Wednesday Afternoon in Tribeca: View of the Hudson River

On this warm, overcast early October afternoon, we traveled among some of the great colleges we're teaching at this semester: from the School of Visual Arts to Fashion Institute of Technology to Borough of Manhattan Community College, where we snapped this pic of the river from the third floor bridge at the 199 Chambers Street main building.

Tuesday Morning in Jersey City: Breakfast at J. Owen Grundy Park

On this cool and cloudy, starting-to-drizzle morning, we took our breakfast with us on the PATH train to Exchange Place in Jersey City and were almost alone as we sat by the pier at J. Owen Grundy Park overlooking the Hudson. Just across the river was One World Trade Center, now almost at its full height. According to the official Jersey City website,

Originally constructed in 1985, J. Owen Grundy Park (at the foot of Exchange Place) has been visited by literally millions of people, as it offers one of the most dramatic views of the NYC skyline. It has been featured in numerous television shows and feature movies. Twenty five years of use, combined with the adverse effects of the climate, have prematurely aged the facility. The new J. Owen Grundy Park features a redesigned seawall and promenade extending from the Exchange Place down to York Street, with historic-styled lighting, as well as a new railing system that will frame views of the skyline on both sides of the river. The pier itself has been completely redesigned, providing shade structures, a variety of seating for lunch and relaxation, café and game tables, and a new performance & entertainment pavilion at the end of the pier.

Actually, this Saturday, June 16, from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m., 4th Street Arts is presenting Shangri-La on the Pier Saturday, June 16th, 2012 at 3pm on the panoramic J. Owen Grundy Pier in Jersey City, NJ. The inaugural
 year of this event promises amazing vistas and even more amazing music. Brooklyn’s Monogold will headline the event. The avant-indie trio has garnered national attention as of late for their complex, astonishing soundscapes. Asbury Park’s driving electronic power duo Brick and Mortar and pop synth Jersey native TEEEL will power the event’s lineup. Jersey City native sons The One and Nines and Thomas Francis Takes His Chances bring a fresh take on funk/soul and eclectic indie mayhem. Brooklyn’s Brums and Drass and I am the Heat will bring feet to the floor with both driving dance electronics and 60’s garage rock dance grooves. Central Jersey newcomer Hot Family round out the bill with their confounding, intense soundscapes. WPBR’s Motorfunker will be spinning throughout the day to keep the crowd moving. We probably won't be able to make it but we hope to come back to this pier in Jersey City again.

Sunday Evening in Hell's Kitchen: Dinner at Clinton Cove Park

We took some soba noodles with tofu and honeydew over to beautiful Clinton Cove Park this evening so we could sit out overlooking the Hudson, wearing our favorite outfit -- shorts and a T-shirt -- and enjoy dinner outside on what was probably the last summerlike Sunday of 2011.

We're teaching seven classes six days a week at four colleges this semester, so we don't have much free time anymore. And this is our last term in New York. In three months, it will be Christmas, and we're moving out west again at that time.

But we'll always be grateful for our times in New York City's wonderful parks.

Thursday Night in the Meatpacking District: Hudson River Park's RiverRocks presents Deer Tick and Dom

On this really gorgeous evening with mild temperatures, low humidity mostly clear skies and a full moon, we got to Pier 54 for the last Hudson River Park's RiverRocks show around 7 p.m. as Dom, the Worcester-based band with their second EP, Family of Love (Astralwerks), just out, started a set filled with catchy songs and the pouting, sweet, insistent scent of the joints being puffed around us. (We may have accidentally found ourselves hanging out with the wrong crowd for a change.)

PopMatters said of the new album,

Indie burnouts Dom probably subscribe to the adage that good things come in small packages: The mysterious but buzzed-about Worcester, MA band must believe in a short-and-sweet aesthetic, going at its own pace and releasing two EPs to its name in the past two years. Even briefer than the debut Sun Bronzed Greek Gods by a few tracks, Dom’s latest nugget, Family of Love, is a more focused effort that still has a tossed-off, casual feel. A good example of how Dom takes well-worn elements and intuitively recombines them into something novel, opener “Telephone” is a canny mix of anachronistic oldies thematics, ‘80s new-wavey elements, and ‘90s indie attitude. Better yet is the bouncy lo-fi of “Some Boys”, which comes off lazy but hot-and-bothered at the same time, thanks to the bratty guest vocals credited to a friend of the band named Emma. Ending on that note, the all-too-short EP leaves you wanting for more, though, then again, there’s no room for filler here, either.

It was pretty crowded and our view wasn't great, but the band sounded terrific.

(Video courtesy of (((unartig))), who has amazing stuff at the (((unartig))) website.)

This is from Pitchfork's review of the new EP:

Family of Love's brevity-- five songs in just under 17 minutes-- doesn't exactly encourage high expectations out of the gate. The real (and very welcome) shock, then, is how well-honed those five songs sound. This stuff is packed with detail, both silly (the telephone keypad solo on "Telephone") and ambitious ("Damn"'s sea of golden guitar lines). A few songs bleed into each other, like parts of a larger whole; the album's most straightforward synth-pop cut, "Happy Birthday Party", dissolves into rumpled noise and fluttering flutes towards its close. These are rich, dense-sounding compositions.

We think Dom, the person and frontman for the band, is pretty funny and multi-talented and we hope he can eventually pay everyone the money he owes them.

There was a lot of beer and weed around. We don't partake of either, being so abstemious as well as old, but we may have done what our grandfather used to do when he was in his sixties when we both worked at his son's clothing store on Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn and maybe gotten a little bit of a contact high from the joints being puffed around us.

Our companion -- this is one of those times there's more than the editorial "we" in this post -- wanted to go to dinner, so we left after Dom's really fine set and never did get to see Deer Tick. No, we won't give in to the urge to put a frownie emoticon here.

We will say that we're grateful we got to hear Dom tonight before we were dragged off just after 8 p.m.

As Pitchfork concluded in its Family of Love review, "Living forever is a desire often explored in pop music; I'm not sure that the boys in Dom want to exist for eternity-- if they keep behaving the way that they allegedly do, they won't even come close-- but they're clearly set on making the most of their time while they're here."

We had a pleasant dinner in Chelsea, but this is some of what we missed of Deer Tick (again thanks to (((unartig))), for whom we are also grateful:

Sunday Afternoon in Battery Park City/Tribeca: Early Dinner at Rockefeller Park

It had stopped raining after our first class and office hour at the wonderful Borough of Manhattan Community College on Chambers Street at 4 p.m. today, so we got the early dinner we'd brought from home and took it over to Rockefeller Park

to enjoy cold soba noodles with tofu and purple potatoes on a bench by the Tom Otterness sculptures

and looked out at the Hudson and New Jersey.

We teach our second class at 5 p.m., but we're grateful to have gotten to be outside in the park catching pleasant breezes and watching the scenery for an hour.

Next week are final exams, and we've enjoyed our Sundays in Tribeca this semester -- more so as the weather has improved.

Thursday Morning in Hoboken: Breakfast at Pier A Park

Usually on Thursday mornings this spring semester, we teach two classes at fantastic Fordham University, but today is Holy Thursday so New York's Jesuit University gives us the day off. It was a perfect sunny morning for a quick ride to Hoboken

to join others with the great idea of having breakfast at beautiful Pier A Park between Sinatra Drive and the mighty Hudson River.

Our PATH train was almost empty except for a middle-aged Asian woman with shopping bags from the Union Square Whole Foods, this gum-chewing young lady who looked at her smartphone

and this guy who picked his nose quite aggressively during the entire ride. He was reading The New Yorker all the while.

We got provisions for breakfast at Chock Full o' Nuts Cafe on the corner of River and First Streets when we got out of the terminal. Across the street there's a Brooklyn Bread place which either is about to open or recently closed.

We love Chock Full o' Nuts -- everyone our age remembers "That Heavenly Feeling" jingle sung by Page Morton Black, the fabulous wife of the company founder --

and who can forget the cream cheese on datenut bread sandwiches you can't get anywhere else?

At the park, it was breezy -- okay, windy -- but not too cold. These guys were practicing soccer on the lawn they had to themselves.

Just outside the terminal is a statue of Sam Sloan, president of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad for 32 years. (He lived in Brooklyn, too.)

The trees were pretty bare at this point in spring. It is spring, right?

We enjoyed walking around the park anyway. It was not raining. We've been teaching Twelfth Night in three classes, and we keep thinking of Feste's final song and the line, "The rain, it raineth every day." Almost.

Some kids were here with their school.

The gazebo, right by the water, must be wonderful in the summer.

According to Wikipedia,

Many people witnessed the September 11, 2001 Attacks from Pier A because it had good views of the World Trade Center. On March 11, 2002 a memorial service was held on Pier A. On September 11, 2003 a section of land was created as a memorial for the September 11, 2001 victims (by planting trees).

Currently, there is a temporary memorial to victims in the form of a tear drop. A permanent memorial, called Hoboken Island, is planned to be built.

A park worker was cleaning up the memorial garden dedicated to the memory of Annette Illing, a Hoboken civic leader who worked on making this waterfront available to all the people, lobbied for open government and advocated for affordable housing in the city.

This is the World War I American Expeditionary Forces Memorial Boulder, honoring the three million troops who embarked from Hoboken to fight in Europe.

We're grateful we got such a nice morning off to have our iced tea and sandwich and walk around Pier A Park.

But it was time for us to get back to New York City. We'll be back in Hoboken when we can.