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brooklynmuseum · 4 years

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Stronger Together

Weekend Roundup of Resources for our Community 

What’s up Brooklyn?! We’re back with another list of resources for you and yours. The impacts of this pandemic are far-reaching and deeply felt here in Brooklyn. We know there are many needs not being met, and many who are willing to help out where they can. Now more than ever, it is essential that we come together as a community to support each other with social solidarity, even if we are physically distant. Check out new opportunities to support and be supported in this week’s roundup. Let’s do what we do best in Brooklyn… spread love.

If you have questions, or have more you wish to see or to spotlight, reach out. We want to hear from you. Please email [email protected].

Also, text 'COVID' to 692-692 to get important COVID-19 related updates sent straight to your phone. You can text 'COVIDESP' to get updates in Spanish.

Follow Our Elected Officials For News:

The Mayor has a new Daily Message available on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube every morning. If your constituents have questions, comments or concerns, they want him to respond to, they can send them using the hashtag #AskMyMayor

The Office of the Brooklyn Borough President provides the most up-to-date information and resources to Brooklynites. Follow these pages regularly and follow Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams on social media for real-time updates.

Follow updates and news from Council Member Laurie A. Cumbo on Facebook and Twitter. Cumbo serves as the Council Majority leader for Brooklyn’s 35th District- Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Crown Heights, Prospect Heights and Bed-Stuy.

Follow New York City Council Member Robert E. Cornegy, representing Brooklyn 36th District- Bedford Stuyvesant and Northern Crown Heights on Twitter , Facebook, and Instagram for important updates regarding COVID-19 updates.

Congresswoman for the 9th District, Yvette D. Clark is working hard in Congress to support our local communities. Follow the Congresswoman on her Twitter to receive updates on what is going on in Washington DC and resources available in your ‘hood!

Stay up to date with information provided by Governor Cuomo. Follow our New York State governor on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for up to date information regarding new health guidelines closures, and executive orders.

Follow updates from the NYC City Immigrant Affairs office on Twitter interested in renewing your DACA application form. Call ActionNYC at 1-800-354-0365.

Local Business Highlights of the Week:

Known for their traditional Senegalese cuisine, Cafe Rue Dix takes pride in incorporating fresh ingredients and bold spices to create some of the best fran-senegalese dishes in NYC located right in Crown Heights. Take out is available from 12-9pm, and if you’re cooking or working at home, try their signature coffee and hot sauce for a real pick me up.

While we dream of what will come, Berg’n is asking their fellow patrons, who have the means during this time, to donate any tips they would give while visiting this local hang-out. You can donate to their phenomenal team by clicking here.

Census

There’s still time! Complete the 2020 Census today at my2020census.gov.

It's not too late to RSVP to host a Census Text-a-Thon in your district on April 20th. Participating in a Text-a-Thon from home is an easy and safe way for New Yorkers to do something positive for our City. NYC Census 2020 will provide access to the peer-to-peer texting tool, Hustle, and will provide all the technical support necessary for people to volunteer to text. RSVP to host a Text-a-Thon in your district on April 20th by emailing Katya Murphy or Jason Reischel. Support for Artists, Freelancers, and Gig Workers

Freelancers in NYC: If you're facing nonpayment issues, file a complaint through NYC Consumer Affairs, which has a list of worker’s rights!

The Arts and Culture Leaders of Color Emergency Fund is set up to help those pursuing careers as artists or arts administrators whose income has been directly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. This fund is for those who self-identify as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color).

Solidarity 4 Service, is a grassroot effort to connect individuals to each other in efforts to provide relief for those who are unemployed or underemployed due to COVID-19. For more information, visit their Support for Service Industry/Gig/Freelance Workers intake survey.

The NYC Low-Income Artist Freelance Relief Fund has intentons to collectively raise funds to provide emergency and preventative resources to artist who are at finical ris and low-income BIPOC, trans/GNC/NB/Queer artist and freelancers.

Creative Capital has created a resource fund which helps artists find various national, state and local grants, mental health assistance.

Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS' COVID-19 Emergency Assistance Fund is helping entertainment professionals meet coronavirus-related expenses and other challenges brought about by the evolving pandemic.

The Jazz Foundation of America provides jazz and blue artists with an experienced social worker to assess his/her situation and provide rapid assistance.

Queer Writers of Color Relief Fund is offering finicial assistance to queer writiers to at least 100 writers, each writer reciveing $5,000.

The South Asian Arts Resiliency Fund is a direct response by the India Center Foundation to offer support to South Asian arts workers impacted by COVID-19.

Dance NYC is offering one time grants for dance making organizations with an annual operating budget between $25,00 and $500,00. Eligibility is determined based upon loss of income or incurred expenses due to COVID-19.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has issued guidance on applying for the $75 million it was allocated in the CARES Act. If a nonprofit cultural organization has received NEA support in the last four fiscal years, they are eligible to apply for a direct grant. Apply by April 22!

For another roundup of resources for artists, check out artnet’s recent article.

Resources for children and families

For updates regarding the Coronavirus and New York City public schools, visit New York City Department of Education Coronavirus Communicaications page.

As the weeks of staying at home stretch on, they are taking their toll on many of us. The mindfulness app HeadSpace has teamed up with New York State to offer free guided meditations and other resources to support the mental wellbeing of New Yorkers during this crisis.

For many, pets are more than just animals — they are a part of the family. As members of your family, they should be included in your emergency planning process. Make sure your disaster plan addresses what you will do when an emergency requires you to leave your home, leave your pet at home, or prevents you from returning home. Visit NYCEM pets planning for more information

No Kid Hungry is offering emergency grants to support local school districts and nonprofit organizations in their efforts to ensure kids get the nutritious food they need. Fill out this grant request form here.

Did you know that you can use your Snap benefits to order groceries online? Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits can be used to shop online for fresh produce and groceries! Use your EBT card to shop securely for fresh produce and groceries at participating stores in the New York City area.

One Week of Free Groceries: The Department of Probation, Neighborhood Opportunity Network (NeON) Nutrition Kitchens, in partnership with the Food Bank of NYC and the NYC Young Men’s Initiative (YMI) have opened five kitchens -- one in each borough -- to distribute free food, available to any New Yorker who needs it.

Women.NYC, which is powered by the New York City Economic Development Corporation, released a downloadable guide for free and low-cost tech courses in New York City.

DOE Graphics Library: A collection of graphics on the DOE's recent announcements that can be shared with families and educators, in all 9 DOE languages

For more information about remote learning, activities for students, and technical support go to schools.nyc.gov/LearnAtHome

While Family Justice Centers are physically closed, anyone can call any of our borough centers for help with safety planning, mental health and planning, legal help, or help in connecting to law enforcement agencies. For more information please visit the Mayor's Office to End Domestic and Gender Based Violence or call our 24-hour Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-621-4673.

Ways to Volunteer and Serve

Visit New York Blood Center to find out how you may be able to donate plasma for those who have recovered from COVID-19.

For Individuals/Organizations/Companies offering to DONATE PPE, visit NYC Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) Donation Portal.

Help Now NYC is providing New Yorkers with opportunities to find out how they can help others affected by COVID-19 and help New Yorkers find organizations that will help them receive COVID-19 related assistance.

The NYC Share Your Space Survey is critical to helping the City prepare for emergencies and outreach to all of the City's communities. Organizations citywide are encouraged to participate.

NYCEDC is currently seeking businesses with the ability to quickly source and/or make needed medical supplies (e.g. face shields, gowns, ventilators, masks, and other products as needed) to support the City’s COVID-19 response.

Deliver meals and emergency food bags to home-bound elderly living in a variety of Brooklyn neighborhoods (car recommended) with Heights and Hills. Learn more here.

Corona Couriers is a collective of cyclists willing to courier supplies to people in need for free, using low contact methods. Email [email protected] if interested.

Here, you may find a source guide specifically for immigrant communities during the COVID-19 pandemic: Please help by passing it along. Also, FYI, this week is Immigrant Heritage Week!

For People in Need

Domestic Violence: If you are experiencing domestic violence, you locate nearby resources online using NYC HOPE, the City’s Resource Directory for services for survivors. Check out NYC Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based violence to attain more resources for survivors during COVID-19.

For individuals with disabilities, visit the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities. More information may be found NYC Mayor’s Office of Disabilities Twitter, as well as contacting representatives at 311 or visitor connect via video phone at 646-396-5830.

DOITT has developed a portal, to help guide the City’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The portal is available in 11 languages and allows New Yorkers to self-report COVID-19 information and will help New York City both better communicate with affected people and identify areas that may need enhanced response. Inputs are confidential. People without internet access or who need help, can call 311.

Possibly Mimbres. Standing Figure, 1100-1000 B.C.E. Stone, pigment). Brooklyn Museum, Museum Expedition 1903, Museum Collection Fund, 03.325.4528. Creative Commons-BY

#strongertogether #brooklynstrong #covid-19 #covid relief #corona virus #community #art museums #nyc #brooklyn #brooklyn museum #community resources #artists #resources

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osceolalibrary · 5 years

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NATIONAL LIBRARY WEEK 2019

HAPPY NATIONAL LIBRARY WEEK, BOOKWORMS AND LIBRARY CATS!

Our favorite time of year has come around again! For those of you who are long-time followers of ours, you know what this means: It’s time to shower your local (and not so local) libraries with all the love we can muster online and in person!

For those of you who may be new here, every year during National Library Week, we make a list of all the library tumblrs that follow us and/or we follow so that you bookworms and library cats can discover new booklrs and fantastic library content! This year the tradition continues with our updated 2019 Master List.

Without further ado, show these libraries some love and (if you aren’t already) #followalibrary!! (Including, hopefully, us! ;D Just putting it out there.)

(Alphabetical by url)

@agslibrary (American Geographical Society Library)

@alachualibrary (The Alachua County Library District)

@alt-library (By Sacramento Public Library)

@americanlibraryassoc (American Library Association)

@aplibrary (Abilene Public Library)

@austinpubliclibrary (Austin Public Library)

@badgerslrc (The Klamath Community College’s Learning Research Center)

@barbertonpubliclibrary (Barberton Public Library)

@bflteens (Baker Free Library’s Tumblr For Teens)

@biblioitesmgda (BiblioTECa en Guadalajara [Technological Library in Guadalajara])

@bibliosanvalentino (Biblioteca San Valentino [San Valentino Library])

@biodivlibrary (Biodiversity Heritage Library)

@bklynlibrary (Brooklyn Public Library)

@bodleianlibs (Bodleian Libraries)

@boonelibrary (Boone County Public Library)

@brkteenlib (Brookline Public Library Teen Services Department)

@californiastatelibrary (California State Library)

@carlblibrary (Concordia College’s Carl B. Ylvisaker Library)

@cheshirelibrary (Cheshire Public Library)

@cincylibrary (The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County)

@cityoflondonlibraries (City of London Libraries)

@cmclibraryteen (Cape May County Library’s Teen Services)

@cobblibrary (Cobb County Public Library System)

@cpl-archives (Cleveland Public Library Archives)

@cplsteens (Clearwater Public Library Teens)

@crossettlibrary (Crossett Library at Bennington College, Vermont)

@cscclibrary (Columbus State Library)

@darienlibrary (Darien Library)

@dcpubliclibrary (DC Public Library)

@decaturpubliclibrary (Decatur Public Library)

@delawarelibrary (Delaware County District Library - Teens)

@detroitlib (Detroit Public Library Music, Arts & Literature Department)

@dorcaslibrary (Dorcas Library)

@douglaslibraryteens (Douglas Library For Teens)

@dplteens (Danville Public Library Teens)

@ebrpl (East Baton Rouge Parish Library)

@escondidolibrary (Escondido Public Library)

@fdrlibrary (Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library)

@fontanalib (Fontana Regional Library)

@fppld-teens (Franklin Park Library Teens)

@friscolibrary (Frisco Public Library)

@gastonlibrary (Gaston County Public Library)

@gladstoneslibrary (Gladstone’s Library)

@glendaleteenlibrary (Glendale Public Library Teens)

@goffstownpubliclibrary (Goffstown Public Library)

@gtpubliclibrary (Georgetown Texas Public Library)

@hbalibrary (Hampton B. Allen Library)

@hpldreads (Havana Public Library District)

@hpl-teens (Homewood Public Library For Teens)

@huntingtonlibrary (Huntington Library)

@kingsbridgelibraryteens (Kingsbridge Library Teens Advisory Group)

@kpltumblarians (Librarians from the Kalamazoo Public Library)

@kzoolibrary (Kalamazoo Public Library)

@lanelibteens (Lane Memorial Library Teen Services)

@lawrencepubliclibrary (Lawrence Public Library)

@libraryadvocates (The American Library Association’s Washington Office Tumblr)

@librarylinknj (New Jersey Library Cooperative)

@lindylibrary (Lindenhurst Memorial Library Teen Zone)

@loudounlibrary (Loudoun County Public Library)

@marioncolibraries (Marion County Public Library System)

@merrickteens (Merrick Library)

@messengerplteens (Messenger Public Library Teens)

@mobilepubliclibraryteens (Mobile Public Library Teens)

@movallibrary (Moreno Valley Public Library

@mrcplteens (Mansfield/Richland County Public Library Teen Zone)

@mvpubliclibrarymallbranch (Moreno Valley Public Library Mall Branch)

@myrichlandlibrary (Mansfield/Richland County Public Library)

@necclibrary (Northern Essex Community College Libraries)

@nevinslibrary (Nevins Library)

@nevinslibraryteens (Nevins Memorial Library Teens)

@norfolkplyouth (Norfolk Public Library Youth Services)

@novipubliclibrary (Novi Public Library)

@nplteens (Nashua Public Library Teens)

@nypl (New York Public Library)

@omahapubliclibrary (Omaha Public Library)

@orangecountylibrarysystem (Orange County Library System)

@osceolalibrary (Osceola Library System - THAT’S US!)

@othmeralia (Othmer Library of Chemical History)

@pclteens (Pittsford Community Library Teens)

@petit-branch-library (Petit Branch Library)

@pflibteens (Pflugerville Public Library Teenspace)

@phplyouthservices (Prospect Heights Public Library Youth Services)

@plainfieldlibrary (Plainfield Public Library District)

@providencepubliclibrary (Providence Public Library)

@ridgewoodlibya (Ridgewood Library Young Adult tumblr)

@royhartlibrary (RoyHart Community Library)

@safetyharborpubliclibrary (Safety Harbor Library Teen Zone)

@santacruzpl (Santa Cruz Public Libraries)

@santamonicalibr (Santa Monica Public Library)

@schlowlibrary (Schlow Centre Region Library)

@sclteenspace-blog (Springfield City Library Teen Space)

@scplteens (Shelby County Public Libraries - Teens)

@scvpubliclib (Santa Clarita Public Library)

@sfplhormelcenter (San Francisco Public Library’s James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center)

@smithsonianlibraries (Museum Library System)

@smlibrary (Sheppard Memorial Library)

@sonobranchlibrary (Norwalk Public Library - SoNo [South Norwalk] Branch Library)

@southeastlibrary (Southeast Branch Library)

@tampabaylibraryconsortium-blog (Tampa Bay Library Consortium)

@teenbookerie (Erie County Public Library For Teens)

@teencenterspl (The Smith Public Library Teen Center)

@teensfvrl (Fraser Valley Regional Library)

@teen-stuff-at-the-library (White Oak Library District)

@therealpasadenapubliclibrary (Pasadena Public Library)

@ucflibrary (University of Central Florida Library)

@uolincolnlibrary (University of Lincoln Library)

@usfspecialcollections (University of South Florida Special Collections)

@uwmspeccoll (University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Libraries Special Collections)

@vculibraries (Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries)

@virlibraryteens (Vancouver Island Regional Library Youth Services)

@waynecountyteenzone (Wayne County Public Library’s Teen Space)

@wellingtoncitylibraries (Wellington City Libraries)

@wflchildrensroom (Wellesley Free Library’s Children’s Room)

@widenerlibrary (Harvard’s Widener Library)

@woodlibraryteens (Wood Library’s Teen Services)

@wplteenspace (Woodbridge Public Library Teen Space)

Keep the Library love going by adding any Libraries we may have missed or don’t know of yet. And never forget we Libraries love all of our bookworms and library cats, and your support online and in person (*hint hint nudge nudge*) make all the difference!

Stay gold, and keep visiting your Libraries!

#national library week #follow a library #tumblr do the thing #library love!#libraries #follow back #just putting it out there #osceola library system #bookish #booklr

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halsteadproperty · 5 years

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Gardens, Courtyards, and Parks: Hidden Outdoor Spaces in the NY Metro Area

Curated by our Halstead agents

Few things are as coveted in the New York City area as green spaces. In the summertime especially, we all search for nature-filled areas to escape the noise, crowds, and pace of city life. We all know of the world-famous parks and gardens the area has to offer, but what about the lesser-known green spots—the secret gardens, hidden courtyards, and easily missed parks?

No one knows the hidden gems of New York City and its surrounding towns and cities better than our agents. So we asked them to share their favorite outdoor hideaways so that we can explore them for ourselves. Take a look at the hidden outdoor spaces they recommended, and find your new favorite place to unwind.

Palma West Village, NYC

“On a charming single-block street tucked away in the West Village is a restaurant that understands how to do garden dining right,” Janet Weiner shares. “With farmhouse décor and flowers everywhere you are transported to a romantic trattoria in Italy.” At Palma, attention to detail resonates in everything.

“Faithful to generations of family recipes and traditions and using only organic ingredients, the food is sublime—don’t pass up the pasta! The garden in back, overflowing with flowers and roses, is not to be missed. Its retractable glass ceiling makes outdoor dining possible year round.”

Janet recommends booking a table in the private carriage house for an intimate dinner party, while reserving the garden for a more festive event like an engagement or birthday party. “Dining in the garden at Palma is like taking a weekend getaway in the Italian countryside without leaving New York.”

Recommended by Janet Weiner of our Village office

Half-Moon Overlook Spuyten Duyvil, The Bronx

An intimate space on Palisade Avenue in Spuyten Duyvil, Half-Moon Overlook faces west and gives you a view of where the Hudson and Harlem Rivers meet. The small park is named for Henry Hudson's ship, the Halve Maen, and it is a beautiful perch to watch the sunset from and forget you're in a big city.

Recommended by the Sanjya Tidke Team of our Riverdale office

The Maidstone East Hampton, NY

The Maidstone has cozy fireplaces and a great bar inside, but it also has a beautiful garden where you can enjoy a drink or a meal. With umbrella-covered tables, benches, and plenty of greenery dotting the area, the garden is a great place to enjoy a friend’s company or sip on drinks with a larger group.

Shaded by large trees, there is a peaceful, almost park-like atmosphere here. “The grounds are absolutely beautiful,” Ani Antreasyan says. “And as a landscape designer, it’s one of my favorite places to hang out in East Hampton.”

Recommended by Ani Antreasyan of our East Hampton office

Amster Yard Turtle Bay, NYC

Tucked behind Instituto Cervantes, the Spanish Cultural Institute, Amster Yard is a true hidden gem. Vivian Ducat goes to this courtyard refuge to work sometimes and enjoys the Victorian atmosphere, with its iron grille work, wrought-iron chairs, and beautiful greenery.

Recommended by Vivian Ducat of our Harlem office

Rowayton Community Center Courtyard Rowayton, Connecticut

The land where Rowayton Library sits has a long and interesting history. Built over 100 years ago, the building that now contains the library used to be a barn and is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Mike Barbis, who is a Commissioner for the town, shares the beauty of the barn's courtyard. It was renovated a few years ago and includes café chairs and tables where you can read or simply enjoy your surroundings. There's even a 100-year-old English Yew. On the property you can also find the dog park and the greenhouse, known as the Potting Shed.

Recommended by Mike Barbis of our Darien office

Tudor City Greens Tudor City, NYC

Two elevated spaces above 42nd Street and First Avenue offer a breath of fresh, quiet air above the maddening crowds below. The gardens are maintained by a neighborhood non-profit and boast much-needed shade, flower beds, benches, and gorgeous views.

Recommended by Madeleine Dale of our West Side office

Mount Prospect Park Prospect Heights, Brooklyn

A little-known park nestled between the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the Central Library, Mount Prospect Park contains the second highest point in all of Brooklyn and was used as a lookout point during the Revolutionary War. The park is now frequented by locals and their dogs for early-morning playtime. It's close to Kris Sylvester's home, so he often goes there with his daughter so that she can practice riding her bicycle.

Recommended by Kris Sylvester of our Village office

West Side Community Garden Upper West Side, NYC

Amelia Gewirtz was on her way to a friend's house when she heard jazz coming from a flower-filled area on 89th Street. She had happened upon the West Side Community Garden, hidden between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues. Since then, the serene hideaway has become Amelia's favorite hidden garden, not only because of its stunning atmosphere, but also because of the many free music and theater events that are hosted there.

Recommended by Amelia Gewirtz of our West Side office

Terrain Garden Cafe Westport, Connecticut

Terrain's greenhouse cafe has beautiful décor and seasonal menus, and there is an outdoor section as well. Enjoy a peaceful meal here surrounded by the lush greenery.

Recommended by Alison Mark of our Westport office

St. Luke's Garden West Village, NYC

A green oasis in the West Village, the garden belonging to The Church of St. Luke in the Fields is a home for flowers, berries, birds, and butterflies. This is where Bo Poulsen used to have lunch, and though it's in plain sight, it's not nearly as visited as you would think.

Recommended by Bo Poulsen of our Village office

The Elevated Acre Financial District, NYC

Take the escalator at 55 Water Street to discover an expansive urban oasis above the bustle of the Financial District. Here you will find landscaped gardens, a lawn, winding paths, a beer garden, and an amphitheater. The views are pretty incredible, too.

Recommended by Madeleine Dale of our West Side office

Paerdegat Park East Flatbush, Brooklyn

Found in a part of Brooklyn with a lack of green spaces, Paerdegat Park offers a full recreation center including basketball and handball courts, a playground, benches, and most importantly, trees.

Recommended by Wilford Nelson of our Fort Greene office

New Canaan’s Protected Lands New Canaan, Connecticut

The New Canaan Land Trust owns over 350 acres of land across the town in an effort to conserve the spaces. Included are the Bristow Bird Sanctuary, Watson-Symington Woodlands, Browne Preserve, and Silvermine Fowler Preserve. Found dotted around the town, these areas have diverse terrains and feature rivers, meadows, reservoirs, and wildlife.

Recommended by John Engel of our New Canaan office

Greenacre Park Turtle Bay, NYC

A beautiful urban green space nestled between Second and Third Avenues on 51st Street, Greenacre Park is a serene escape from the bustle of the city. It features a 25-foot-high waterfall flowing down a granite wall, a rarity in New York City. “It’s truly a hidden gem,” Ali Rubenstein says.

“Mature trees and landscaping fill the space to create a jungle-like atmosphere with tables and chairs sprinkled throughout. It’s a few blocks away from my apartment, so I frequent this tranquil oasis on the weekends in the spring and summer to enjoy my morning coffee. I always leave feeling refreshed and at peace.”

Recommended by Ali Rubenstein of our Brand Team

Liz Christy Community Garden The Bowery, NYC

The oldest community garden in New York City, this green space was established by Liz Christy and a group of “green guerrillas” that cleaned up and beautified the then vacant lot. Today, you can find a pond, wildflower habitat, weeping birch trees, vegetable gardens, a grape arbor, and more.

Recommended by Madeleine Dale of our West Side office

Columbia Manhattanville Courtyard Manhattanville, NYC

Vivian Ducat was searching for a comfortable outdoor space to relax, so she headed to Columbia University’s Manhattanville campus. She walked alongside the Jerome L. Greene Science Center and came upon a lovely courtyard with shade-providing trees and colorful chairs and benches. “A breeze off the river makes it a very pleasant place to sit,” Vivian says.

Recommended by Vivian Ducat of our Harlem office

Public Hotel Garden Lower East Side, NYC

The Public Hotel has the popular Bowery Garden on its rooftop, but for a more casual atmosphere, try the small garden directly in front of the building on Chrystie Street. The space has picnic tables for you to enjoy a meal (consider getting something from the Jean-Georges food bar inside) and have a nice respite from the city.

Recommended by Bo Poulsen of our Village office

#New York City #connecticut #hamptons #Summer #garden #Park #outdoors #green #brooklyn

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oliveratlanta · 5 years

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101 things to love about Atlanta

A love letter to a city of many nicknames—just don’t call it Hotlanta

Unlike other American metropolises, it’s sometimes hard to determine exactly what Atlanta is, especially for outsiders or so many newcomers. Is it a business-friendly, big-hearted, mild-weather region that’s six times more populated than it was 50 years ago? Yes, Atlanta is that. A cradle for some of the most influential music—particularly hip-hop and rap—of the past three decades? Yep, that too. A burgeoning foodie wonderland? A southeastern mecca for the production of television and Hollywood blockbusters? A pastiche of gloriously unique, provincial villages masquerading as official neighborhoods? A cultural frontrunner and cautionary tale? Global magnet of opportunity? Still kind of a mess—but lovably so?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and that’s right, y’all.

So maybe that’s what’s special about Atlanta: It’s not yet finished, and never one-note. Rather, it’s a Brunswick stew of varying allures. It’s amorphous, restless, unwed to the past, intoxicated by its own prospects. Very little is sacred here but change, and instigators are more than welcome. Atlanta doesn’t know what it is yet, or exactly where it’s going, but it’s having a damn good time getting there. Let’s celebrate what’s great here, right now.

1. Inclusivity. The economic and cultural heart of the Deep South isn’t just accustomed to being diverse, it’s proud of it. See virtually any public gathering place intown for proof that humanity can peacefully coexist—and that Atlanta still has better things to do than hate.

2. Sky-high architecture. From the emerald towers of Sandy Springs’s King and Queen to the Georgia Pacific Tower’s illuminated stairsteps, the skyline is among America’s most underappreciated, especially at night. It’s not contiguous yet, with large gaps between poky clusters from most angles, but it’s distinctive and bold. And oh how it glows.

3. Easy-breezy climes. Sure, summer’s hotter’n’ Hades. But there’s Christmas shopping in flip-flops (sometimes), T-shirt weekends in January (occasionally), and bloomy early February (without fail).

4. After Hours at Waffle House: The 20-minute wait at 3:17 a.m. is plenty of time for random singing with other scatterbrained, post-bar strangers in line.

5. The prevalence of nature. Cicadas. And barn owls. Talking. At night. Among the giant urban oaks, in July.

6. Festival-a-palooza. Neighborhoods across the city have unbridled, borderline incomprehensible enthusiasm for getting together. Random gatherings invented on Facebook (looking at you, Lanta Gras) have ballooned into huge annual traditions with street closures and parades.

7. Bezos who? Amazon didn’t choose Atlanta, and Atlanta cared for five minutes.

8. It’s almost never hard to find a seat on public transit.

9. Kid-friendly. Little children growing up in Atlanta tend to think it’s amazing. That’s an impression bolstered by innumerable playgrounds and ubiquitous King of Pops, those delectable, homegrown frozen staples.

10. Random celebrity encounters. Like that time when André 3000 was shopping alone at the DeKalb Farmers Market, sans entourage, near the seafood section, all cool in his army jacket despite the July swelter and crush of onlookers, not too busy or highfalutin to shake everybody’s hand.

11. Yes, $100,000-something condos are prevalent—still—in desirable places across Atlanta. Many aren’t shoeboxes, either. And some count incredible views, particularly of central Midtown or downtown’s oldest streets.

12. Tech hub. Because Georgia Tech is a factory of coveted IT brainpower that’s more essential to the city’s business climate each year.

13. Westside escape. With its bridges, creekside vistas, and smooth, snaking pavement, the Proctor Creek Greenway trail is already otherworldly, in the best, most bucolic way. And it’s just a fraction of what it stands to be in coming years.

14. Long live the Clermont. A few years ago, neighbors were preparing to fight to save a local strip club from its new owners. It was a false alarm—the new owners view the Clermont as an asset. But that’s Atlanta.

15. Where it’s greater. With its transit connectivity, celebrated food scene, walkability, and perennial ranking as Georgia’s best place to live, Decatur gets it.

16. World’s busiest hub. With flights seemingly every minute from early morning until the wee night-time hours, the Atlanta airport is a stressful but handy launchpad of convenience, with a ridiculous wealth of nonstop flights to basically everywhere (hello, Dubai and Johannesburg). We’ll forgive a MARTA train derailment, that famous power outage, and perpetual TSA clogs.

17. Expats welcome. Because almost nobody on your street is actually from Atlanta, and that’s so normal it usually doesn’t even register. A common greeting for new neighbors: “So, where ya from?”

18. Can’t-miss Cascade. Especially in autumn, SW ATL’s Cascade Springs Nature Preserve offers ITP serenity to the fullest. Meander through 120 acres of trails, climb Civil War-era ruins, hop across a waterfall’s rocks. It’ll make even the most overstressed office dweller feel something akin to childhood awe.

19. Walkability. It’s getting vastly… better, in many places, from densifying EAV to the growing shopping avenues of central Buckhead. It’s happening, albeit slowly.

20. But... Atlanta’s still a major city where driving conveniences are largely possible, and lugging groceries on trains and such isn’t always an everyday hassle. Rush hours, however, are always plural, and Saturday traffic is, unfortunately, no joke anymore.

21. Trees of green. Friends flying in for the first time might say, “All I saw were trees—and then we landed.” A high compliment.

Curbed Atlanta

Atlanta’s canopy with the Buckhead business district at left, and Midtown/downtown at right.

22. Playspace. The restored, climbable treasure that is Noguchi Playscapes, the famed landscape architect’s work in Piedmont Park, was the only U.S. playground he completed in his lifetime.

23. Bungalows. The quintessential intown homes. Built to last, forever in vogue, and usually affixed with that most Atlanta of residential features: the generous porch.

24. Bearings Bike Shop. The community-focused nonprofit is teaching kids the value of hard work, the joy of exercise, and the viability of traversing a car-crazed city on two wheels.

25. Late-night stalwart. MJQ is a longstanding and culturally important club that welcomes anybody and everybody down into the rollicking, subterranean bowels of a former blues club. Chicago House in one room, a Whitney Houston singalong in the next.

26. Adios, Bravos. The pro baseball team left town for the monied ’burbs—and might very well have done Atlanta a favor (unless you operated front-yard parking lots). Nearby Georgia Avenue’s rebirth could show how large-scale adaptive reuse, married with new construction, can be a smartly executed replacement for storefront vacancies and so much stadium asphalt. Changes of this magnitude don’t come without gentrification fears, of course. But rows of beautiful, vacant old buildings—which could’ve doubled as a post-apocalyptic Main Street before, but are under renovation now—were doing Atlanta no favors.

27. The mother of all porch parties. Three cheers for the grassroots explosion of Oakhurst Porchfest. Founded in 2015, the autumn musical extravaganza counts 200-plus acts now, performing wherever volunteers offer their porches as stages. It’s community unification through music at its finest.

28. High Museum. The Southeast’s preeminent showcase for contemporary and classical art, housed in buildings designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Meier, is free for locals on the second Sunday of each month. How’s that for accessibility?

29. Viewrific, Part I. The approach from Douglasville on Interstate 20, over that hill, in fading evening light, the Land of Oz.

30. One of television’s best shows needed no other name than our city’s.

31. Georgia Aquarium’s bucket-list essential. For about the price of a car tire, you can swim with whale sharks downtown. And if you’re lucky, they’ll inadvertently bump you, with all the gentle power of a city bus in slow motion.

32. Curated graffiti. Running along the northern borders of Cabbagetown and Reynoldstown, Wylie Street is an ever-changing urban museum of eye-popping street murals, with a dash of biting social commentary.

33. Atlanta is where misfit street characters become local legends. Here’s looking at you, Baton Bob. And where art thou, Bicycle Shorts Man?

34. The Dungeon house in Lakewood Heights. Birthplace of OutKast, it was recently purchased by Big Boi. Hootie Hoo!

35. The Atlanta Beltline. Despite affordability challenges directly caused by the now-famous Beltline, the popular segments are socially magical, unifying things—Atlanta’s boardwalk, the Little Peachtree—and it’s barely reached adolescence at this point. Maybe one day, instead of sprawl and traffic, a mention of Atlanta anywhere in the world will conjure images of this mythical green loop. All dreamed up by a local college kid.

36. Sylvan Hills. The historic nabe between downtown and the airport is the prettiest neighborhood that half of Atlanta’s never heard of.

37. Scooter culture. Having spawned across the city in a year, the vehicles can be annoying, unsightly, and even dangerous for pedestrians and bicyclists. But the two-wheel zeitgeist beats all those lawbreaking riders driving alone in 4,000-pound street cloggers, right?

38. Raising the bar. Rooftop restaurants and bars have multiplied tenfold (roughly) in recent years, highlighted by Ponce City Market’s vintage amusement park in the sky and Hotel Clermont’s unpretentious new hang. About time.

39. Our iconic downtown library is by Marcel Breuer, someone cooler than Carnegie.

40. Path Force. The Beltline’s roving, specialized, applaudable police squad is consistently effective. Despite millions of visitors to the trails, the number of annual crime incidents can sometimes be counted on one hand.

41. John Portman. The late architect’s simple idea born in downtown Atlanta—the inner high-rise atrium, designed to cheaply cool low-income buildings—revolutionized hotel design around the world.

42. A growing legacy of rather badass sports statues. There’s Hank Aaron swinging through his record homer, shredded Evander Holyfield (currently MIA), sculptural Olympics remnants, Dominique Wilkins in mid-dunk, and that incredible Falcons sculpture.

43. Viewrific, Part II. The downtown skyline from that stoplight, facing west, where Freedom Parkway meets Boulevard. It’s the famed Jackson Street Bridge vantage point, immortalized in The Walking Dead Season 1 poster, panned out.

44. Park potential. Bellwood Quarry’s green space initiative could finally bring that side of town the Piedmont Park it deserves.

45. Commercial survivors. Poncey-Highland throwback DVD rental spot Videodrome and dive-bar stalwart Righteous Room are here to stay forever! Probably.

46. Road trips galore. From Atlanta, there’s a wealth of geographically and culturally diverse long-weekend options in all directions. Asheville, Savannah, the Gulf Coast, Charleston, Blue Ridge, Jekyll Island, Nashville, Charlotte, and the list goes on. Leave at lunch on Friday and reach them all by happy hour.

47. Church Bar on Edgewood. Before it was a tourist destination, the beloved Edgewood Avenue watering hole was just an unholy alliance of irreverent art, ping-pong, sangria, and a male former church deacon named Sister Louisa.

48. Atlanta United. In just its third year now, the club has scored a Major League Soccer championship and global headlines that declare this city, for once, an exemplar of fandom.

49. They don’t make ’em like Whittier Mill Village anymore. The semi-secret old cotton mill community includes 1800s homes, beautiful ruins, and Buckhead schools.

50. We took Snowpocalypse jokes—and are still taking them—in stride. Two inches of daytime snow paralyzed a major city, but hey, we made the front page of the New York Times! And inspired the creation of an SNL Weekend Update character called Buford Calloway, a “survivor.”

51. Lemony pepper wings. Order dry, with a little tub of hot sauce on the side. Graze the wing across blue cheese, and then dunk in the sauce. Bite big. And behold caloric Eden.

52. Bank of America Plaza. The world’s largest cigarette just happens to be the Southeast’s tallest building—and the ATL’s Eiffel Tower. (Sorry, Big Chicken.)

53. Purposeful art. With poignant murals, impressive permanent pieces, and a civil rights installation series where historical events actually happened, the Beltline’s Westside Trail artwork is stepping up the game. Ditto for the Eastside’s series, and William Massey’s awe-inspiring pieces made of garbage found on streets.

54. Viewrific, Part III. Sure, the ginormous chiseled Confederates are awkward at best, and embarrassing at worst. But evenings and sunrises atop Stone Mountain are religious experiences (literally, every Easter, with church services). Up there, find unparalleled vistas of so much rippling green, cast pink, with the glint of skyscrapers in the middle distance.

55. Adair Park. Blight and disinvestment didn’t diminish the beautiful old bones of this historic place.

56. The Atlanta Tech Village in Buckhead is the real deal. A tech hub that’s spawned big local companies—and a lot of cushy salaries.

57. Car-free lifestyles no longer seem crazy. Alternate transportation commuters are becoming more prevalent by the year—and proving that living without a car (gasp!) is possible in Atlanta. (See: the saddlebags and backpacks accessorizing business attire along the Freedom Park PATH Trail during weekday rush hours.)

58. No shortage of swingin’ highrise pools. It’s like a subculture unto itself, from late April to September.

59. We have the Southeast’s largest burial ground, and it’s beautiful. More than 100,000 people have been laid to eternal rest across Westview Cemetery’s 600 acres, which is centered around a gorgeously ornate mausoleum and chapel.

60. Lest we forget Oakland Cemetery. Atlanta’s oldest public green space is a historical, durable, accessible intown treasure that really knows how to party. For proof, see the long-running, multistage Tunes From the Tombs festival.

61. The National Center for Civil and Human Rights is > the NASCAR Museum that Atlanta “lost” to Charlotte.

62. Pittsburgh Yards. This southside Beltline redevelopment is centered on the creation of jobs in underserved places—instead of $3,000 apartments and $13.50 bespoke kale bowls—and it could be a game changer.

63. Buckhead’s tallest building, the Sovereign tower, still stands out, architecturally. And it could soon have a big blue modernist sibling.

64. Venturing OTP won’t actually kill you. Resurrected and richly historic downtowns are in abundance in the Atlanta suburbs. Like, everywhere. Find a half-dozen worthwhile day-trip destinations in Gwinnett alone.

65. The Atlanta splash pad, a social oasis and absolute godsend. And even better: More splash pads are in the works, from Vine City (definitely) to Chosewood Park (probably) and Kirkwood (maybe). About damn time, say toddlers across Atlanta.

66. Queer culture is thriving. That’s epitomized by Atlanta Pride, which is more massive than ever after almost 50 years (and now family-friendly, for better or worse).

67. English Avenue’s Mattie Freeland Park. Founded and controlled by neighbors, the tiny green space is a shining example of small but vital civic strides in historically troubled places.

68. The Chattahoochee River. A revived and unspoiled (if underused) resource for every season.

69. Insert here: A non-cheesy, non-obvious, pithy ode to the Varsity, that legendary fast-food drive-in—still the world’s largest after 90 years. Don’t mention “What’ll ya have?” Ah, never mind.

70. Music Midtown. For all its faults (overcrowding, lawn damage, neighbor inconvenience, lineups geared toward teens), the reborn multistage extravaganza is a dynamic and diverse musical showcase every September. Walk barefoot across lush Bermuda and dance like only 75,000 people are watching.

71. Ted Turner’s legacy. The media maverick and early Atlanta believer has been called an inspiration by people as disparate as Ted Koppel and Killer Mike.

72. The reinvigorated cyclorama. Once bedraggled, the restored cyclorama—one of America’s largest historical artifacts—is now in good hands, presented in a state-of-the-art showcase at the Atlanta History Center. That’s where it’ll be until infants of today are septuagenarians. At least.

73. Almost every Atlantan has some tale about the cast or production of The Hunger Games, The Walking Dead, Stranger Things, Baby Driver, etc. And hundreds of us have rented our homes for movie and TV shoots. Cha-ching.

74. Atlanta Streets Alive. The occasional street-closure sensation (with attendance routinely north of 120,000) illustrates a dream scenario, in terms of biking/pedestrian infrastructure and how cities of the future could yield to people over automobiles.

75. Inspiring architecture—seriously. In a few too-rare cases, large-scale design is getting quite interesting. Find several forthcoming examples on Howell Mill Road alone. And approach the Jenga-d facade of Midtown’s new lilli tower from any angle at twilight.

76. The Beltline’s Northside Trail. It’s a tucked-away, leafy, unsung jewel—with a rail bridge underpass that could stand as a top Beltline highlight forever.

77. Relaxed ganja laws in the City of Atlanta. Anyone caught with a bag of pot in the city can face—worst case—a $75 fine now. But even that’s left to the officer’s discretion. And judging by the pungent wafts from innumerable cars and so many porches, the memo on that was widely read among intowners.

78. The Goat Farm! Westside ruins turned artist hive. Now don’t let redevelopment gut its inimitable soul!

79. Where the expressions “Y’all!” and “Yo!” coexist harmoniously—and sometimes come from the same mouth.

80. Inman Park Festival. A late-April tradition for almost half a century, this fest is Atlanta’s greatest neighborhood showcase. It’s proof that even prestigious places need not take themselves too seriously.

81. These directions make sense in Atlanta-ese: “Head up the Connector, around the Grady Curve, beyond the Brookwood Split, past Spaghetti Junction, barely OTP, and then…”

82. Record shops keep it spinning. From the hippest gritty neighborhoods to the far-flung ’burbs, ATL vinyl is alive and well.

83. The original Lantern Parade. A luminous Atlanta Beltline tradition—now 70,000 strong—unlike any other.

84. Moonlight drives. The city’s nonsensical roadway design actually makes for more interesting (if impractical) drives, once you know where the hell you’re going. For a test run, take Ponce from the Majestic Diner to Decatur, late at night, windows down.

85. Because the Atlanta Hawks stayed put, right in the city’s heart. And now they’re trending like the team of the future.

86. Ansley Park. With its dizzying array of residential masterworks and unique country-club-under-skyscrapers vibe, this is aspirational living done right. Leafy and hilly at every turn, the neighborhood’s bounty of walkable green space options is almost unfair.

87. Those wondrous, weird accumulations of snow. About six times per decade, there’s a legit, if short-lived, snowfall. Added bonus: The city’s streets and parks are perfectly angled for sledding, for those rare Atlantans who actually own sleds or don’t mind embarrassing themselves on greased cookie sheets.

88. Midtown’s unyielding boom. Crane-watching (and counting) has become a pastime in Midtown. It’s the epicenter of intown’s metamorphosis, where soul-sucking surface parking lots go to die.

Curbed Atlanta

Midtown in summertime, as seen over Piedmont Park.

89. The “Atlanta’s Population Now” sign on Peachtree Road. Long a source of pride and bewilderment for this once modestly sized Southern town, the electronic metro population counter in front of the Darlington Apartments is climbing ever closer to 7 million. Fun fact: It was installed by a young billboard mogul named Ted Turner in the 1960s, when the metro’s population was about 1.1 million.

90. The potential of South Downtown. For far too long, Atlanta’s oldest, most captivatingly vintage streets have been forsaken by most investors, residents, visitors, and anyone else not headed to Magic City, a Falcons game, or the Gold Dome. Whether the trifecta of ambitious plans for the Gulch, Underground Atlanta, and Newport’s extensive portfolio can spring the district to greatness remains to be seen.

91. Castleberry Hill. Atlanta’s epicenter of authentic loft living and bohemian art galleries is also cool enough for a 2 Chainz restaurant.

92. The food. It ain’t all pulled pork, buttermilk chicken, and Frosty Oranges ’round here anymore. From Buford Highway’s international fare to Decatur’s award-winning menus and classic eateries like Busy Bee Cafe, you could live in Atlanta a decade and not sample all its eclectic deliciousness. “This year cemented the Capital City of the South’s status as a culinary force,” wrote Zagat in 2017, declaring the ATL the nation’s ninth “most exciting” food city.

93. Pre-dogwood hoopla. A sunny March weekend in Piedmont Park is like a city festival organized by the citizenry, with plenty of flying frisbees and open-container good vibes.

94. Palm trees. So what if they’re not native to Atlanta? Neither are you (probably). Some varieties really thrive here, punctuating front yards and restaurant landscapes in these subtropical climes.

95. The Fabulous Fox. It’s the site of Prince’s final concert and, when the wrecking ball loomed, legendary 1970s preservation efforts led by bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd. The glittering Fox Theatre is an Atlanta showplace like no other.

96. Viewrific, Finale. Southbound on Peachtree Road, just past Jesus Junction, that downhill vantage point captures something like a scene from the movie Metropolis, only framed by towering pines.

97. Pollen preparedness. A real downside of Atlanta’s otherwise glorious, floral springs are the swirling particles so thick they turn black cars yellow. Or streets into yellow-tinged rivers when it rains. Luckily, ATLiens aren’t fazed, popping non-drowsy Claritin, minding pollen counts on the news, or—in some cases—strapping on SARS-style masks.

98. Local beer. Suddenly, it’s everywhere! A hundred varieties not named SweetWater.

99. That being said… a frosty glass, a SweetWater 420 on draft, a Saturday afternoon in May, counting passersby from a lively patio bar, and somebody, somewhere, just started strumming an acoustic guitar.

100. We’re not “Marthasville,” thank God. (One of this settlement’s original names.)

101. Still welcoming after all these damn carpetbaggers.

source https://atlanta.curbed.com/2019/5/29/18629884/reasons-to-love-atlanta

#OliverAtlanta

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dallaswyst463-blog · 4 years

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History of Cincinnati

Background of Cincinnati, Ohio

Cincinnati has numerous monikers, like Cincy, "The town of 7 Hills," "The Queen City," "The Blue Chip City," "The Queen of your West," and "The Queen in the West," These are definitely all the more related with specialist, scholarly, and advertising and marketing references to the city, such as eatery names, one example is, Blue Chip Cookies, and so are not typically employed by area persons in easygoing dialogue. The exemplary moniker "Ruler Town" is taken from an 1819 paper article observed because of the Church of Ouzo and affirmed via the Cincinnati Public Library and "The City of 7 Hills" is yet another identify for town.

In 1788, the town was positioned within the northern facet with the conjunction in the Licking and Ohio streams. Cincinnati is a unique city during the U.S. province of Ohio and is particularly the executive seat of Hamilton County. It is the third-largest town in Ohio and 65th in America. Its metropolitan area will be the quickest developing economic electrical power from the Midwestern Usa dependent on the increment of economic produce, and it's the 28th-best urban measurable territory from the U.S. Cincinnati is Also inside a large portion of working day's travel of 60% of America masses.

By 1788 The main surveyor, John Filson, named it "Losantiville." In almost any scenario, Cincinnati begun when Colonel Robert Patterson, Mathias Denman, and Israel Ludlow arrived in a place in the northern lender of Ohio and chose to settle there. In 1790, Arthur St. Clair, the legislative head from the Northwest Territory, improved the identify on the settlement to "Cincinnati" outside of appreciation for the Culture from the Cincinnati, produced up of War veterans, of which he was a Component of.

The presentation of steamboats on the Ohio River in 1811 opened up town's exchange to progressively swift transporting, and the town build enterprise ties with other towns. Cincinnati was fused like a town on March one, 1819. Exporting pork goods and feed, it became a focal point of pork planning in the district.

From 1810 to 1830 its populace Just about tripled. Completion with the Canals Miami and Erie in 1827 to Middletown, Ohio further more invigorated businesses, and executives attempted to obtain additional individuals to fill positions. The town had a work deficiency until enormous floods of motion by foreigners from the late 1840s. Improvement of your Canals began on July 21, 1825, when it absolutely was referred to as the Miami Canal, identified with its beginning at The good Miami River. The central Section of the trench was opened for business enterprise in 1827. Amid this time of fast improvement and noteworthy high quality, inhabitants of Cincinnati commenced alluding to town as being the Queen Metropolis.

Development started out in advance of long, to interface Cincinnati While using the Mad River and Lake Erie Railroad, and give entry to the ports in the Sandusky Bay on Lake Erie.

Amid the slave-owning time period somewhere in the selection of 1810 and 1863, Cincinnati went about as being a "Bordertown". Its space made it a apparent area for captives to acquire far from the slave-possessing south. A lot of conspicuous abolitionists Also considered Cincinnati their home amid this period, and created it a mainstream end to the Underground Railroad.

Common neighbourhoods in Cincinnati-

Northside (formerly Cumminsville)

Avondale

Bond Hill

California

Camp Washington

Carthage

Clifton

CUF

Clifton Heights

University Heights

Fairview

College Hill

Columbia-Tusculum

Corryville

Covedale

Downtown Cincinnati

The Banks

East End

Eastgate

East Price Hill

East Walnut Hills

East Westwood

English Woods

Evanston

Fay Apartments

Hartwell

The Heights

Hyde Park

Kennedy Heights

Linwood

Lower Price Hill

Madisonville

Millvale

Mount Adams

Mount Airy

Mount Auburn

Prospect Hill

Mount Lookout

Mount Washington

North Avondale

North Fairmount

Northside (formerly Cumminsville)

Oakley

Over-the-Rhine

Camp Washington

Paddock Hills

Pendleton

Pleasant Ridge

Queensgate

Riverside

Roselawn

Sayler Park

Sedamsville

South Cumminsville

South Fairmount

Spring Grove Village (formerly Winton Place)

Walnut Hills

West End

Price Hill

Westwood

Winton Hills

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biofunmy · 5 years

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Leonia, N.J.: A Suburb of Artists, in Easy Reach of Manhattan

When Dan Pacek bought a house in Leonia, N.J., in 2002, the seller boasted that the borough, just over a mile from the George Washington Bridge, had “more oboists per capita” than anywhere else.

Mr. Pacek, 57, an architectural designer and vice president of Leonia Arts, a nonprofit group that promotes the borough’s creative community, sized up that claim as soon as he met the neighbors: “There were three oboists between my house and the corner,” he said.

Snug and hilly, Leonia sprouted a vibrant artists’ colony in the early 20th century, as painters and illustrators set up studios in barns and attics. Performers and academics like the actor Alan Alda and the physicist Enrico Fermi followed, drawn by the pretty surroundings within easy reach of Manhattan theaters and Columbia University.

For Amy Zoloto, 47, a clarinetist with the New York Philharmonic, and Lawrence Rock, 66, the Philharmonic’s audio director, the Bergen County borough of 9,200 was a logical destination. Several musician friends already lived there.

Two years ago, the couple paid $645,000 for a three-bedroom, Craftsman-style house built in 1906 that just needed the addition of central air. Ms. Zoloto now practices without riling the neighbors, which was a problem at their old apartment in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx. And as the mother of a first-grader, she appreciates Leonia’s supportive atmosphere.

“For someone in the arts with a wacky schedule,” she said, “there’s always somebody to watch your kids.”

Moreover, the nine-mile drive to Lincoln Center — which Ms. Zoloto and her clarinet frequently make at off hours — usually takes less than 40 minutes, though she always gives herself a cushion.

Leonians who rely on the George Washington Bridge and narrow Fort Lee Road, which leads to it, know to factor in enough time. Traffic is a given in and around the town, which in 2018 tried banning outside motorists from using its side streets as a shortcut to the bridge.

“You have the best of all worlds in Leonia, but traffic is the price to pay,” said Helen Saitta, a borough native and an agent with Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty in Alpine, N.J. Many buyers choose the low-rise suburb, she noted, because New York City is so near.

Joanne Terrell, a lawyer, and Allen Terrell, a contemporary artist and curatorial consultant, came from a place with real congestion: Los Angeles. After Ms. Terrell accepted a job in Midtown Manhattan in 2016, the couple, now both 48, made a wish list: highly rated schools for their two daughters, a commute of under an hour for Ms. Terrell, walkability and ethnic diversity. Mile-and-half-square Leonia, which has ample bus service and sizable Asian and Hispanic populations, checked those boxes for the Terrells, who are Korean-American.

Their century-old, five-bedroom, center-hall colonial cost $815,000 and offered a bonus: a second floor in the detached garage, ideal for Mr. Terrell’s work space. When he wants to escape the studio, he heads to the county park on Leonia’s western border and paddles his kayak in Overpeck Creek, just as he did in the Pacific.

“That kind of sealed the deal,” he said of his new town.

What You’ll Find

Interstate 95 and Route 46 create a loop around Leonia, and therein lies a problem: Tie-ups send some motorists off the highway in search of local access to the world’s busiest crossing.

170 PROSPECT STREET | A five-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bathroom house, built in the 1880s on 0.34 acres, listed for $848,000. 201-768-9300CreditTony Cenicola/The New York Times

The borough’s solution — closing off dozens of side streets to nonresident vehicles during peak commuting hours — sparked legal challenges. For now, signs declaring the restriction are covered in black plastic, and the matter remains in the courts.

But Mayor Judah Zeigler reports progress: The navigation apps responsible for directing motorists through town have removed the shortcuts.

Noting that 12,000 vehicles might enter Leonia on the worst commuting day — triple the usual number — Mr. Zeigler said the borough’s intention was not to ban outside vehicles entirely, but to keep them on major arteries like Fort Lee Road.

Bridge traffic notwithstanding, Leonia is charming and unhurried. Downtown, centered on a five-block stretch of Broad Avenue, has cafes, a chock-a-block hardware store, a Korean grocery, a dozen hair and nail businesses, and a cow sculpture grazing near the squat post office.

161 OAKDENE AVENUE | A four-bedroom, two-bathroom house, built in 1920 on 0.23 acres, listed for $645,900. 201-833-9300CreditTony Cenicola/The New York Times

Houses are eclectic in style and date mostly to the early 1900s, with condominiums and apartments scattered about. Up in what locals call “the hills,” on a former golf course, is a neighborhood of 1980s homes on generous lots.

While its immediate neighbors allow high-density residential development — including towers to the east in Fort Lee and boxy duplexes to the south in Palisades Park — Leonia guards its small-town ambience.

“We are protective of our zoning,” Mr. Zeigler said. “Other communities have built up and developed nearly every inch of available space. We haven’t.”

The borough, however, is considering high-density apartments as part of a plan to redevelop Willow Tree Road, a remote office corridor next to Overpeck County Park. Mr. Zeigler said the redevelopment would help ease homeowners’ property-tax burden.

130 RELDYES AVENUE | A four-bedroom, one-bathroom house, built in 1955 on 0.15 acres, listed for $550,000. 201-482-8848CreditTony Cenicola/The New York Times

What You’ll Pay

An older single-family house needing work might be found in the $300,000s, but generally prices start in the mid-$400,000s, said Rosemarie Bracco, the broker-owner of McAlear Cavalier Realtors, in Leonia. Buyers pay more to live in “the hills,” where homes start in the low $700,000s, she said.

During the 12 months ending March 31, 83 single-family houses sold at a median price of $570,000, compared with $528,750 in the same period a year earlier, according to the New Jersey Multiple Listing Service.

On April 25, the service showed 27 single-family houses priced from $324,995 to $848,000, and two $1 million-plus colonials that a builder plans to construct on a large subdivided lot. Listed near the median, at $565,000, was a three-bedroom, two-bathroom, circa-1925, brick-and-clapboard colonial on Glenwood Avenue, with property taxes of $11,077.

The Vibe

No one starves for culture in Leonia. The 100-year-old Players Guild of Leonia mounts theatrical productions at the Civil War Drill Hall, a restored armory. The Leonia Chamber Musicians give concerts at churches. The library holds open-mic nights. And there is a sculpture park downtown.

Mr. Terrell, the West Coast transplant, finds that the “liberal and artistic attitude” makes for conviviality. “I thought L.A. was sociable,” he said. “But the hospitality here is incredible. We went to six house parties in December alone.”

House parties may be the only place in town to get a drink. Leonia has no bars, and none of its handful of restaurants — Italian and Asian mostly — have a liquor license, though customers can bring wine.

The Schools

The 1,900-student public school district, which also serves seventh- through 12th-graders from nearby Edgewater, has one elementary school, one middle school for sixth through eighth grade, and one high school. Enrollment is 39 percent Asian, 29 percent white, 23 percent Hispanic and 4 percent African-American.

Leonia High School offers academies in science, business and marketing, hospitality and culinary arts, and the humanities, and is slated to introduce academies in the performing and visual arts this fall. “Some of the world’s best musicians live in Leonia,” said Edward Bertolini, the superintendent of schools. “And we want them to be part of the program.”

In 2017-18, average SAT scores were 587 in reading and writing, and 599 in math, versus 542 and 543 statewide.

The Commute

Those who prefer not drive to Manhattan take the bus. New Jersey Transit’s No. 166 runs on Broad Avenue, and Rockland Coaches buses travel on parallel Grand Avenue. Getting to the Port Authority terminal takes 25 to 45 minutes. Fares are $4.50 one way or $148 monthly on New Jersey Transit, and $5.45 one way or $89.70 for 20 rides on Rockland Coaches.

Additionally, Leonia commuters can take a short ride on New Jersey Transit’s No. 182 bus to the George Washington Bridge Bus Station, in Washington Heights, and catch the A train there. The bus fare is $3.50 one way or $107 monthly.

The History

George Washington led his troops through what is now Leonia on Nov. 20, 1776, in retreat from the British. The name “Leonia” was chosen around 1865 for the train station, in a nod to Washington’s second-in-command, Gen. Charles Lee, the namesake of Fort Lee.

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topmixtrends · 6 years

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Editor’s note: Naomi Hirahara has been a pillar of the mystery community since she published her first Mas Arai novel in 2004. To commemorate her final Mas novel, I asked Mike Sonksen, a.k.a. Mike the Poet, bard and historian of contemporary Los Angeles, to go on a walk with Naomi and write a profile that would do her justice. It was a huge task, but I believe he succeeded.

NAOMI HIRAHARA IS one of the most prolific Los Angeles writers of the last few decades. Best known for her Edgar Award–winning seven-book Mas Arai crime novel series, she has also authored several nonfiction titles on Southern California Japanese-American history. Her newest Mas Arai mystery title and the final one of the series, Hiroshima Boy, was just published by Prospect Park Books in March 2018, and in April her latest nonfiction title, Life After Manzanar, was published by Heyday.

On a cold March day just after the rain, Hirahara took me on a walking and driving tour of Little Tokyo and Boyle Heights spotlighting seven sites featured in her Mas Arai books. What’s more is that she read specific passages from her work pertaining directly to every site we visited. This essay looks back at the entire Mas Arai series and highlights how her many nonfiction projects inform her fiction.

Hirahara is in many ways a one-woman Japanese-American history project. Her nonfiction books have tackled seminal Japanese-American history topics like Terminal Island, the flower industry, Japanese-American gardeners, the Japanese-American concentration camps, and survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “I need to do both fiction and nonfiction,” Hirahara says. “They feed each other.”

In many ways, Hirahara’s process is like that of Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club and several other novels. In his book of essays, Stranger Than Fiction, he describes the nonfiction he writes between novels. “In my own cycle,” he writes, “it goes: Fact. Fiction. Fact. Fiction.” Hirahara’s bibliography shows a similar trajectory, alternating publications of fiction and nonfiction. Her historical projects have given her hundreds of pages of material for her fiction. She pulls the nonfiction narrative out and reconstructs it into fiction because “it is not my story to tell with real names.” Furthermore, she says, “in fiction you have more freedom to tell secrets.” Her combined fiction and nonfiction illuminate the Japanese-American experience not only in Southern California but in the United States at large.

The Pasadena-born Japanese-American poet Amy Uyematsu has known Hirahara for over two decades. Uyematsu says:

Naomi Hirahara is one of our most gifted and passionate Japanese American writers — whether she’s telling the stories of Issei and Nisei on Terminal Island or documenting the histories of the Japanese-American gardeners, farmers, and nurserymen of Southern California. In her Mas Arai mystery series, I love how skillfully she weaves Japanese-American culture and community into her plots; by the end of the novel, the reader finds out “who-done-it” along with an insider’s view of everything from baseball to strawberry farmers, spam musubi, a snakeskin shamisen, and more.

Uyematsu also notes that Hiroshima Boy “will be especially poignant because Naomi’s own father was a Hiroshima survivor.” This makes sense because her protagonist Mas Arai is partially based on her father. Masao Arai, better known as Mas for short, is a lovable curmudgeon, a Japanese-American gardener who was born in the United States on the eve of the Depression, grew up in Japan, survived the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, and then moved back to America in 1947. Mas is not a carbon copy of her father, but there are several similarities. “The personal history is the same,” she says, “although my father was much more in tune with his emotions. He was emotionally very intelligent; I learned a lot from him.”

Little Tokyo’s Laureate

This essay will focus primarily on Hirahara’s Mas Arai mystery series, but excerpts from all her titles, both fiction and nonfiction, go a long way toward breaking down history, geography, and culture for Japanese Americans, Angelenos, Californians, and beyond. The Pasadena-born Japanese-American scribe began as a reporter in the 1980s at the Little Tokyo newspaper the Rafu Shimpo and was later promoted to head editor of the paper for six years in the 1990s.

Her training as a journalist exposed her to many incredible stories that began to fuel her interest in writing fiction. Hirahara not only weaves Japanese-American history into her novels, but she also interjects ample Los Angeles neighborhood history and culture.

Like earlier storied Angeleno fiction writers such as Raymond Chandler and Chester Himes and, more recently, Walter Mosley, Gary Phillips, and Nina Revoyr, Hirahara maps the social relationships of each neighborhood the protagonist passes through. Essentially every time Mas Arai travels to a different neighborhood, a few historical facts and elements about the area will be woven within the text. For example, in Sayonara Slam, Hirahara writes: “Montebello used to be a flower town; it even had a generic flower featured on banners drooping from light poles on its main streets.”

The wide-ranging insight dropped by Hirahara demonstrates what an expert she is on Southern California’s geography, history, and culture. Another example, from Sayonara Slam exclaims:

Mas was in a sense a Valley man, but his valley was the San Gabriel one, the valley held in by purple-tipped mountains. Old money — grand estates and libraries — had first attracted Japanese gardeners, domestics, and laundries to this valley, but now the area was a magnet for new Asian immigrants, not from Japan but from China, Taiwan, and Korea.

While most of the books are about somewhere around Los Angeles, like Pasadena, the South Bay, San Gabriel Valley, West Los Angeles, or the Crenshaw District, there are sections of a few of the books in Hiroshima, New York City, San Diego, and Watsonville.

Hirahara is so prolific that she does not even know how many books she’s written. According to the list, near the front of her latest book, the number is somewhere around 15, 10 fiction and five nonfiction. A graduate of South Pasadena High School and then Stanford, she’s been freelancing since 1997. Many of the nonfiction titles she has completed are history projects for organizations like the Japanese American National Museum, the Southern California Gardeners’ Federation, and the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center (JACCC), among others. She is so steeped in the culture, that her process feeds itself and sustains her creativity. Like many writers, she is a perfectionist. Her first novel and the first book of the Mas Arai series, Summer of the Big Bachi, was published in 2004. “It took me 15 years to write the first one,” she says.

A week after our all-day city excursion, I went to Hirahara’s book launch for Hiroshima Boy at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena. The performance area of the bookstore was packed, standing-room only, with well over 100 people in attendance. She read excerpts from the new book and reflected on the seven-book series. The audience included a core group of fans that were devoted followers of Hirahara and Mas Arai. Some of the questions during the Q-and-A session demonstrated her readers’ intimate knowledge of the series and their fervor for her work.

Walking around Little Tokyo with Hirahara means stopping every half block or so to talk with other pedestrians because she is constantly running into old friends and local associates. We started the walk at the JACCC along San Pedro between 2nd and 3rd.

James Irvine Garden

Immediately after meeting up we walked down a set of stairs to the James Irvine Garden on the eastern edge of the JACCC site. The hidden Japanese garden with a koi pond and exquisite landscaping is a location most Angelenos are unaware of; even many who visit Little Tokyo frequently are not aware that a world-class Japanese garden exists within the dense blocks of concrete.

Featured as a wedding location in Blood Hina, the fourth book in the series, Hirahara read the following passage while we were there:

The wedding rehearsal was a disaster from the very start. Spoon showed up forty-five minutes late, saying her youngest daughter had taken her car without telling her, so she had to wait for another daughter to pick her up. All the grandchildren, meanwhile, had arrived, pulling at mondo grasses, terrorizing the koi, running through the bamboo, and hopping on the worn bridge.

Looking around at the bamboo and the calm koi pond after Hirahara read that scene, it was easy to laugh because the garden’s tranquil setting epitomizes a Zen spirit in complete opposition to the chaos she described in the passage. Hirahara also told me the garden’s three-part watercourse represents three generations of Japanese-American gardeners and the three generations of Japanese Americans that have called Southern California home.

The next few sentences following the above quote led to the next location Hirahara walked us over to. “Mas could just imagine,” Hirahara writes,

the reaction of his fellow gardeners who tended the Japanese garden in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo for close to nothing. The Gardeners’ Federation was big on “volunteer” — but Mas didn’t believe in it, because you usually ended up losing more than you put in. And for what? A pat on the back and maybe a photo in the federation’s newsletter. Mas preferred that his charity be less visible, if visible at all.

Southern California Gardeners’ Federation

Mas’s stoic and laconic nature is more about action than words. Before talking about the Southern California Gardeners’ Federation, it’s important to address Mas’s disposition. Gasa-Gasa Girl, the second book of the Mas Arai series, explains that he is a “Kibei — ‘ki’ meaning ‘return,’ ‘bei’ referring to America.” Kibei, she writes, is “a word made up by Japanese Americans to explain their limbo. So, while America was actually home for the Kibei, many of them weren’t quite comfortable with English; on the other hand, they weren’t that comfortable speaking Japanese, either.” The stoic essence of Mas Arai provides a perfect lens to view Japanese-American Los Angeles and the social changes occurring in the city during the early 21st century.

The second stop on our walking tour with Hirahara was the Southern California Gardeners’ Federation because they have been an important institution in the Japanese-American community, and because the federation has been mentioned in a few books of the Mas Arai series. The federation is a small building located a block and a half south of JACCC on San Pedro on the southwest edge of Little Tokyo. It is housed in the liminal area between the Toy District and Little Tokyo, and some have called this block “Skid Rowkyo.” On our approach to their tucked away office we sidestepped several tents and an encampment of homeless on the sidewalk along the west side of San Pedro Street.

Originally founded in 1955, the Southern California Gardeners’ Federation has been a critical organization for the Japanese-American community. Once inside their building, Hirahara showed me a book she edited for their 45th anniversary in 2000 titled Green Makers: Japanese American Gardeners in Southern California. After seeing the exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum a decade ago about the historic role of Japanese-American gardeners in the development of Southern California’s landscape, this book caught my eye. I ended up purchasing it on the spot. The fascinating book includes text printed in both English and Japanese side by side.

The book’s introduction, authored by the Publication Committee, asks:

Why did so many Japanese Americans — reportedly up to 8,000 in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s — enter the field of gardening? Why did some college graduates choose this grueling work, especially during the 100-plus degree summers, before and after World War II? Who are these men and women? And how were they able to make a desert green for the next generation?

The same introduction also states:

But there is more to the story: these same individuals were also the economic backbone of a whole ethnic community. They created community-based credit unions, cultural centers, and Japanese-language schools. Through their efforts, their children were able to gain college degrees and pursue professional careers.

The essays, photographs, timelines, glossary, and excerpts of poetry in Green Makers spotlights the three generations of Japanese-American gardeners along with profiling the early gardening districts: Hollywood, Sawtelle (West Los Angeles), and Uptown (where Koreatown is now).

Uptown is where Mas’s second wife Genesse lives when he meets her in the second half of the series. Hirahara references St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, a well-known house of worship just north of Olympic Boulevard on Mariposa. St. Mary’s has been an iconic church for the Japanese-American community that lived in the Uptown area for over three generations. A passage in Green Makers quotes an oral history interview with the deceased Father John Yamazaki explaining the intricate stained-glass window at St. Mary’s that paid tribute to local Japanese Americans.

The excerpt states:

[T]he flowers in the lower left-hand panel commemorates those who worked in the flower market. The fish marks the achievement of fishermen, specifically those of Tottori Prefecture in Japan. The horn of plenty represents the produce market, where many Japanese American labored. Finally, in the lower right-hand panel we have a push mower, symbolizing the work of Japanese immigrant gardeners. The stained-glass window is believed to be the only one on the United States to feature a lawnmower.

I went by St. Mary’s recently and though the congregation is no longer Japanese-American, the stained-glass window with the lawnmower, flower, and fish remains intact and the Los Angeles Zen Center is a block north. A few of the old craftsmen bungalows in the surrounding streets still have Banzai trees and emanate a Japanese influence.

Looking at her work as a whole, it’s obvious how Hirahara’s years of historical research feed her fiction. She uses historical data to create compelling narratives and educate her readers. Mas Arai’s occupation as a gardener is a big part of his genius, and it makes him an iconic protagonist. In Summer of the Big Bachi, Hirahara writes:

The thing about gardening was that you had plenty of time to think. Mas figured that’s why so many gardeners turned out to be gamblers, philosophers, or just plain crazy. The younger ones who dropped out said that the work was just too darn hard on their bodies, but Mas knew better. They didn’t know how to fill their heads.

Mas is an occasional gambler and humble philosopher. He does not brag or show off with his words, but he is always quietly surveying the situation and mindfully assessing what’s really going on. He is a street philosopher who knows his own strengths and weaknesses. His garage is his sanctuary. “It was musty with the smells of grease, oil, and rusty metal,” Hirahara writes in Summer of the Big Bachi. “While surgeons had their operating tables, Mas had his own version, crowded with glass jars of nails, screws, and even fishhooks.” After so many years as a gardener, father, and husband, Mas has his perspective and belief system firmly in place.

In the next paragraph, Hirahara reveals that the garage is where he

prayed for the first and last time, when Chizuko had had another relapse of stomach cancer, There, in between his broken-down lawn mower and his oily pliers, he had prayed: “God, Kamisama, I know that I’m a good-for nutin’. But save my wife. Not for me. She needsu to enjoy. Enjoy life. Neva gotsu the chance.” But God didn’t answer his prayers. And from that point on, Mas swore that he would never make a fool of himself again. His heart would be closed to both religion and doctors.

And though this quote addresses his lack of faith, there is an inherent Zen spirituality in Mas’s straightforward honesty and dependability. This simplicity and reliability is another reason Mas is such a lovable character.

The Koyasan Buddhist Temple

After visiting the Japanese Gardeners’ Federation, Hirahara walked us north up San Pedro two blocks to First Street. Walking east a half block on First, Hirahara walked us past the Miyako Hotel where the character Yuki Kimura stayed in Sayonara Slam. Kimura is a Japanese reporter from the Nippon Series and he works closely with Arai in two of the books. Just a few feet beyond the hotel, Hirahara walked us down a small alley to a small Buddhist Temple that is easy to miss if you don’t know where to go. The Koyasan Buddhist Temple is a small temple tucked between First and Second Street and only accessible from the alley on the side south of First Street. Koyasan is one of the best-known Buddhist temples in Southern California, a place with a long, storied history.

Originally established in Los Angeles in 1912, the current location is their third site and was built in 1940, just before the start of World War II. In 1989, then–Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley brought over the Hiroshima Peace Flame from Japan to Koyasan. Hirahara told me that it is an eternal flame and Koyasan was chosen as the keeper of the Hiroshima Peace Flame for their long and deep connection to the Japanese community in Los Angeles. Within the narrative of Sayonara Slam, Mas and Yuki Kimura enter the temple after leaving Kimura’s adjacent hotel room and along the way, Mas tells Kimura that the Hiroshima Peace Flame is inside.

Yuki put his hands together and bowed toward the light. This moment of reverence both touched and surprised Mas. The boy then stepped back and waited, as if he expected Mas to do the same. But Mas had experienced the flames of the Bomb firsthand. He felt no need to bow to it now.

The Daimaru Hotel

Next, we crossed over to the north side of First Street to go up into the Daimaru Hotel. This small hotel is another location that could be easily missed if you are not looking closely. Lodged between the 10-plus eateries along North First Street between San Pedro and Central, you enter the hotel from a small staircase off the street. After climbing up to the second floor, you find an office and small rooms stretching down the halls and up the next three floors. It is similar to one of the old residential hotels, like a Single Room Occupancy from the era of John Fante and Charles Bukowski. There are two other similar small hotels on the same block above other eateries.

The Daimaru Hotel holds 50 small rooms in the three floors. Along First Street, there is a timeline in front of each address from Central to San Pedro that tells what each site was over the years. This timeline is better known as “Omoide Sho-Tokyo,” which translates into “Memories of Little Tokyo.” Created as a public art project by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and Sonya Ishii in 1996, the entire block is a national historic landmark. This timeline according to Yosuke Kitazawa at KCET, “traces the history and memories of the neighborhood with a timeline of landmark events and businesses embedded on the sidewalk. Juxtaposed with the historic yet still-thriving surroundings, it provides a fascinating glimpse into the past, while planted firmly in the present.” Commemorating events like the Japanese internments camps and Little Tokyo’s temporary status as an African-American neighborhood called “Bronzeville,” the Omoide Timeline is a fitting tribute to one of the most historic blocks in all Southern California.

In front of the Daimaru, the timeline reads “Union Hotel, 1914.” In Summer of the Big Bachi, Hirahara called this space the Empress Hotel and one of the characters, an elderly Japanese woman, stayed in a room there. “There was nothing imperial about the Empress Hotel,” Hirahara writes. “In fact, they should have called it Hole Hotel or Dirty Inn. Even Mas himself felt apprehensive about entering a place that rented rooms by the week.” The hotel has recently been lightly renovated to have a fancier front door and a few subtle touches, but it is essentially still the same as it’s always been. On the way down from the hotel back onto First Street, Hirahara pointed out where the Far East Café Restaurant was for many years.

The Far East Café

Though the sign still reads Far East Café, this space is now the popular Far Bar. Far East Café closed after the Northridge earthquake in 1994. She explained further that the site was “repaired and reopened in 2006 as Chop Suey Cafe and Lounge. Closed in 2008 and then became Far Bar.”

In any event, Hirahara had eaten at the Far East Café hundreds of times with her family for over four decades. In the same passage where she describes the hotel, she notes that Mas “parked the Honda at the meter in front of the boarded-up chop suey restaurant. How many times had he, Chizuko, and Mari eaten off their thick ceramic plates? The entrance to the Empress Hotel was on the side, up a narrow flight of stairs.”

Earlier in the same book, Hirahara describes Mas Arai and his family’s connection to the now-gone eatery:

When Mari was growing up, they went to only one restaurant: Entoro in Little Tokyo. Entoro was also known as Far East Café, a chop suey house, the old kind before the new Chinese came to town. There, you got greasy homyu, looking like day-old Cream of Wheat in a tiny bowl; almond duck, slippery, fat, and buttery, with a crunch of fried skin and nuts; and real sweet and sour pork, bright, stinking orange like the best high-grade motor oil.

The passage continues that everyone in the Japanese-American community always went here no matter the occasion. “Someone married, go to Far East,” she writes. “Someone dead, go to Far East. It was simple and predictable.”

This section is also an ideal example of the many moments through the series where Mas Arai’s internal dialogue is revealed. In the same above quoted excerpt from Summer of the Big Bachi, Mas pontificates further about contemporary new hip eateries:

Mas hated to eat out, especially now. He didn’t like to talk to strangers. He didn’t like to look at a long list of food items with foreign, fancy names. He didn’t like multiple pieces of silverware, two forks, two spoons. All you needed were a pair of chopsticks and a pair of hands to wrap around a hamburger or a carne asada taco.

Mas Arai’s diction is a patois of colloquial English and select specific Japanese words. The occasional italicized Japanese words sprinkled throughout the text add layers of meaning and character to the narrative. In addition to Mas’s great dialogue throughout the series, his cynical interior monologue and way of thinking make him an endearing character despite his moodiness and reticence. Here’s a great excerpt from Hiroshima Boy demonstrating his thoughts: “Waiting in the line was a hakujin, a white man with unruly hair, a smelly backpack at his side. This could have been his own son-in-law, Lloyd, maybe twenty-five years ago.”

After walking through the hotel and discussing the Far East Café, we then walked east down First Street to head toward the Rafu Shimpo, the Little Tokyo–based newspaper where Hirahara served as an editor. The paper is located at Third and Alameda. While walking south along Central, Hirahara pointed out another example of public art in the neighborhood.

Poets in Little Tokyo

On the southeast corner of Second and Central, there is a gray marble rectangular sculpture surrounded by foliage that could be easily missed. This sculpture is about five feet tall and seven feet wide and it has a poem inscribed on it in both Japanese and English from Bun’ichi Kagawa, a pioneering Japanese poet, essayist, and critic that lived from 1904 to 1981. The poem, “The Sea Shines,” laments Kagawa’s journey to the United States.

Writer Rio Imamura reports in an essay published at DiscoverNikkei.org that Kagawa studied at Stanford in the 1920s and started concentration camp magazines in the Japanese language during World War II. After seeing this sculpture, I discovered that Kagawa was even published widely in venues like Harriet Monroe’s Chicago-based magazine Poetry in the 1930s.

One more fascinating detail revealed on the sculpture is that Kagawa’s poem was translated into English by someone named Masayuki Arai. The translator’s name could be abbreviated as Mas Arai. This specific, unexpected coincidence further cemented the synchronicity of the day. This was the first I had ever heard of Kagawa and the first time I had seen the sculpture, though I have been at that intersection hundreds of times. Hirahara hadn’t noticed this other Mas Arai before.

After seeing the Kagawa sculpture, we also talked about the pioneering Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, father of the famous artist, sculptor, and designer Isamu Noguchi. The younger Noguchi is more internationally known, but his father was the first Japanese poet to be ever published in English in the late 19th century. Isamu Noguchi is famous for furniture design, and he also created the stone sculpture in the courtyard of the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center where we started the tour.

The Rafu Shimpo

Founded in 1903, the Rafu Shimpo is an English-Japanese-language newspaper. This publication is mentioned in almost all the Mas Arai books, but the office is specifically cited in Snakeskin Shamisen. Hirahara began her writing career here in the 1980s after graduating from Stanford. After a few years as a reporter, she became the editor of this Los Angeles institution from 1990 to 1996. The day we visited their office, Hirahara introduced me to their longtime photographer Mario Reyes. Reyes has worked at the paper for over 25 years, and he has also been in two of the books.

In Snakeskin Shamisen, Reyes appears a few times, most prominently taking a group photo in a location soon to be the scene of the book’s first murder. Reyes is described as wearing “a safari vest and red-framed glasses.” In the following paragraph, Hirahara states, “Mas narrowed his eyes. Didn’t look Japanese, but then who said he had to be? Mas remembered that the photographer’s byline in The Rafu Shimpo had a Latino name. They were all touched by Latinos in California and the rest of the Southwest.” Reyes is an award-winning photographer and has taken thousands of published photos over the last three decades, including many in critical Los Angeles moments like the 1992 Rodney King Uprisings and other equally iconic times.

Our final two sites on the tour required we get in the car and drive to Boyle Heights. Hirahara drove us east on First Street. First is a thoroughfare connecting several important Los Angeles microcosms in just a few miles from Historic Filipinotown, Bunker Hill, the Disney Concert Hall, City Hall, Little Tokyo, the Arts District, the Los Angeles River, and Boyle Heights. Before we crossed the river, she pointed out the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple on the northside of First in the area some call the Arts District. This temple is one of the best-known Buddhist houses of worship in Southern California.

In Gasa-Gasa Girl, a sculpture at Nishi Hongwanji is mentioned. Construction on First, east of Alameda, prevented us from visiting the temple, but as we drove past the temple, Hirahara explained how Little Tokyo originally stretched east all the way to the Los Angeles River and west past San Pedro Street and even to the edge of Los Angeles Street. When the Parker Center LAPD headquarters was built in the 1960s, close to 1,000 Little Tokyo Residents were evicted from a few buildings that were demolished for the then-new police building. The rise of the northern section of the Arts District in the last three decades has also been the erasure of the eastern edge of Little Tokyo.

Evergreen Cemetery

After we crossed the Los Angeles River and the First Street Bridge, we continued east on First, passing Mariachi Plaza and headed toward the Evergreen Cemetery. For many years, dating back to the mid-19th century, Evergreen was one of the only places people of color could be buried in Los Angeles County. Located between First Street and Avenida Cesar Chavez and Evergreen Street and Lorena Avenue, there are over 300,000 bodies buried in Evergreen, including thousands of Japanese Americans. Evergreen is also just a few streets west of the boundary of Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles, which is along Indiana Avenue.

Boyle Heights is a district in the City of Los Angeles, and the area called East Los Angeles is actually a section of Unincorporated Los Angeles County, just east of Boyle Heights. As much as everyone conflates Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles, they are not the same thing. There is a similar misunderstanding like this around Watts and Inglewood in South Los Angeles. Only dyed-in-the-wool, old-school Angelenos like Hirahara know these specific designations. Most recently, Evergreen has become known for a paved path around its perimeter where thousands of Eastside Angelenos jog and walk around it.

When we got to Evergreen, we parked and then walked over to the northwest corner of the cemetery where a large monument pays tribute to the Japanese-American soldiers from the 442nd Infantry Regiment in the United States Military who fought in World War II. Hirahara describes this location in Summer of Big Bachi: “A tall monument stood in the back next to a patch of grass. It was skinny and pointed; at the top was a concrete man, helmet on his head, hands at his sides, and a rifle hanging from his shoulder.” There is a plaque with a verse from Dwight Eisenhower.

In the following few paragraphs, Mas Arai is looking for his wife’s tombstone, and he searches for almost 10 minutes to find her grave. Eventually he sees “[a] headstone, short and squat, shaped much like his late wife herself. The letters were filled with dirt, and Mas felt a pang of shame. He should have come earlier, he thought, trying to scrape the letters clean with the edge of a matchbook.”

Hirahara’s description of Evergreen captures the cemetery perfectly. “Beyond the soldiers,” she writes,

were more graves of mothers, daughters, fathers, sons, all Japanese. Beyond that were black families, even a good number dating back more than a hundred years. Some tombstones had oval photos of older black women wearing corsages, and black men in felt hats. There were cement angels looking over the graves of babies, born and dead within the same year. The markers weren’t lined up straight and perfect, like at some of the high-tone cemeteries in the hills. Instead, the ground had shifted, causing some to rise like crooked teeth.

The dry grass is no longer evergreen, either.

By the time we left Evergreen, the sun was setting through the clouds. The mood was solemn, and the verisimilitude of her description was uncanny. Most of the grass was dry and brown, and many of the old tombstones were chipped and did indeed look like crooked teeth. When we got back in her car and drove toward the exit, the front gate was closed. We laughed for a moment before one of the employees came and let us go.

On the drive back to Little Tokyo, Hirahara spoke more about how so much of her research, life experience, and nonfiction work fueled the Mas Arai series and her other fiction. Whether it be mentioning restaurants that she’s eaten at hundreds of times like the Far East Café or her final Mas Arai book taking place in Hiroshima, where her father was on that fateful day in 1945, Hirahara’s fiction is rooted in believability and that stems from her deep knowledge of her subject matter.

After reading all seven of the Mas Arai books, I still cannot pinpoint one being better than the rest. They are all equally compelling with plot twists, unexpected surprises and reversals, and lucid dialogue. At the same time, you can read any one out of the series on its own and it still stands up. She has a way of filling in the details without being repetitive or excessive. One interesting detail she did tell me is that although the entire series is murder mystery or crime fiction, she made each of the seven a different subgenre as a way of keeping it interesting for her as the writer.

The first book of the series, Summer of the Big Bachi, was a crossover of mystery with a literary bent. The second title, Gasa-Gasa Girl, is a smaller world, and the third, Snakeskin Shamisen, is political. Blood Hina is about drug espionage, and Sayonara Slam is international and about baseball. The fifth book, Strawberry Yellow, is a bio-thriller, and the final book of the series, Hiroshima Boy, is an island mystery.

I ended up reading all seven because the series is a true tour de force and Mas Arai is an incredible protagonist. Award-winning L.A. author Nina Revoyr says, “Mas Arai is a wholly original sleuth — reluctant, curmudgeonly, and irresistible.” Like Revoyr and Hirahara’s legion of fans, I found myself not only getting attached to Mas as a character, but even feeling a sadness about the series ending. Some consolation can be provided in that Hirahara will be writing some Mas Arai short stories. She’s not sure chronologically where they will be set in the 15 years of his life she has already composed, but she does plan to write some one-off stories with Mas.

Life after Manzanar

Before finishing this retrospective on Hirahara, a quick word needs to be said about her other new book, Life after Manzanar. Co-authored with Heather C. Lindquist, this nonfiction work examines the “resettlement” of the Japanese Americans who had been detained in the Manzanar concentration camp during World War II. The book mixes both archived oral history and new testimonies to create an illuminating narrative about their lives after the internment camps that is both tragic and triumphant. Multiple generations of voices are included in the text.

One of those voices is poet and activist traci kato-kiriyama. Hirahara published a poem by traci in the book titled “No Redress.” Both of kato-kiriyama’s parents were in the concentration camps in their youth. Her mom, Iku Kato-Kiriyama, became the senior class president at North Torrance High in 1957 and later went on to become an educator in LAUSD for almost 40 years. traci’s father was also in the internment camps as a child and he went on to become a longtime local educator and a member of the district’s school board. Together, her parents co-founded the Japanese American Historical Society of Southern California.

traci grew up making annual pilgrimages to Manzanar with her parents. She tells Hirahara in the book that:

It was on the way to Manzanar, that I vividly remember my parents instructing me to pay attention to the places they were taking me as a form of education. As the years passed and I stepped onto the grounds of Manzanar each year during pilgrimage, I also came to understand the connections we had to other communities — from the indigenous/Native American peoples […] to […] immigrants and migrant workers from Mexico and Central and South America, to the institutional racism and oppression of black folks for the duration of this country.

traci’s poem in the book further explicates her connection to Manzanar, her family’s history with it, and how it connects to the contemporary United States.

kato-kiriyama first met Hirahara in the early 1990s while she was in college. Hirahara published kato-kiriyama’s first poems and essays in the Rafu Shimpo when she served as the editor. After kato-kiriyama graduated from school, she started Tuesday Night Café in 1998, a poetry open mic in Little Tokyo. Two decades later, the event is still going and kato-kiriyama has become a seminal figure in both Little Tokyo and literary Los Angeles.

traci credits Hirahara for being an early mentor:

I wonder if Naomi realizes the kind of impact she has had on community as well as countless writers. She was the editor of the Rafu Shimpo when I was first starting to write, and she gave so many of us a platform to process our ideas and create intergenerational conversation through the publication. She’s like a big sister for whom I carry a lot of gratitude.

Most recently, in late April, the pair appeared together at the Torrance Library for a reading celebrating the book.

Life after Manzanar also covers the journey of many former Manzanar internees, including Jeanne Wakatsuki, who went on to write the 1973 book Farewell to Manzanar, and dozens of others who were there, like Shigetoshi Tateishi, Shinjo Nagatomi, Sangoro Mayeda, Jack Takayanagi, Paul Bannai, and his grandson Sean Miura. There is even coverage of the ongoing court cases that eventually led to surviving internees receiving redress and reparations in 1989. The stories of their lives after Manzanar are equally inspiring and tragic. Moreover, these stories are especially relevant in this moment where immigrant children are being detained in cages at the United States southern border.

It is easy to see how nonfiction projects like Life after Manzanar feed Hirahara’s fiction. In recent years, she has also been selected to curate several Japanese-American historical exhibits in museum sites for the National Park Service, the Manzanar History Association, and, most recently, for the Maritime Museum about the Japanese-American fishing community that was in Terminal Island near San Pedro. These exhibits must be visually engaging, so they feature rare photos and artifacts rather than being too text heavy.

Hirahara is truly prolific. She’s even started another mystery series in 2014 with a female protagonist, Ellie Rush. Two titles have already been published in this series, Grave on Grand Avenue and Murder on Bamboo Lane. Ellie Rush is a young LAPD bicycle cop and aspiring homicide detective. Though Rush is an entirely different character from Mas Arai, she also navigates Los Angeles with the same veracity. The history and geography of Los Angeles are an endless reservoir for Hirahara in both her fiction and nonfiction. Her extensive bibliography covering Southern California puts her in the upper echelon with the best of the best in the pantheon of L.A. letters.

Mike Sonksen, is a third-generation L.A. native whose prose and poetry have been included in programs with the Mayor’s Office, the Los Angeles Public Library’s “Made in LA” series, and Grand Park.

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