Not to be melodramatic but waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.
Worst thing about last night’s Yankees / Rangers game: not going to be able to watch certain New York City Ballet dancers (no names mentioned 🙂 ) getting plastered at a certain Lincoln Center-area bar during the World Series.
Seriously, I am so upset…
Photo of Derek Jeter taken from here.
I spent much of this and last weekend up in Washington Heights / Inwood, the area north of Harlem and just below the Bronx on the west side of Manhattan. I have several friends who live up there and are trying to convince me to move. It’s really beautiful, much of it inhabited by Dominican immigrants. A-Rod was born there and his father once had a shoe store somewhere in that neighborhood – I really wanted to know where that was!
The top photo is taken more from the Inwood area (the northernmost part of Manhattan), and you can see George Washington bridge, which connects Manhattan to New Jersey. The river is the Hudson.
Kids playing baseball in Inwood park. The diamonds were really full and the teams looked serious! Like a training ground for little athletes 🙂
I found the best Mexican restaurant in the city, Papasito, on Dyckman Street, the border between Inwood and Washington Heights. It’s a funny area – there will be a very chi chi block, even a gated community – which I don’t know I’ve seen anywhere else in NYC, and then right across the street a far less privileged area. There was this tiny section of Dyckman with these five-star restaurants, such as this one. And right across Broadway, totally different story. Anyway, I had the best chili relleno I have ever had in my life at Papasito!
Here’s my view from the restaurant.
The restaurant’s the one with the green lettering in the middle of the picture.
And this is down the east side of Dyckman. I met the sweetest Dominican man working in a bodega where I bought a bottle of water. So polite! He kind of reminded me of a Dominican version of Dolores’s father in Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love 🙂
This is Fort Tryon park. Beautiful! Lots of kind of scary-looking cliffs though. It leads up to the Cloisters, an old monastery that houses some of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Medieval collection.
The Cloisters.
Dominican pic-nic-ers in Fort Tryon park, right across the street from Papasito. The Dominicans really know how to throw a party – they had bouquets upon bouquets of colorful balloons everywhere, lots of food, and merengue music!
This is from the southern part of Washington Heights, in Riverbank park, which is actually in Harlem. So many parks in Manhattan along the river that I never knew of.
More parties in the park, back in the upper end of Fort Tyron park.
The Cloisters gardens / lower end of Fort Tryon park.
Staircase with murals and graffiti painted along the side, leading down from Fort Tryon park, lower end, to Broadway.
I found this really cute arty area right underneath George Washington bridge!
Cute little restaurants and wine shops. And books and art for sale outside on the street.
Off the arty street, a staircase leading up to one of the exclusive, gated areas.
One of the “exclusive” buildings – i.e. there were “private” signs everywhere. Beautiful building though.
Another park along the Hudson. Men playing dominoes, others relaxing on park benches.
Children playing in sprinklers.
A nice, middle-class area in the middle of the Heights, around Columbia Medical School.
Ditto.
This is taken back in my current neighborhood. You can see how far up the bridge is, if you can make it out in the distance. Overcast day!
Cute little outdoor cafe I just found right in my area, on the riverfront. Never knew it existed!
Oh, I’m so sad. The judge I clerked for following law school, Sylvia Pressler, just died. She was only 75 and had only retired a few years earlier. Of course, she worked until the last possible moment a judge could until mandatory retirement under New Jersey law.
She was head of the Appellate Division (New Jersey’s intermediate appeals court), and had a reputation for being very intelligent, very formidable (but sweet!), and very liberal. She’s responsible for a good many important civil rights decisions, involving mainly gender equality, sexuality equality, and the death penalty and due process. Apparently, if I’d been born a New Jersey resident, I would only have been able to play Little League (as I did in Phoenix) because of her. (Btw, New Yorkers just love to condescend to New Jerseyians, but Hoboken, you know, is the birthplace of baseball… and Frank Sinatra. And, New Jersey law tends to be far more progressive).
I remember the year I was there our flashy, press-attention-heavy due process case involved a high-school’s extreme last-minute decision to prevent a student from graduating because she’d gotten into some kind of vague fight with another student earlier that day. The appeal was emergent (since it needed to be decided right then, the graduation ceremony being just about to happen), and Judge Pressler determined in a few precious moments that since the school had failed to give the student a hearing beforehand, they’d violated her due process rights. The student graduated. Her photo was in the paper the next day waving about her diploma, wearing a huge smile. The school board was not happy, but the student and her family sure were. Judge Pressler was always a champion of the underdog.
The several judges who shared our Hackensack building would often take all of us law clerks out to lunch together. Judge Pressler was one of only two female judges (I think I remember her saying she was the only woman in her entire class at Rutgers Law), and by far the most liberal, and she managed to be both sweetly likable, and formidable (she was the head of the entire Court after all). She’d start going off on some conservative politician (usually Giuliani :)) and the male judges would sit there biting their hands, dying to say something but too intimidated to speak up. It was great — we were in awe!
According to the Times, she died at her summer house in Sparta, which I remember from our end-of-the-year judicial panel party (and which I always thought sounded very balletic). It’s out on this beautiful lake, where there were many swans. I remember approaching one (which I’d never seen in person before) and realizing they’re beautiful and elegant, but if you get too close and they get threatened — especially if they have babies around — they can be very aggressive, which I guess makes sense.
Anyway, I was very honored to have clerked for her. Below is a photo of her swearing me into the New Jersey Bar — one very cool thing she’d do for her law clerks (as did most of the other New Jersey judges; in New York, I got sworn in along with about a thousand other people in a gigantic room by a nameless, faceless someone).
She has a son, Noah, and a daughter, Jessica, who is a writer. I think Jessica writes for New York Magazine.