I ’bout fell off my bicycle Saturday afternoon riding across Brooklyn through Crown Heights, when I rounded a boarded up pre-war apartment building and came upon this giant yellow monster.

So this is the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. Why didn’t anyone tell me Brooklyn had one of those? I really should get me a kid, so I can be in the loop on such swell goings-on.

Not only is the museum a gem to behold, it’s super-sustainable. Designed by Rafael Viñoly Architects and opened last September, the building achieved a LEED Silver rating for its use of rapidly renewable and recycled materials in construction. The big yellow building even has geothermal wells for heating and cooling purposes. Wow. I wonder what those look like.

And check out the Museum from above:

Photo: Michael Moran

Lovely. It’s incredible to see such bold design in a public project—plopped in the middle of Crown Heights, no less, rather than in Dumbo, Brooklyn, or some such trendy (read: ridiculous) location. This place for kids could hold its own against any boutique hotel on the Lower East Side.

Score: 1, NYC Department of Design and Construction. And one for Brooklyn.

“As far as I’m concerned, the whole point of living in New York City is indoors. You want greenery? Order the spinach.”
—David Rakoff, from the essay “In New England Everyone Calls You Dave,” collected in his book Fraud.

“One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.”
—Frank O’Hara, from the poem “Meditations in an Emergency”

The crowd at David Byrne’s free concert in Prospect Park, Brooklyn—rain forecast be damned. June, 2009.

Um, really?

One of my very favorite things about New York in summertime is that everyone seems to up and move outdoors. The park is our backyard. The rooftop turns into the living room. The stoop becomes the kitchen. The fire escape: the den.

I’ve always chalked the phenomenon up to we New Yorkers’ lack of indoor space. Our apartments are just so tiny—there sure ain’t room for a decent-size get-together. If the weather’s right, let’s just spill out into the street. Plus it’s so hot and muggy; no window a/c unit is going to churn out cold air fast enough for this crowd, and no indoor space is going to be as well-ventilated as plein air.

It’s a treat to walk down my block and hear other folks’ music pumping out of speakers pressed up to the window screens (usually), smell what they’ve got on the grill, see the colorful buffet all set out, and run the gauntlet of kids steering bikes and scooters across the sidewalk, oblivious to adults (so far up!) with something to do, someplace to be.

But then maybe the writers I quoted above were talking about Manhattan. I haven’t been there in years (well—called it home, anyway). When I go back for a visit (almost daily), the lovely human-scale buildings seem to be disappearing as fast as Bush supporters, and slick glass high-rises are the way of the future. What if a person wants to set up a lawn chair out front? What if I want to have a Saturday stoop sale? What if we want to throw a rooftop party? The answer, I guess, is: Move to Brooklyn.