A monthly blog about the sensory experience of New York City

Monday, July 8, 2019

SIGHT: Seven sights for the seventh month

In Sense & the City tradition, I present seven of my favorite sights from the past year in honor of the seventh month.


Only in New York would there be a line to get into a laundromat. The Cornelia Street Laundromat must be a pretty special place to wash clothes.



A visit with ninety-five-year-old grocer John Cortese at his Golden Gate Fancy Fruits and Vegetables is always worth the trip to Flatlands, Brooklyn.


Barkaloo Cemetery, the smallest graveyard in Brooklyn, features only two graves (the others are monuments), and is wedged between a shady side street and a school bus depot.


Perhaps the fanciest basketball court in the city was carved out of Brooklyn's Paramount Theatre in Fort Greene in the 1960s and is now home to the LIU Brooklyn Blackbirds, 



Kingsland Wildflowers, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, converted an industrial rooftop into a field of wildflowers native to New York City to attract pollinators. Cast against the silver digester eggs of the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, the scene presents an eerie hybrid of wild and industrial rarely found in the city.


CW Pencil Enterprise on the Lower East Side proffers iconic New York City colors in pencil form: SoHo Scaffolding, City Bike Lane, Taxi Cab, F Train Seat, Street Pretzel, Bodega Mums, Harlem Brownstone, Manhattan Bridge, Asphalt, and Subway Station Tile.


I stumbled upon this mysterious find on the uptown 4/5 platform at Lexington and 59th Street: a vintage subway record book chronicling escalator repairs and a tiny green lock.