Vased, New York City

If every dog has its day, so every flower has its vase. But now always happily.

Take the flower murders of my childhood. Every few years or so a malevolent force would ravage the tidy suburban gardens on our street. It could be a dog slipped its collar, a toddler with pinched fingers, a killer gust or hailstorm from the North. No matter, the result was pretty much the same. The bulbs that had been carefully planted, watered and nurtured with care became ugly, awkward, snapped-off stems. Fallen flower heads littered the fertile dirt like broken soldiers. Some garden owners raged or cried. Others, more pragmatic, gathered up the wilted tops and stuck them in bud vases.

Sentimentalists—hoarders, collectors, nurturers in particular—all hate to see flowers die. Count me in. I make a game out of extending cut flower life (short of using processes like drying, pressing or acrylic dipping). Like a good nurse I cut stems on the diagonal, change daily water, cull moldy leaves and add those powdery packets that look like sweetener. It works. Recently, I cajoled some purple calla lilies into sticking around and sticking around. A small victory, for sure, but it felt just like a miracle.

June roses are the thing now. For some, a big bouquet is too much lush. My L.A. friends salute the individual by sprinkling garden rose stems—each in its own container—across their dining table. Any bud vase or dish suits fine, from elegant Lalique crystal to lopsided homemade pottery. Honestly, the flower doesn’t care.

Paradoxically, one of the world’s largest plant conservation and research programs lies in the Bronx, courtesy of the New York Botanical Gardens. Both their spectacular grounds and the NYBG gift shop hold inspiration for rural and urban plant lovers. There I discovered this PTSD-curing arrangement of winsome single stem containers. Even if the nature of flowers is to come and go, a shelf glass garden has staying power.

Surreal, New York City

A walker in the city—who by definition has no destination except to get around—ends up a visual treasure seeker. Multitudes of streets hold the real, the beautiful, the unexpected, and the bizarre–sometimes all four at once. What to make of a black nude female torso hanging from a brass luggage rack above a stand of yellow daffodils? Or the guy who tries to shake me down for a few dollars after I laugh and grab a quick pic?

Slowly the puzzle resolves, aided by years of urban experience. I’ve run across the Department of Outlandish Found Objects, curated by a sidewalk book peddler. You might walk right by his shabby folding table, his thinking goes, but you can’t walk right by this. I don’t know where he gets his stacks of new and tattered books, his headless hanging nude or his crazy whimsical ideas. But if he had a book on Man Ray, I would need to buy it, wouldn’t you?

Mini Me, New York City

Evolving 3-D printing technology is pretty darn amazing, from household doodads and clothing all the way to houses and body parts. We can’t print full humans— yet—but Doob-3D™ a German 3-D printing company with two stores in New York City and seven more across the United States, promises to capture the real you in a core resin polymer figurine. It’s 3-D narcissism, a “selfie” in the round.

Enter the onsite “Dooblicator,™” which looks a little like an airport scanner, and a few weeks later receive your freshly printed mini-me. So-called Doobs™ range in price from a $99 4-inch “Buddy” to a 14-inch $699 “Diva.” They’re not exactly cheap, but, I suppose, a perfect gift for that person in your life who has everything. Why collect Lalique birds or Herend bunnies when you can gather up your own life stages?

The Upper East Side store features the material timeline of “Heather,” (photo below). You see figurines of Heather pregnant, holding a baby, and then with growing family. Looking at a row of aging tiny Heathers made me feel a little nervous, like pet taxidermy or The Twilight Zone. I can easily imagine a Black Mirror episode where Doobs—kissing couples, siblings off to school, beloved huggable dogs—come alive at night on their little shelves and march off to subsume their flesh and blood hosts.

Creepiness aside, there’s also something sweet and sentimental going on here. Time is a killer beast. Like photos and videos, making your own 3-D Doob is a proud, defiant move. Her children may grow up, marry, and have children of their own. But Heather will be able to hold her unwrinkled pregnant self forever in her hands.

Leaving, New York City

I’ve learned to notice that leaves change color as much in spring as fall. For a few short weeks in May, I walk under sky fields of fresh, lime-green leaves that will continue to darken and thicken into summer. Right now they’re babies, really, with tender tight-balled fists that unclench a little more each day. Each year I try to spot the instant when they open fully in the nurturing sunlight. It’s a fool’s game really, impossible to win. But I think if you or I can see it, we will forever hold the moment rich.

Escalated, New York City

You don’t typically notice escalators, unless they’re broken. And the short ride itself is a zone-out moment (with a quick wake-up at the end to make sure those scary claws don’t grab your toes). Now Rem Koolhaas’s newly debuted design of chromatic iridescent main floor escalators for Saks Fifth Avenue’s flagship store, part of an ongoing $250 million luxury renovation, has made taking the #escalator into an Instagrammable event. It’s midtown’s newest destination ride.

Koolhaas dramatizes the experience of rising from Handbags on One to Beauty on Two by using light, color, and mirrored glass to create a dazzling retail kaleidoscope of people, clothes and goods. Like “The Vessel” (below) built in front of the gleaming new Neiman Marcus in Hudson Yards, ever-changing reflections call out to the camera-ready. The future of luxury retail is shutter clickbait.

Poetree, New York City

Knitfiti is the inspired practice of wrapping urban elements—from bike racks and benches to stop signs and tree trunks—in colorful 3-D yarn. Also known as “yarn bombing,” it’s traditionally performed in stealth. Anything is fair game. I’ve seen tree trunks, bikes, fire hydrants, stop signs and ugly scaffolding all brightened by cheerful knitted or crocheted tubes.

Poetry bombing is less of a thing. Until now. A mysterious poet-tree lover has been glorifying the Upper West Side’s blossoming cherry trees with A. E. Houseman’s poem, “Loveliest of Trees.” My first sighting (above) was tied with purple ribbon to a townhouse iron fence; my second (below) hung off a mighty branch in Riverside Park. Both were printed on three hole-punched binder paper, protected by a plastic sleeve, and blotched purple from the morning rain. I stopped to read the poem and admire the tree in both locations. It was urban “Versifiti” at its best.

To Go, New York City

I’m totally obsessed by this silicone coffee cup, which collapses and changes size like a toy. The first time I saw one on the subway, I stared at it, mesmerized. Like the geeky architects who collect hundreds of different coffee lids, I couldn’t let it get away. So I made the cool person sipping from it unplug her headphones and tell me all about it. She told me it’s portable, refillable, colorful and never leaks. When she’s finished, she just collapses the sides, sticks the lined ring inside the bottom and tosses the empty flattened puck in her purse.

“Good for you, saving the earth one paper cup at a time,” said a man near us, eavesdropping. Perhaps, he, like me, had just read this article in the Climate Fwd: Newsletter from The New York Times, which suggests multiple ways to brew a greener cup of coffee to reduce climate impact. Not surprisingly, single-use cups generate a lot of waste when tossed daily. A convenient refillable mug is a great green step .

The happy, helpful coffee commuter told me to look on Amazon, where I easily found several food-safe, BPA-free brands (here’s one version). I immediately went home and ordered two. One for coffee, one for water. If I ever see her again, we’ll match.

Octotruck, New York City

This city used to run on coffee and conversation, but now it’s WiFi and the cloud. On bus and subway, citizens make personal space silos by plugging eyes and ears into smart phones. Today’s news is cleanly streamed and scrolled, not folded. Down at the new and shiny Hudson Yards, the neighborhood of the future presents an immaculate plaza, gleaming supertall glass towers, and a mirrored copper-clad staircase to the sky.

Undaunted, old New York standbys like graffiti and clutter persist on uptown streets like hardy weeds. Phone booths and large stacks of Sunday papers may be almost gone, but sidewalk boxes manage to hang in. So do random funny moments in an unexpected street scene. Here, four giveaway newspaper boxes line up like sentinels around a mailbox. Behind them, a big-eyed mollusk painted on a parked truck seems to grab the old print freebies. Only in New York: an octopus has snatched three dinosaurs.

Music Haul, New York City

Back before Uber and Lyft and Task Rabbit, the original members of the gig economy were the people who did gigs, i.e., freelance musicians. All over New York City, their instruments are visibly on the go. Mighty basses wheel down subway platforms, clever guitars steal bus seats, nimble flutes ride bikes, and leggy cellos, like the one above, are backpacked down the street. In this case, the case is critical. Why stick to dowdy brown or black when you can pack your axe in brilliant red or yellow fiberglass? This cello guy was so bright, graphic and eerily humanoid that I had to tail him for several blocks. All the while, I could feel his Cyclops eye looking right back at me.

Green Beans, New York City

Amazon packages may be scary fast and shamefully convenient, but they have yet to arrive with steaming coffee. They’re also not a textured communal experience (read here to find out why The New York Times thinks human contact is the newest luxury good).

Which may explain the growing tendency to caffeinate all sorts of urban spaces.

Custom cappuccinos have spread from bookstores to bank and hotel lobbies, gyms, clothing and home good stores, chocolate boutiques, barbershops, cocktail bars, Lexus Intersect accessories, and even a high-end car wash (see my post, Cleansed, August 18, 2018). Ditto churches and museums. No matter where you go, it seems that specialty coffee just the way you like it is there, too.

Even florists have joined the hybrid-retail trend. In Midtown East, Remi Flower and Coffee Shop sprinkles rose petals and lavender on cappuccinos. On the Upper West Side, the PlantShed sells custom coffee (would you like that with oat milk?), matcha tea and super-trendy Dirty Lemon charcoal drinks inside an enchanting indoor forest of small trees, hardy plants, terrariums, ferns, succulents, and fresh flowers. Cozy café tables in a garden setting add to the relaxing vibe. I got seduced into coffee to stay and flowers to go. Which, I guess, is exactly the point.

Malled, New York City

New Yorkers are fussy about dirt. Too little is the suburbs. Too much is the country. Just the right amount, say, on a stroll along Broadway in the West 90s, is the real New York. Some old-time city residents even mourn the super-grimy, edgy, “I’m walkin’ here!” aura of last century Times Square.

So I wasn’t surprised when the city’s critics threw mud at the $25 billion new luxury development, Hudson Yards, now open on Manhattan’s far West Side near 34th Street. For The New York Times’s Michael Kimmelman, the design was “at heart, a supersized suburban-style office park, with a shopping mall and a quasi-gated condo community targeted at the 0.1 percent.” New York Magazine’s Justin Davidson said, “too flat, too clean, too art-directed…I can’t help feeling like an alien here.” The New Yorker’s Ian Parker described the site as a “Doha-like cluster of towers on Manhattan’s West Side.”

Translation: it was too damn clean.

When I visited on opening weekend (March 15-17, 2019), I, too, was overwhelmed. Every surface, from the glass-and-steel supertall towers (one of which, 30 Hudson Yards, is now the fifth highest building in the U.S.) to the luxury retail mall’s walls and floors, gleamed. The plaza’s objet d’Instagram, “Vessel,” glowed like a penny in the sunlight and threw warm coppery reflections onto the white retractable shell of the adjacent arts complex, The Shed. The only dirt I could find was in the specially designed “smart soil” in the vast planters filled with gorgeous purple pansies. Even that dirt was clean.

How alien.

Did anyone notice? Thousands of visitors filled the 5-acre plaza, lined up to climb the 154 flights of stairs in the Vessel, flowed politely onto the seven floors of escalators at The Shops and Restaurants mall housing the city’s first Neiman Marcus, and ate snacks in the bakeries and food shops. The hordes were diverse, local, young, excited and curious. They were having fun. So was I.

Then I realized what the critics missed. The futuristic new neighborhood does fill a niche, and not just for the .1 percent. It’s a vacation from grit! Available to all, and just a subway ride away. A neighborhood with free Wi-Fi, 28,000 plants, 200 mature trees, specialty snacks under $10 and public revolving art exhibits? In close proximity to the High Line park? All sorts of people, from locals to tourists, will come for a clean getaway. By force of nature they will humanize it and, over time, it will acquire a unique patina all its own. If not from New Yorkers, then leave it to the birds.

Be Kind, Auckland

I saw a pleasant older woman walking down Broadway with a crazy big button pinned to the strap of her pocketbook. It stood out against her bright blue winter coat. “Make America Kind Again,” it yelled politely.

You couldn’t miss it. MAKA. Now there’s a thought.

Kindness is trending. Or, perhaps more accurately, counter-trending. I’ve noticed artists, writers and concerned citizens all over the world promoting kindness as a change agent for several years now.

The British newspaper, The Guardian, says that “Kindness is replacing mindfulness as the buzzword for how we should live.”

The publishing world calls it “up lit.” Christie Watson’s book, The Language of Kindness, out in paperback next month, is soon to be a TV series. Jaime Thurston’s action book, Kindness: The Little Thing that Matters Most, is an instruction manual for what no longer comes naturally.

Accepting the 2016 National Book Award for The Underground Railroad, a novel about the horrors of slavery, author Colson Whitehead said: “Be kind to everybody, make art and fight the power.”

In this NPR interview, a former neo-Nazi explained how meaningful empathetic interactions with customers who should have hated him changed his views. Instead of polarizing, they cohesed.

Even down in New Zealand, where civility and generosity are woven into the national character, I discovered this folk artist’s plea for kindness. It was love-locked to a railing in the Auckland harbor. Now is the time, it declares.

“I believe that in the end it is kindness and generous accommodation that are the catalysts for real change,” Nelson Mandela said.

Kindness is not just moral. It’s political. These days call for it.

Note: This post was published just before the tragic Christchurch mosque massacre.

Wee, New York City

People bring big dreams to this big city, but they live small to survive. They rent studio apartments with tiny kitchens. They walk diminutive dogs. They work in cramped cubicles. They do little gigs. They have trivial arguments. They eat microgreens.

Wee is us. And this mini snowman—about 18 inches high—was right on trend. He popped up on a townhouse railing after a March snowstorm that was slighter than expected. Tidbit accessories completed his look. Baby carrot for nose, celery scraps for hair, pebbles for eyes and the spindliest of twigs for arms.

And yet, small is beautiful. The frosty sculpture had presence. Think Billy Porter in his velvet tuxedo gown at the Oscars. Think Constantin Brancusi at the Guggenheim. Under its anonymous creator’s hands, the ephemeral snowman disrupted the three-circle cliché and turned a simple brown railing into a majestic pedestal. It was something all together new and fresh.

True outsider art. Or at least outside.

Code Red, Auckland

synchronicity/noun (def): That Cat-in-the-Hat inspired moment during travel in Auckland, New Zealand, when a fellow in a red-and-white striped polo walks across a matching crosswalk.

Hypotheses: 1) In New Zealand locals dress to match crosswalks 2) Engineers and fashion designers down under are greatly influenced by Dr. Seuss 3) fondness for year-round candy canes 4) WET PAINT? 5) Fresh!

Conclusion: Not only do bright crosswalks stop traffic, they impact fashion. Cities around the world should consult with Kiwi traffic safety engineers about ways to use color and design to achieve Vision Zero. The “chipped zebra” crosswalk look seen throughout New York City is way too pedestrian. Action plan: Go red.

Alive, Times Square

A friend of mine once had a devastating fire in his apartment. It wasn’t his fault. The wires behind his walls were bad. “You always forget,” he said, “that behind every smooth wall hung with pictures is a bunch of energy that’s always on.”

Same goes for city streets. A labyrinth of gas, water, electricity, transformers and cables lurks hidden underground. The grid’s power is immense and unforgiving. It refuses to be ignored. A manhole cover blows, a giant sinkhole opens, your gym’s glass windows blow out, or a pipe in the middle of traffic simply needs to let off steam. Then we remember. There’s an entire world below our feet, and, guess what? It’s alive.

Lit, New York City

In the dead of winter, candles are alive. I light them every morning to wake up to beauty. Outside my window, unbroken grey wraps sky and sidewalk in an enervating hush. The city is in hibernation. At the kitchen table, my slim candle flames dance to their own music. A wax pinecone sinks inside itself, preserving its brown spikes and spirals as it melts. Another, “Feu de Bois” from Diptyque, sends out a wood fire scent. A few are just glass votives, because, why not?

By mid-February, things are looking up. Daylight begins to stretch. Some afternoons are still too grim and dark and cruelly cold. Others hold surprises. Walking in Central Park toward dusk, I see black trees lined up like logs against the urban skyline. Glass buildings shoot gold and orange embers at the sinking sun. Everything is lit. Warmth spreads. It’s a fireplace in the sky, New York style.

Soul Mate, New York City

I’ve never forgotten the joy of finding my homemade second grade mailbox (aka slotted shoebox) stuffed with Valentine’s Day cards and SweetHearts Conversation Hearts. Admittedly, it was an easily won popularity as the teacher’s rule was give to one, give to all. I learned to see the kitsch in paper hearts and candy sentiments, but my original enthusiasm for the day never waned.

Now I search for ways to mark the day in proper urban style: Ironic, dressed in black and self-obsessed. Scrolling through my inbox, I see endless local V-day options.

Instead of buying or receiving roses, I’ll adopt a Highline plant in Manhattan. Or shed my pants at Cupid’s Undie Run for charity. With the Naked at the Met Scavenger Hunt, the nude is in the art. Still too cloyingly romantic? In Queens, My Bloody Valentine Haunted Attraction bleeds red with two floors of scary stalking. Brooklyn’s Littlefield hosts a series of hipster events: “It’s Friday and I’m (Not) in Love, ” (a wear black Anti-Valentine’s dance party), “Mortified!” (share your teen-angst memorabilia) and “Tinder Live with Lane Moore” (watch her swipe right in onstage improv).

You name it, there’s a class for it. Teachers around the city are primed to instruct in making heart-shaped chocolates, cakes, soufflés, floral bouquets, lollipops, linoleum prints, and so on. My favorite? “Self-Love Hand Lettering” at Parachute Home, where you make a card to “celebrate the one person most important in your life…you!”

I take a walk to clear my head.

An overflowing Valentine’s window display at the independently owned store, More & More Antiques on Amsterdam Avenue, calls out to me. I realize I can’t complain about national chain stores and shuttered retail fronts ruining the streetscape unless I start to put my money where my mouth is. I wander in and buy a tiny hand-painted figurine with a winsome heart-shaped face. Something about it is slightly off, but it promises to be “All Mine.”

XOXO, Cutie Pie.

Frozen, New York City

The polar vortex is here. From Maine to Michigan, people are stuck in a freezer of ice, snow and brutally cold temperatures that threaten skin and spirit. My mind flashes back to this icy guy-in-a-box, Snowman, installed in MoMA’s Outdoor Sculpture Garden last summer. The frosty copper-coated statue was a magic trick in June’s humid heat. A clever study of contrast and form by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and the late David Weiss. It amazed and amused me.

Now the extreme cold darkens my perception. I have seen the Snowman, and he is us.

Haunts, New York City

One crazy funny-but-true story about the iconic luxury store Bergdorf Goodman is the number of devoted shoppers who want their ashes scattered inside. Of course, you have to do it on the sly. Their dedicated spirit may haunt the store’s interior, but in my mind the outside sidewalks belong solely to the late fashion photographer Bill Cunningham.

Cunningham, who died in 2016 at the age of 87, was for decades a fixture on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. He knew it was where the stylish met the fashionable. I would often see him crouched and squinting in his signature blue jacket as he hunted street trends with his Nikon. Now every shot from that location, like this one on pattern-mixing, feels haunted by his legacy.

His single-minded desire to record New York’s elegant and outlandish is shown in the 2010 documentary, “Bill Cunningham: New York” and his recent posthumous memoir: Fashion Climbing: A Memoir With Photographs (Penguin, 2018).

Even though he looked angelic, he could be tough when necessary, as I discovered.

After I was hired at Women’s Wear Daily, I was excited to learn that Bill Cunningham had started his writing career at the paper. Our commonality was only in my mind, though.

One of my earliest WWD assignments was to “cover” a big New York society party. I had to get all the photographed local celebrity’s names spelled correctly and write a column. I was green and new to the scene. We were tucked off behind ropes, and all the photographers were firing rapidly away.

Bill Cunningham was shooting next to me for The New York Times.

“Who’s that?” I asked him as the first beautiful socialite walked by. He told me, quickly. I wrote it down. “Who’s that?” I asked, as the next woman passed.

He paused and glared at me. “Get your own names,” he snapped.

It was a quick lesson in the competitive nature of journalism, down to and including party reporting. And from then on, I did.

Read Me, New York City

Lately I’ve felt overloaded by all the options in Internet reading, streaming, listening and watching. It’s hard not to feel like Lucy racing the speeding conveyor belt in her famous chocolate factory scene. Instead of candy, it’s too many stories pouring down the e-tunnel. Where’s the quality in all that quantity? Choice paralysis sets in.

Overwhelmed, I head to the quirky communal atmosphere of any one of my favorite local independent bookstores. New York City teems with them. Here’s one list.

I’ve got company. It turns out sales of physical books have increased every year since 2013. The number of indie bookshops across America has increased by more than a third from 2009-2015 (all stats from the American Booksellers Association). It’s newly trendy to promote your indie bookshop-loving inner nerd on social media with “shelfies” on #bookstagram. More than 25 million Instagrammers have done it, reports Vox.

Local bookstores are full of surprises and things you would never find without them. Take these “Read Me If You Liked…” brown-paper wrapped books sold at Book Culture on Columbus. Here’s your own psychic librarian. The burden of choice is essentially gone. When you don’t even know what you’re buying, how can you choose wrong? Best of all, you can unwrap it at home like a present.

When you cut out small decisions, you save your bandwidth for the more important things. This year I resolve to choose less.