Sunday Morning in Glendale: Breakfast at Atlas Park

We took the Q54 bus from our corner to Atlas Park in Glendale at 8 a.m. on this sunny summer Sunday to have breakfast. Atlas Park isn't really a park any more than Williamsburg Park is a park; instead, it's a shopping center, the kind of "lifestyle commons" we've seen in Calabasas, California; Weston, Florida; and Gilbert and Desert Ridge, Arizona.

We used to like to come here -- it's a one-stop bus ride down Grand Avenue in Brooklyn, then Metropolitan Avenue in Queens (and since Atlas Park opened a few years ago, the Q 54makes a short detour to let passengers off in front of the shopping center) -- but then Borders Books & Music closed, so now we usually just come in the mornings because it's one of the few Starbucks in New York City that has a nice outdoor space you can sit at and read the Sunday New York Times in peace and quiet.

That's because Atlas Park doesn't get a lot of people, it seems to us.

But it has a nice Sun Belt feel, and it's clean and suburban, and sometimes,

although you love the gritty urban feel of Williamsburg and Bushwick and the Lower East Side, sometimes you want something different.

So we're grateful to have Atlas Park close by.

Buy stuff at the wonderful stores there, join the health club there, open offices there, just make sure it stays in business for our sake! Thank you.

Sunday Morning in Brooklyn Heights: Breakfast at Brooklyn Bridge Park and a Look at the New Pop-Up Pool

e At 8 a.m. today, before it got too hot and humid, we left home, took the J train over the Williamsburg Bridge one stop to Essex, went downstairs and got an F train two stops back into Brooklyn for York Street, walked down Front Street to the Dumbo Starbucks and got a venti iced tea and a multigrain bagel, and kept walking until we got to our breakfast destination: a bench at the waterfront at Brooklyn Bridge Park. We read the Sunday Times, as we have been doing for, oh, 48 years, and at 10 a.m., we walked over to see the cool new and popular Pop-Up Pool,

which can hold sixty people, although only one or two seemed to be in the water at such an early hour.

It was so beautiful we walked all the way down to Pier 6 and walked along Atlantic Avenue until we started getting sweaty enough to want to go home. We're grateful for Sunday mornings when we don't have to work, especially when they are this pleasant.