totally loved taking the ferry.  we even found the best croissants i have had in a long while at this odd spot called mark it with g– they have a super pricey brunch and dinner that we didn’t check out but their croissants were perfection — not too big, with a crisp outside (but not completely hardened) with a soft, buttery, pillowy interior.   if only brooklyn had some anywhere near that.   we found some decent coffee at reddings and i really, really wanted to check out their cotton candy made-to-order with flavors like watermelon and cherry.  maybe next year.

on a cloudy day, we travelled over to greenport on the northfork where we had some pretty rough espresso from aldo’s though his scones were excellent and also took a few rides on the carousel.  we also took a little trip toward orient where we found lavender by the bay thanks to a tip from sweet fine day.  that was a treat.

and finally we had to take a few trips out to the real ocean.  k was a pretty happy little girl, and even her brother — the one who screamed at the sight of sand last year — was pretty excited about the waves.  a nice end to what seemed like a way too short summer.

finally!!!  we’re off to shelter island tomorrow — hoping to cram the kids and most importantly the hubbie into the car no later than 8 a.m. so we don’t get stuck in loads of traffic.   we’ll see how well that goes but that’s my goal.   looking forward to lots of swimming, biking and maybe even reading (really want to get through my life in france).  and while i do have some unpleasant work to attend to, i’m hoping that will be minimal and i can focus on some cherrypatter improvements in my allocated “do what you want time.”  hope you all have a great labor day.

i think this stamp photo matches the mood of today. it’s gloomy outside, much chillier than it has been, and has that ominous feeling that our long lazy days are about to end.    no matter, i’m determined to enjoy august till the very very end and so i’m just rolling out some of my more useful suggestions (as long as they have pretty pictures) before we head off to the beach.

i have become a big stamp fanatic, and now we stamp our return addresses on envelopes (instead of my chicken scrawl) and i even made my cherrypatter cards with stamps which everyone seems to love.  they’re not quite perfect but they are charming.   i just like that handmade look, and especially using bright vibrant inks on beautiful card stock.  

rubber stamps, inc., located just around the corner from where i used to work across from madison square park (how i miss that location), is not exactly a come in and browse store. it’s more of a get what you want done here and they can do pretty much anything in the rubber stamp department.  basically, rubber stamps, inc. can make whatever kind of stamp whenever you want, and sometimes you just need that service.   while rubber stamp, inc. does the more pedestrian kind of stamps, you can just send them any logo or shape you want and they will make it to order.    there are other stamp stores around which are cuter spaces like the ink pad, but i prefer rubber stamps, inc. because they will definitely get the job done.  rubber stamps, inc., 11 west 25th street between broadway and 6th avenue, manhattan, new york, .

sometimes you really just need to know where to go.  when we made the big move across the east river as a family a few years ago (i already felt like a brooklynite as i had lived out here right after college), we had no idea where to get baby stuff when s. was born back at at the very very end of 2006.   when we were in manhattan, of course, the only easy place for basics was buy buy baby. not my favorite shop in terms of styles available, or the most trendy items, but it was sooo easy.

as we continued to trek into chelsea for bottles and other items that had been lost or destroyed by k several years before, i decided we finally had enough and just had to find somewhere in brooklyn where we could get these things.  and while there was nothing in park slope or right nearby, when i finally found heights kids i couldn’t believe i hadn’t been coming there all along. this is no fancy shop.  while they have some high end strollers (the bugaboo of course), they also have the more mundane like the workhorse maclarens which was more our style, and price point.  i really love the service at heights kids.  they’ll fix up old equipment, and their real selling point is on the mysterious car seats.  staff from heights kids will install, and reinstall, car seats for you right then and there.   no worries about whether you did it right, and if you have to readjust they’ll do that too.  i love that. made life so much better.

heights kids is pretty big at around 3,000 square feet and they do carry a lit bit of everything. they have a whole room of toys (though i would opt for a place like lulu’s or acorn before heading here), and every single kind of baby oriented device you might need — potty seats, droppers, breast pumps and all the associated accessories, portable cribs, layettes (not the prettiest but they’ll do), sippy cups and the list goes on.   so don’t go here for great style or beauty, but if you are incredibly sleep deprived and just need that one extra binky that will make your baby sleep all night heights kids is the place.  heights kids, 85 pineapple walk near henry street, brooklyn, new york, .

other than super easy access to the r train, which is a much underappreciated train i now realize, there is not much to like about 4th avenue.  this is especially true after nyc brilliantly rezoned this strip of nyc yet failed to put any design requirements on the buildings.  the result is something that makes you wish we could just have more autoshops (and there are a lot) or even the semi-benign drive-through mcdonalds, rather than more hideous brand new 12-story buildings.   i think with this latest disaster 4th avenue could win the award for the most poorly designed place in america.  

the one saving grace of living so close to this wasteland of greed and fumes is that even though we are technically in park slope (at the very bottom of the hill for sure), we get access to mother & son, a fruit van where two guys sell all sorts of amazing caribbean fruits all day nearly every day in the warmer months.  i love that they have fruits that you just cannot get easily elsewhere (not even the coop) including the guinep (also called a chennette),  june plums, lady finger bananas (those sweet baby bananas that i last had in thailand) and dried tamarind too.  they also sell huge stalks of sugar cane, extremely sweet mangos and papayas.

mother & son also has quite the juicing operation going. you can get freshly opened coconut water, or juices made with most of the fruits or even chunks of the sugar cane to eat raw on in some sort of drink.   clearly, mother & son has a super loyal following.  every time i go by they have three to five cars backed up ordering something from the stand. and while i think there are plenty of these trucks around less gentrified areas of brooklyn and queens — last week i saw one last week in bed stuy — they are not a typical park slope trendy vendy truck amenity. now i just need to make more of a habit of picking up fruit from mother & son.  so cheap and so good.   mother & son, fruit truck/van located on western side of 4th avenue between 1st and 2nd streets, brooklyn, new york.

so we’re entering into the very last weeks of august and things are slowing down.   i love this time of summer when there is just a hint of fall but new york is still incredibly mellow.  everyone is out of town it seems, parking is no problem, and we can eat wherever we like (well almost) without a reservation or a wait.   yesterday, immediate gratification on the huarache front from the   newly nominated vendy truck country boys/martinez taco truck.  even better, our shelter island vacation starts next saturday so we’re all looking forward to lots of downtime.   i’ll also be using some of that time to retool the blog a bit, and starting this weekend with help from the most amazingly talented and incredibly generous nita we upgraded to  a new template that will allow for lots more improvements over the next few months.   there may still be a few kinks here and there on the site and we hope to iron them out very very soon.  

for today, i’m just documenting what many think is the best chocolate chip cookie in new york city from levain bakery.  this cookie weighs a ton so it is really not a treat for one, or maybe one if you’re having a really bad day.  because it is so enormous, the outside is crisp but the inside is still quite gooey, and the sweetness is cut by the inclusion of walnuts and the fact that the chocolate is not too sweet.  for $3.75 at 1/2 pound it’s a pricey treat but pretty well worth it.

in addition to some great basic baguettes and rolls, levain bakery also has some relatively cheap snacks that looked pretty good.  on my visit, they had three kinds of crispy pizza slices each for $7: olives with goat cheese; caramelized onion with parmesan reggiano; and artichoke hearts with gruyere.    they also offered a roast beef with horseradish mayonnaise and lettuce on sourdough sandwich for $6.  a pretty good deal, and so close to central park it will be hard to resist in the future.   levain bakery, 167 west 74th street between amsterdam and columbus avenues, manhattan, new york, .

the waterpod projecthas been floating around new york since the beginning of the summer, and last week i got to take grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins aboard to check out this self-sustaining art colony when it was docked off of joralemon street in brooklyn.   the waterpod project is an ambitious idea created by a group of artists who wanted to be able to live mostly off this floating entity, eat most of their food from there (personally, i really loved the chickens on board), and also engage in various art projects both for themselves and for others.

sustainability is a big theme of the waterpod project. the floating structure is made out of recycled and reused materials.  apparently the some of the metal for the domed structure came from equus, that horsey play on broadway with a naked harry potter (at least something from that somewhat bizarre theater experience is going to good use).  the waterpod projectalso produces its own power through a vertical wind turbine, solar pv panels and bicycle power. 

a few of the creators live on board, and there are rotating artists who come by for weeks  or a few months at a time.  apparently, life is not all fun and games aboard the waterpod project.  there is lots of work to keep it going. not too much downtime to enjoy the view or be creating art work but i’m sure it’s fun, or at least fun to chat about.  the whole toilet system is another story – and that’s for those of you dedicated to some serious composting.    waterpod project: for the next two weeks, from august 18th to the 31st, they’ll be in staten island near the atlantic salt festival.  for the first two weeks of september, from the 1st to the 14th, they’ll be at the world’s fair in queens.   see their schedule for more details.

björn borg is one of the more eccentric underwear shops i have checked out lately but the whole nostalgic tennis thing definitely made me want to check it out.   my summers as a kid were spent playing tennis.  a much older guy in our neighborhood, david freed, who coached davis cup in 1960 and 1961, generously gave us local girls tennis lessons all summer long.  he took us to matches across the city and was infinintely patient with us teenagers.   i spent many an afternoon hanging out at his tennis court hitting ball after ball after ball with some loving but strick guidance.  and to top off my tennis obsession, which didn’t last past high school, i also spent many hours in front of the tube watching those incredible connors-borg and evert-navratilova matches which i loved.   those were definitely summer dog days.

so when i stumbled by the björn borg underwear shop i of course had to come in and frankly the knickers are pretty cute.   lots of vibrant colors, bold prints, sporty styles (not exactly sexy but definitely useful) and it would certainly make for a nice change from the gap.   i liked the fact that they had an equally fun collection for men, and i think i need to escort j. down there pronto as i know that he loves those undies from marks & spencer (every time we go to london we have to stock up) but their color scheme is just a bit too bland. 

other than the underwear, i cannot say there is much else to recommend in the shop.  the tops were not as interesting.  given that björn borg is an international chain (this soho branch is their first foray into the states) hopefully they will be able to withstand the recession, or maybe splurging on day-to-day undies (at $26 a pop these are not cheap) is something people still do.  björn borg: 89 crosby street between spring and prince streets, manhattan, new york, .