A return to the rut

This post is dedicated to two special groups of readers:
1. Those people (pity them!) who have never spent time on Hampstead Heath and wonder why I have such a bee in my bonnet about living close by.
2. Those New Yorkers (thumb your teeth at them!) who think London's weather is relentlessly awful.

Today I renewed my commitment to a longstanding tradition. As per the NW5 tradition/ routine, I took a constitutional yomp across Hampstead Heath, with 3 friends and traditional 'what did you do last night' chat. It was a gorgeous, crisp, chilly, sunny day.

See? We do get blue skies here (I shouldn't mention yesterday's wall-to-wall drizzle..)

We headed, without discussion, up Parliament Hill, the natural starting point for any Heath yomp. It was the first time I've walked up there for at least a year. The view which was so familiar - from the many years when I walked up Parliament Hill at least once a week - has changed significantly. 'The Shard' is really shockingly tall! Anyway, that's not news to anyone who lives in London and I was roundly mocked for commenting, so I won't comment further.

It isn't just me who thinks The Shard is ridiculously tall. It's just that everyone else got over it months ago.

Then we struck out, north across the Heath, to the Pergola, which is something of a hidden gem. The pergola is an elevated walkway, essentially an Edwardian folly, in the grounds of Leverhulme House (the Hampstead pile of soap baron, Mr Lever, of Unilever fame, now converted into fancy flats). Even at this time of year, with bare branches and barely a bud in sight, it's a lovely place to walk.

Someone else's pic of the pergola, in summer. I think you get the picture though.

Our meander took us South via the Vale of Health, a cluster of cottages where poor people used to live when Hampstead was a fashionable spa town. And back, along the avenue which cuts East-West across the Heath, to the Dartmouth Park side. Where the tennis courts and good places to eat and drink are.

As often happens when I mooch around NW5 with friends, we bumped into some other friends doing much the same meander. Hot chocolate at Kalendar as the final light faded was the perfect end to the afternoon.

On the home straits, as the sun sets over Hampstead

 
And that pleasant, and rather pedestrian ('scuse the pun) afternoon, is just one of the many reasons I'm so happy to be home. The NW5 comfort bubble is as comfortable and enjoyable as ever.

Coney Island's finest garden

I guess March 2009 was a quiet month for the Parks and Rec garden competition. Still, here it is, Coney Island's best garden. A little round patch of hope and shrubbery in the wasteland between Nathan's and the boardwalk.

About those parks... I was wrong

Another retraction... I'm like the Private Eye of blogs. Well, no-one is suing me, but my conscience is pricking me. This time it's those mean comments I made about scrappy little New York parks.

A recent visit from my favourite little sister re-opened my eyes to the magic of Central Park. We walked from the Natural History Museum on the west side, across to the Met on the east, via the Ramble, the boating lake, and its little cousin the model boat pond. Plus we consumed the best icecream my favourite little sister has ever had - those Van Leeuwen dudes know just what to do with a roasted banana.

We also took in the High Line, of course, and enjoyed cups of tea in both Bryant Park and Madison Square Park. Both of which are charming little city parks (if a little over-run).

The lovely Bryant Park.

But most excitingly for the park lover in me - and thanks entirely to my favourite little sister - I have discovered the joys of the lesser known Riverside Park South. It's a relatively new park, below the Trump Place buildings on the West Side Highway, up in the 60s and 70s.

Until recently my riverside runs only took me as far as 55th Street, at which point crippling pain sent me hobbling back home like a lopsided pixie. Then my favourite little sister, who happens to be a brilliant physiotherapist, told me that my gastrosoleus complex was so tight it was not allowing the old tibialis posterior to function correctly. No wonder it hurt.


God bless the NHS! After a couple of weeks of targeted stretching and strengthening exercises, I have added another couple of miles, or twenty blocks, to my run.


Now I get to enjoy the lovely winding paths, interesting public art, windswept marshes, ghost piers and all round envigorating experience of the Riverside Park South. It has a low profile, quite the opposite of the jam-packed High Line, and I suspect it's a park for locals. The rest of New York is missing out.

And I was wrong: New York City has many excellent parks. Sorry NYC...

Park Life Reconsidered

Maybe I was being a bit churlish, pouring scorn on the scrappity bits of dust New York claims as parks.

I took a long walk yesterday - from Chelsea to Williamsburg, no less. On my way through the West Village, Greenwich, Nolita and Soho, where the grid system breaks down and little triangles emerge between the diagonal roads, I saw lots more of those scrappy/ crappy parks.

This one is called Little Red Square, and is not much bigger than the Rabbit Hutch:

This one is called the Playground of the Americas, which is rather grand considering it consists of a single slide.

Like I said, I'm a spoiled Londoner. Plus I have happy memories of all those beautiful, well managed parks in LA. Sure, you had to pay $15 to park, but they were so well equipped!

Still, this is New York and the standard is different. Rather than deriding these lame efforts - perhaps instead I should applaud the bravery and sheer insouciance of a city that says 'yeah, that's our park, whaddayagonnadoaboudit?'.

These neighbourhood corners are not really parks so much as statements: 'eff you, this city's so great, and central park is so awesome, we don't need anything more than a bench and a tired looking tree on our block'

Or, as the Euro would put it, go big or get out.

Park life

As a Londoner I feel particularly well equipped to comment on parks. London has absolutely nailed it, from the formal gardens of Regent's Park and the contained gorgeousness of St James Park, to rambling Hampstead Heath and the vast frisbee field of Hyde Park. And then there are all those pretty little garden squares, little hankerchiefs of green bordered by grand terraces. Yup, we've got great parks in spades.

You could be forgiven for thinking that New York has just the one park. You know, that big one in the middle.

Central Park is brilliantly conceived and perfectly executed. It's so bold to have carved out this huge block in the middle of Manhattan to be a great big park. On photos like the one above it looks to me like the mansions and towerblocks which hem it in are about to march in and take it over. Fortunately the borders are secure and what goes on inside is protected. Thank goodness, for it is a fabulous park. I love the gently curving paths, the quaint redundant bridges, and the clever zoning - from the shady delights of Strawberry Fields to the softball fields of the Great Lawn.

The only small flaw is the fact that drinking in public is illegal, making civilised picnics with a bottle of rose a subversive act. Londoners would never stand for it. Actually, some New Yorkers don't either. Apparently there is a secret margarita guy who roams Sheeps Meadow surreptitously squeezing lime and serving margaritas to those who dare.

And that's not all. New York has some great supplementary parks too. I like the Hudson River Park which borders the West side of Manhattan. Sure, half of it is a thin path for runners which passes rubbish processing sites and car pounds. But the rest is a lovely chain of riverside plazas, green piers, tennis courts and skate parks. And let's not forget those pretty, European style garden squares of Bryant and Madison Parks. Or the elegant High Line.

Plenty of these parks are dog free, and all are smoke free. Which as someone who doesn't like dog poo or smoke, I appreciate. Also, brilliantly, most of the kids ones have sprinklers - essential in the summer.

So yes, New York's parks are ace.

But... a word of advice. Putting a few railings up and installing a bench does not a park make.

Balsley Park: a case in point. Not every empty square of land merits park status. Look at the size of it:

It's a tenth of a block! There's a CVS two blocks away which is bigger! In any other sane city this would be an ignored scrap of wasteland. Perhaps an impromptu carpark, or a place for a couple of skips (as in dumpsters) to live. But here in New York, people are so pathetically grateful to have somewhere to sit outside their rabbit hutch that they put a fence around it and call it a park.

My advice? Stick to what you're good at New York: the grandiose, ambitious parks. The small friendly stuff, I'm afraid it just isn't you.

The lesser known Sky Line park

The High Line extension opened this week. The High Line was an elevated freight railway, which ran along the piers and warehouses of Chelsea and the West side - right through the middle of buildings to avoid darkening the avenues below. It used to go into the biscuit factory which is now the Chelsea Market, probably delivering butter and sugar and rolling pins, which was surely work of national importance.

After making a final delivery of frozen turkeys in 1980, it fell into disuse. Nature took the railway over and created something much prettier and quieter, but somewhat less useful for butter and sugar deliveries.

In 2009, as the local news anchor put it, in a rather Day Today-esque turn of phrase, 'what was once just the dream of a bunch of activists' became a reality: the High Line Park was opened. Between 21st Street and Gansevoort Street those crazy activists replaced the weeds you see above with pretty grasses and concrete slabs and little water fountains and public art.

It was a cool little park but rather on the short side. You could get from one end to the other in about 10 minutes flat. It was handy for us on our saunter back from the Chelsea Market but that's about it.

Until this week... when the extension opened. It runs past our block now, and all the way up to 30th Street now. I'm not quite sure when we'd ever go to Midtown but just in case... we no longer need to cross a single street to get to 30th Street.

The new bit is really good. It has a big patch of lawn and you get up close to the backs of residential buildings, in a way the first stretch doesn't really do.

Rabbit Hutch Towers is just out of sight on the right of the redbrick building

Also, we now have an icecream van parked right on our block most days. Most convenient.

 

The other, less exciting impact, is the arrival of a flood of tourists. West 23^rd Street was always relatively free of out-of-towners but the High Line attracts them like wasps to orangina. Most of them are probably off to get in the way of actual shoppers by taking photos of fruit at Chelsea Market’s Manhattan Fruit Exchange. Grrr. "Off my land, tourists!"

TLOML and I saw one chump yelling into his mobile, Dom Joly style, ‘I’m in the Skyline Park! No, the Skyline!’

We smirked at each other like the smug New Yorkers we have already become.

Yeah, maybe the onslaught of tourists isn’t such a bad thing. It's always nice to have someone to make you feel superior.