There are places which are a writer’s dream subject. If your reader is unfamiliar with the locale, it makes you look like a brilliant explorer who has uncovered a real gem. And visiting for the sake of a writing assignment is a real perk. The only real difficulty is avoiding the cliches which have been used ad nauseum.
In this case, the place is City Island, Bronx, and the cliches are words and phrases such as “look and feel of a small New England fishing village,” “more like Cape Cod than New York,” “Nantucket,” “less Cape Cod, perhaps, than a tiny, Stephen King-like town on the lonesome Maine coast,” ” a constant reminder that this idyllic spot is not Nantucket but an island in the Bronx,” and “an active fishing village with a 718 area code.”

The beauty of City Island is that it does live up to all the cliches, metaphors, and comparisons. I suggest a visit – you won’t be disappointed. If you don’t have access to a car, it is serviced by public transportation. However, you will need to take both a train and bus to get there.

You are never more than a few blocks from the water. City Island is quite small – at 252 acres, it is only 1/3 the size of Central Park with 4520 residents. It is accessible to the Bronx mainland via the City Island Bridge. As would be expected, everything is defined by the ever present water – fishing, boating, shops with a maritime focus, and the Nautical Museum. We spent a pleasant time with proprietor and long-time resident John at Trader John (upper photo), 239 City Island Avenue, which specializes in new, used, and antique marine and nautical supplies.

Seafood and seafood restaurants are abundant. We chose Tony’s Pier Restaurant at one end of the island (1 City Island Avenue), a fast food-styled place on the water (across the street from Johnny’s Famous Reef Restaurant). We ate our food to the sounds of the ocean and a huge population of seagulls. See my gallery of island photos here.

I find a comfort and restorative experience being at the ocean. Instinctually, we all recognize its constancy and tremendous power – surrender to it and in that surrender, find comfort. Like being in the hands of a vigilant, caring doctor…

The problem is simple – I have spent too much time looking for the Manhattan in Brooklyn. My travels there have focused on neighborhoods such as Park Slope or Brooklyn Heights – historic enclaves with row houses most similar to those in Manhattan.

One will often hear a Brooklynite use the phrase “going into the city,” one of the prime examples of a city which is Manhattan-centric. In many ways, Manhattan does drive the city as an economic engine and is a mecca for culture and the arts. It is the center of the financial world and of many other industries for which New York City is known. However, Manhattan is not the only place on earth, with Brooklyn playing second fiddle – an attitude many Manhattanites share, as I did for most of my life here.

Welcome to Sheepshead Bay, both a neighborhood and a bay separating the mainland of Brooklyn from the peninsula Manhattan Beach (see my previous article here). Sheepshead Bay is named for the sheepshead, an edible fish once found in the bay. Read more about the neighborhood here.

On my recent excursion to the area, I crossed the footbridge (Ocean Beach Bridge) which spans the bay and connects Manhattan Beach to Sheepshead Bay’s commercial strip, Emmons Avenue. It is here that I also found Stella Maris, the last fishing and tackle shop in the area. The bridge is a must do – it affords great vistas of the bay, both neighborhoods, and the maritime activities. See my gallery of photos here.

I think differently now. Brooklyn is steeped in character and history. Brooklyn has its own style and attitude. I am disappointed that I didn’t take better advantage of Brooklyn and really explore it when I was younger and had a few good friends there.
But I am doing makeup work, busy discovering the neighborhoods of Brooklyn and learning things every Brooklynite always knew: Brooklyn is its own world.

This is New York City, not colonial Virginia. I was astounded on my recent excursion to the Manhattan Beach section of Brooklyn, which I had never really explored. This stately home is typical of many of the large residences in the area, mostly detached single-family homes with lawns and garages, some even with swimming pools. See my gallery of photos here. The environment feels more suburban than urban – atypical of New York City and unlike most of Brooklyn itself.

Surrounded by water on three sides, the neighborhood is very much an enclave and one of the most expensive in New York City. Many residents are Jewish and/or Russian immigrants. There is very little shopping in the neighborhood, and on weekends and holidays during the summer season (May 15 to Sept. 15), parking is prohibited on nearly all Manhattan Beach streets, owing to the attraction of the beach. I found the expanse of rocky beach reminiscent of the Maine coast, certainly not typical of New York.

Manhattan Beach Park offers a baseball field, playgrounds, tennis courts, basketball and handball courts, picnic areas, and rest rooms. Snacks are available from concession stands and pushcarts.
Another very unique aspect of the neighborhood is that Kingsborough Community College, with a 70-acre campus and their own private beach, occupies the easternmost tip of the peninsula. The school, established in 1963, is part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system and has 30,000 students.

I recommend a visit of the area, perhaps with Sheepshead Bay as a base for your explorations (subject of a future post). A footbridge crosses the bay, providing nice vistas and a connection to Manhattan Beach…

If you want the full spectrum of contrasts, head for Long Island City. Here you have a borough with an industrial history and the buildings to prove it. This is the westernmost neighborhood in Queens, flanking the East River, so the area affords some of the best views of the Manhattan skyline along with the 59th Street Bridge, which connects it with Manhattan. There are historic districts with beautiful row houses/brownstones. The Citicorp Building stands at 658 feet – the tallest building in Queens and outside Manhattan. On the waterfront, a former dock facility was converted to Gantry Crane State Park. Large-scale residential conversions and developments have been undergone, such as a building which formerly housed the Eagle Electric Manufacturing Company and in areas of LIC such as Hunter’s Point.

Long Island City was formerly its own city, created in 1870, and became part of the City of Greater New York in 1898. The area has gentrified, and many of the factories have been converted to other uses. The former Silvercup Bakery, whose iconic sign can be seen from many vantage points, is now Silvercup Studios. This studio has been used to film many well-known music videos, commercials, films, and television series such as the Sopranos, Sex and the City, Gangs of New York, and 30 Rock.

Artists have been resettling to LIC for many years. Art organizations as well as independent artists are located in the neighborhood. P.S. 1 Contemporary Art and Sculpture Center is located here. Isamu Noguchi converted a photo-engraving factory into a workshop, now a museum dedicated to his work. 5 Pointz: The Institute of Higher Burnin‘, is an artists’ residence in a converted warehouse. Graffiti is allowed there – the structure is a living collage of graffiti.

The largest fortune cookie factory in the United States, Wonton Foods, is in LIC. Donald Lau writes the fortunes. For a fascinating anecdote about this company and good fortune, see Fun with Numbers below.

Fun with Numbers: I found the zipcode for Long Island City, 11101, very interesting for a number of reasons. The number is a string of ones and zeros only, making it binary. In decimal, this is 29, which when totaling the digits becomes 11. Stripping out the zero in the zipcode, we have 1111. Numerologists believe that events linked to the time 11:11 appear more often than chance or coincidence. In May 2005, Wonton Foods printed a series of lucky numbers. Five our of six of these coincided with the winning numbers in a Powerball drawing. Because of the large numbers of cookies printed, 110 people (binary again) won approximately 100,000 each.* And my own zipcode? – 10011. 🙂

*According to an article in the the New Yorker: “Lottery officials suspected a scam until they traced the sequence to a fortune printed with the digits “22-28-32-33-39-40” and Donald Lau’s prediction: ‘All the preparation you’ve done will finally be paying off.’ “