Last Friday, I emerged from treatment in a full-blown existential crisis. How have we evolved to a point where we are becoming less human? This is what I asked myself. As I walked north, I ventured into a shop that I love because it always feels like a reenactment of a scene in a 1980s movie, where a man tries to buy something fancy at a snooty uptown shop. He's wearing a suit, and it's his lunch break, and he's about to pick out an apology gift that's all wrong. I get the catalog for this shop in the mail, and knew that they sell eccentric decorative trash cans. In my fantasy of my new apartment, I own the one that's made of linen, with colorful, fluffy polka dots in a color palette that reminds me of the American Girl Magazine. A salesgirl led me to the trash can corner, long walk across kelly green carpet, and then back to the register. Click clack on the keyboard. "Can I charge the Amex on file?" I'd only shopped here twice before. All I had to say was "Yes". Too easy, I thought. Retail from another era. Dangerously outside my tax bracket. With my big blue bag, misshapen by the roundness of the trash can, I made the spontaneous choice to try to dine at a nearby Very Trendy Restaurant. I arrived 15 minutes before opening and read the New Yorker while I waited in line, but when I made it to the front, the snippy hostess refused me the last open bar seat and I made a promise to myself to never participate in this absurd humiliation ritual ever again. As I kept walking, I happened upon Donohue's, a tiny old steakhouse with bright red table cloths. I was seated at the table right in the middle of the restaurant and two minutes later a man with an identical big blue shopping bag sat at the table to my right. He was, indeed, wearing a suit, and he looked guilty of something. I ordered a black coffee, steak, a baked potato and shrimp cocktail and allowed the waiter to bully me into eating broccoli, too. Frantically, I wrote down my most outrageous existential thoughts in my journal, but I kept getting distracted by the number of Belgian Shoes I spotted on the checkered floor. So, this is where they hide? Uptown people, also from another era...cont’d in comments
A rite of passage for a New Yorker in print: visit @casamagazinesnyc to hurriedly flip through the pages, read the article standing up, and then buy a stack for posterity. It never gets old!! Thank you for featuring us, @fthtsi and fabulous guest editor @helloellephanta 💖
Lunch break iron infusion, wondering when I'm going to catch up on all of my neglected work, realizing I won't have time to actually eat lunch before the board meeting I don't want to go to, thinking that maybe it's actually curse to have lots of ideas, maybe a sickness to possess boundless curiosity and desire, plotting the next time I can just lay flat on a patch of grass and bake in the sun, feeling guilty about all of the texts I haven't replied too, fending off resentment towards the inbox full of people who want something from me, dreaming of my new apartment but dreading everything that has to happen first, You Got It by Roy Orbison playing in my head to hype me up, followed by Cannock Chase by Labi Siffre to calm me down. I can see water on the horizon and an easier day coming soon. It'll be a writing desk in a sunny room, eating cherries on a beach, that feeling of a shower before a night with no end. Today all I want to do is take some mushrooms and shop for furniture, but as I sit here with a tube of brown liquid in my arm I imagine it's fuel for the video game that is my life.
Most days I stop for coffee at Fawad's cart on Union Square West before going to the office and somehow he always sees me coming before I see him. My coffee (large, black, no sugar) is ready by the time I join the back of the line, if there is one. He shouts "hey, dear!", I cut to the front, slide him exactly 5 dollars, and asks me if I want the change, even though he knows I'm going to say no. In the spring and again in the fall, when the weather starts to turn, he begins to ask me "hot or iced?" until I change my mind. He knows that once I switch for the season, I don't ever switch back, and then we resume our routine until it's time again to ask the question. Today was the day that I finally answered "iced!", and we laughed about it, and while all of this is totally inconsequential and mundane I'm telling you to remind you that small, consistent interactions are the bedrock of daily life!
This is the tray of beads I picked out at The Bead Merchant in Tulsa, which is my favorite bead store I've ever been to. As I slowly oogled every strand in sight, a woman working on a project at the table told me she was making a new necklace for her pit bull. This was yesterday, and I'd chosen to leave the last day of my conference early and go shopping instead. I'd been walking south down a street that it seems people don't typically walk, but I'm a New Yorker and we'll walk anywhere. I spent hours zig zagging across the giant road to go into shops, and eventually I ended up at a local burger joint where I sat in a red booth and drank a homemade root beer out of a frosted mug as I wrote in my journal. I went back to the hotel to re-group and then headed out to the minor league baseball game I'd been encouraged to attend by a woman named Paula, who I met in a cafe the day before. She told me she sits along the first base line, so that's where I chose my seat. It wasn't until I arrived there that I saw GAME POSTPONED DUE TO EXTREME WEATHER (dramatic wind) on the jumbotron. I shrugged and kept walking until I happened upon a cafe where there was open mic poetry. Two men wearing Cherokee Veteran hats sat amongst teenage punks and everyone snapped after each poem, except for me, because I can't snap my fingers. While I was standing there holding my double espresso, I decided to buy a ticket for whatever show was on at Cain's Ballroom. It didn't matter what it was, I just needed something to do and that was the thing to do. I left the cafe a picked up my physical ticket from the box office and entered the sacred 1930s home of Western Swing. Both artists on the bill could be classified as alt/country, and the crowd was mixed. I stood and tapped my foot somewhere towards the back and enjoyed not knowing what I was watching. Periodically, I moved to a different corner of the ballroom, and in the back right, a random man asked me to hold his beer for a sec while he tried to dance with his friend. When he came back he said "Turns out neither of us know how to not lead" and asked me to dance with him instead. ...cont'd in comments
HEY LOCAVORES! There are whole bunch of new eyes on this page, so allow me to reintroduce myself! I’m Caroline Weaver, an independent retail advocate, career shop girl and voracious New Yorker. Back in 2020, in the throes of running my first shop, I had a thought: “What if there was a directory for ALL of the independent retailers in NYC? Would people be more inclined to patronize them if they didn’t have to do the work to find them?”. And so, in 2022, on the tail of closing my shop, with all the lessons I’d learned in the process, I began walking every neighborhood in NYC, one by one, to catalog their shops. Since then, we’ve launched our online directory, begun publishing our annual guidebook and opened The Locavore Variety Store as an example of what participating in a local circular economy actually looks like. What I didn’t expect was how much traction we’d gain through video content, and what a delight it’d been to earn your trust and to show you so many brilliant little corners of this city. Most of all, my mission is to demonstrate WHY all of this matters, and HOW we as consumers, and business owners, can better insure a bright future for our city’s storefronts.
This summer I’ll finish the last few neighborhoods I have yet to catalog, and together we’ll complete a big audit of the existing listings in our database. This is what I love most about my job: the days where I just get to explore a new neighborhood and meet the people who live there. I feel a childlike sense of wonder, almost like I’m Harriet the Spy, and it really, truly never gets old.
While I’m not a native New Yorker (I’m from Marietta, OH!), I’ve never imagined living anywhere else. I’ve been here for 13 years and live in the East Village with my two brother cats. When I’m not biking around town to visit shops, or working in my own shop, I’m probably at a Mets game, hosting friends for dinner or with my hands in the dirt.
I’ve got a lot of big ideas, and can imagine a world where it’s the norm to prioritize community and culture over corporate homogeneity. Where more of our money goes into the pockets of our actual neighbors and not the wealth-hoarding 1%. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
For several years, I've had my dad's crusty old college baseball jacket in a paper bag in my closet. It was made in the '80s, so the sleeves were a nasty, disintegrating white vinyl that needed to be fully replaced. So, I took it to @evajoanrepair here in NYC, because they're experts in creative tailoring and garment restoration. Together, we reimagined my dad's jacket as something that I'd actually wear: with buttery red leather sleeves, repaired lining and my last name chainstitched in lilac across the back using the same kind of old-school machine that would've been used on it originally. It's a masterpiece! Thank you, @evajoanrepair ❤️
A MOMENT OF NATURE at Parco Querini, a magical park in Vicenza, Italy where wild bunnies roam free amongst turtles, nutria, ducks and roosters.
Please note that at the time of filming, the roosters were hiding behind a pair of arguing Italians on a bench and were therefore omitted from this video.
I took this photo before heading out for a day of roaming around Venice on an off-season weekday. At 8am, I walked across the island to the fish market, and observed everyone on their way to work and school. When I got there, I wrote down names of fish I'd never heard of and watched a sneaky seagull steal one of them. By lunchtime, I'd had an espresso at four different cafes and a nice chat with a group who complimented my jacket. For lunch, I was on a mission to eat as many types of fish as possible at a place I'd heard was good for it (4 fish, another espresso, no English-speaking patrons). All day I'd been on a scavenger hunt for a type of old-school soap I love, and I also found my MOST favorite, rarest Italian toothpaste in the process. Later, I sat by the water for gelato at a place I'd never have found without a local recommendation and when I noticed the spoon was unique, I set off to track it down (successfully) at a restaurant supply store I'd seen earlier. By then, it was time to go back to the letterpress workshop where I'd ordered personalized note cards the day before. On my way, I let myself get lost and found my way back to the hotel just in time to freshen up and head out for a long dinner with a new friend. Travel should be a scavenger hunt, informed by carefully observed clues and a willingness to ask questions, to talk to others. Less planning, more exploring! Put that phone away!!
Backup plan: run away to a climate where I can have a house surrounded by mimosas. That intoxicating scent! That ephemeral, supernatural puff! That yellow, almost neon!
Arm full of tulips from @moonshot_farm , juggling coffee from Fawad’s cart, stuffed tote bags from @garberhardware1884 and @wnyc , winter uniform (hat, big red coat, proper gloves, many layers underneath), boots for stomping through puddles. I’ve been training my whole life to be good at New York Winter!!!
