BROOKLYN FLEA MARKET

The flea market was attractive and well worth a visit and included food and drink booths for those who were hungry and thirsty. We walked from the subway station down Lafayette Ave, a pretty part of the borough with elegant old houses, which I'm sure cost the earth.

My granddaughter likes vintage clothing. She bought a dress at the market and souvenirs for her family and friends. The dress looked homemade, but very nicely done. If it was vintage, it was recent, because the style was of today. The photo shows Ashlynn trying to decide.

My daughter bought souvenirs, too, and one or two pieces of inexpensive jewelry for herself.

Since I no longer do souvenirs, I purchased only an inexpensive foldable sun hat to go with my collection of foldable sun hats, all of which I forget at home when I travel, thus leading me to buy yet another foldable sun hat.

 
My favorite item that I didn't buy was the pink elephant, a nostalgic reminder (for other people) of boozy wild and reckless nights.

ROSES!

During our visit to New York City, we visited the New York Botanical Gardens.  The roses in the rose garden were past their prime, but I photographed one cluster that was still beautiful. My daughter walked around the garden with pen and paper noting the names of the varieties she liked, I suppose with a view to future planting.

CITIZEN M HOTEL IN NEW YORK CITY

The lobby with bookshelves for the use of guests at CitizenM Hotel on W 50th St in NYC. We loved staying at the hotel. The location is convenient, right in the heart of Midtown activity, with two nearby subway stations. The staff is welcoming, friendly, and helpful. Though the rooms are small, the efficient arrangement of comfortable furnishings is such that we did not feel crowded. The shower is wonderfully spacious, with a rain shower head and another removable shower head. The excellent and reasonably priced food buffets are a big plus, as well as the warm and welcoming atmosphere the hotel lobby, which made us feel that we were in a real home away from home.

 Below is a photo from the top of the Empire State Building during the rains from Hurricane Arthur, the worst of which missed New York City.
 

HAPPY GAY PRIDE DAY!

 

Empire State Building in New York City

UPDATE FROM THE COMMENTS:

Murdoch Matthew

We've never seen such a turnout in New York City -- crowds from 40th Street to the end of Christopher Street three-deep at least, often filling sidewalks. We were in the first of the march when people were fresh, and it was three miles of screaming. We doubled back to watch the rest of the march across Tenth Street from the Church of the Ascension (which served water with lemon to Marchers), and it was quieter. Sprinkles began at 3pm, not enough to dampen anyone seriously, but it thinned the crowd a bit by 5pm. The march began at noon and ended at six. A celebratory day.

The Episcopal Church was in the last section, with the bishop on the float. The Riverside Church brought up the rear, just in front of the police cars and street sweepers.

PICTURES OF HAVOC WREAKED BY SANDY IN AND AROUND NYC

LaGuardia Airport

New York subway

FDR Drive under water.

Entrance to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel

George Takei

A double rainbow touching down in Manhattan symbolizes the end of the storm and the beginning of the recovery.

My title for the rainbow picture is "Hope". NYC, one of my favorite cities, will recover.

The other pictures are from the Facebook pages of my friends Dan and Doug.

UPDATE: More pictures at Doug's blog Counterlight's Peculiars.

DOGS BANNED IN NYC BARS

From the New York Times:

Miles has been going to Ace Bar all his life.

His face has grayed there. Friends have come and gone. He never paid for a drink, but rarely walked out of the East Village bar with an empty stomach. He may have purged his dinner on the floor a time or two, his fellow bar patrons said, but who among them hadn’t done the same?
....

“He’s a dog, but I swear he looks sad,” Mike Israely, 33, said of Miles, his 9-year-old boxer-pug mix, as the dog peered through Ace Bar’s glass doors Thursday night. “Coming here was part of our evening walk.”

Dogs in bars have long been banned in NYC, but it was a look-the-other-way offense that was much ignored. Actually, I could not resist linking to the article in the NYT because I liked the second paragraph, but I do think that it would have been better if the powers had continued to look the other way for well-behaved dog patrons. That dogs are not allowed even at outside tables, is pushing the rules too far.

Once we took Diana to a Mardi Gras parade here in Thibodaux, only to be told that dogs were not allowed at parades. The officer did not make us leave with Diana, which was kind of him, and we haven't tested the rule again.

I'm Leaving On A Jet Plane

First I'm going to New York City, and then I'll go by train to visit my friends in Connecticut. I'll wave good-bye to her husband before he leaves to drive down to Louisiana to do fall fishing with Grandpère and my son. My friend belongs to a choral group that is quite serious about practices, so she can't miss. Instead of traveling to Louisiana with her husband, she invited me to visit her in Connecticut. That sounded good to me. GP and I were in their wedding many years ago, but we moved and lost touch with each other for a long spell, and then I found them several years ago through the internet. We've kept in touch and visited back and forth since then.

In truth, I'd just as soon be out of the way of the testosterone-driven fish stories and expressions of dismay about the stock market. Plus, I hope to see fall color while I'm in Connecticut. I'll spend a few days with my friend, and then I'll head to beautiful midtown Manhattan and around and about in New York City for a few days.




I love New York, I do. Apparently Robert Indiana's LOVE sculpture is all over the place. The New Orleans Museum of Art has a copy of it in the sculpture garden. According to Wiki, "The original Love outside sculpture, created in 1970 of cor-ten steel, stands in the sculpture garden at the Indianapolis Museum of Art."

I won't have a computer with me, so there will be little or no blogging while I'm gone. I'll turn off the comment function before I leave tomorrow.

See y'all when I get back.