After work, I spent a big chunk of my day in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn waiting to pick up a kid from her graduation party.
I don't want to seem like a broken record, or a member of a cult, but I had The Artist Way with me so decided to catch up on the homework in both of these cafes.
I rarely visit Greenpoint so I was delighted to be in two brand new coffee shops in one afternoon. (I'm old enough now to be able to use words like "delighted.") I don't know if I'm supposed to--is The Artist Way akin to therapy sessions that you're not supposed to talk about?--but I wanted to share some of my homework here.
Maybe it doesn't matter out of context, but here's a piece of it:
Dead people you wish you'd met(off the top of my head at the time): Jimi Hendrix, Alice Neel, Andy Warhol, Vic Chestnutt, Gram Parsons, Joey Ramone, Emily Dickinson, Alexander McQueen, Harriet Beecher Stowe (I thought of more than five.)
Traits people you admire have (including the dead people): creativity, courage in the face of criticism, audacious acts, beauty, originality, intelligence, enthusiasm, charisma
Well, that's all for now. I liked both of the cafes I visited today. In the first, Troost, I had a pickled beet/goat cheese/arugula a ciabatta and an iced coffee with a soundtrack that included the Jesus and Mary Chain and Stevie Wonder. In the second, Milk and Roses (which has a grand piano that no one was playing at the time), I had an iced tea while listening to Tina Turner do "River Deep, Mountain High."
Anyone who knows me at all knows how much I love clean well-lighted public places where I can sit and eat stuff and drink stuff and write and/or grade.
This strong inclination of mine I came to slowly. By the last two years of college, I was taking the bus from Provo to Salt Lake in order to do my homework at the Salt Lake Roasting Company, for I could not bear to do it at home . . . or in the then snackless HBLL. (Sorry, library!) And there were was nothing remotely similar in Provo.
Over the years, I have lingered (probably very pretentiously--who am I kidding?) in countless cafes in . . well, not as many cities as I would have liked, but Paris is one of them!
I only regret I have not kept track of them, so I'm going to do so now.
Today I spent the afternoon in a newish lower east side cafe called Pushcart Coffee. My notes are as follows:
Pushcart Coffee. East Broadway and Clinton. New York, NY
Pros:
Food: Locally sourced ingredients (a whole chalkboard
devoted to this), raw kale salad on the food menu
Coffee: Stumptown
(roasted in Brooklyn)
Music: Perfect
for aging Gen Xers like me: Stones,
Ramones. TV on the Radio, Violent Femmes, Nirvana, The Breeders, The Strokes
(from the ‘hood!), Johnny Cash’s “Cocaine Blues,” Fugazi’s “Waiting Room” (one
of my favorite ditties—see below), and Ziggy-era Bowie on the hi fi
Staff: Super
nice and earnest staff, who patiently overlook my Saturday afternoon spaceiness.
I now even know their first names.
Unexpected amenity:
A healthy stack of contextually sensitive reading material for patron
perusal: The Great Bagel and Lox
Book, New York: Then and Now, The
Lower East Side Remembered and Revisited, Unexpected New York, and Life on the
Lower East Side: photographs by
Rebecca Lepkoff, 1937-1950.
Ambience: lots
of natural light, wood floor, high tin ceilings.
Wi Fi: seems
not so easy to get on the Internet (I didn’t ask)--which is good for writing (but
bad for grading). Plenty of computer outlets!
Cons:
Bathroom: No visible
public bathroom (although I didn’t ask).
Unexpected Amenity: kids' activity area (although, even as
little as four or five years ago, this would have been a big pro).
Food: Uninspired
kale salad (a tad overpriced for what it was)
Décor: Too fussy?—the cafe has such good bones that the vases of dried flowers, dried wheat, and
the empty coffee bean bag hung “Salt Lake Roasting Coffee style” on the wall were unnecessary.
View out the window: Generic East Broadway traffic and the back of the worst of
‘60s-era urban renewal.
Lack of interesting legwear: No tights wearing except for me
(granted it was a warmish day)
Overall: Pros far outweigh cons. Plus, the
management seem very devoted to the best aspects of the neighborhood—its
texture and history (it’s called Pushcart, after all), and it’s a good, low pressure place
within walking distance to get some good old-fashioned writing done.
It's very generous of management to be so welcoming to children.
