A great way to escape the city...Especially amazing in Spring when the cherry blossoms are out. I love the Japanese pond, the famous NYers walk with plates for Arthur Miller or Lee Krasner and of course the green house.

Prospect Park is a great place to have a water balloon fight, a picnic, a jog, and play with other people's dogs.

One of my lunch favorites - start with the crab toast lemon aioli, then roast carrot avocado salad, Kasha and Bowtie pasta with Meatballs - and their homemade sodas and green juice are awesome! 

Somewhat off the beaten Williamsburg-track, Brooklyn Art Library is nestled on a mostly residential street. It’s home to tens of thousands of artist sketchbooks known as “The Sketchbook Project”. Over 100 countries are represented and their “collection houses books from small communities in Mongolia next to professional illustrators from New York.” You can donate one of your very own! All the sketchbooks have been cataloged for easy searching of their vast shelves, by artist and subject, and visitors are invited to browse what feels much like a hands-on museum. The Art Library also remains one of the few places to find art supplies (while limited) in the neighborhood, and if you’re in the market for a special gift (including books, totes and the cutest retro pennants) for your favorite art-lovin’ bibliophile, you might just get lucky here.

XXXI (‘Thirty-One’) is ❶ a mixed-use community space for designers (and others) to exhibit, teach, and discuss self-initiated work; ❷ a shared studio space; ❸ a residency for designers; and ❹ an online (and sometimes physical) store. It purposefully lives outside (or against) the constraints of the city it exists in and traditional commercial practice to ask what design can do when its goal is not money.