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.

A friend who lives nearby sent along this lovely photo of Metropolitan Avenue at Graham—our closest subway stop (Graham Avenue on the L line). It was taken in the summer of 1937 by Berenice Abbott (available from the New York Public Library digital archives here).

Curious, I went out and snapped my own, from the same spot:

The differences and similarities are equally striking! 72 years did quite a number, but to my eyes it appears that not a single building has been razed. Altered considerably, sure, but the structures still stand—people still pass them everyday, climb their stairs, and call them home.

The intersection was unquestionably more beautiful in 1937. I don’t think I need to tell anyone here how unspeakably tacky vinyl siding is (Unless—landlords? Y’all listening?) compared to the facades of the thirties: the Victorian cupola on top of the corner building anchoring the intersecting avenues, with rounded pediments on either side giving balance and proportion. The ornate cornices along the tops of all the buildings have been lopped off, leaving them no better crown than a fence. Where the windows have not been bricked (or sided) over, they’ve lost all the framing that made them make sense in the larger structure—eaves, ledges, sills, gone. The wide friezes separating the storefronts on the ground floor from the residences above have given way to bulbous prefabricated awnings and roll-down metal gates. Charming.

Interestingly, the cast-iron subway entrance hasn’t changed one bit. Evoking Industrial-Age New York (Ms. Abbott captured her photo the same decade the Empire State Building went up), the chunky balustrade around the stairs is supported by thick, tightly spaced posts (I wonder if they were forest green back then?) and lanterns signal the entrance.

There was a beer ad (and Coca-Cola too, of course) spanning the south face of the corner building in ’37, so I can’t rail at that in the modern world. But look at that poor lamppost littered with paper scraps and tape gunk from flyers and solicitations—in the age of Craigslist, no less! The streetcar tracks laid into the cobblestone have presumably had black asphalt poured over them. One thing we do have, mercifully, on the streets these days, that was missing back then: trees.

“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.