Great mid-eastern food in Chelsea/Flatiron/NoMad/whatever you call that area.

Neighborhood lunch place / Japanese supermarket. Love it for its authenticity and affordable Japanese food menu. Although its located in SOHO, it’s not hip, not fancy, not designed, not styled, not outstanding. Feels like a honest, family run business that makes the most out of this location for sure. Come here for Ramen, soba, sushi, and more. Try some fries with a choice of chili or wasabi mayonnaise. There’s something about them.

Summertime in Bushwick, means the locals will be barbecuing on the sidewalk, and playing in the hydrants. It's the perfect time to grab some shorts, and run down the street. If the one outside Mckibben isnt going off, one of the other 15 hydrants in the neighborhood will be.

I love sneaking over here in the middle of the day to see a movie - they always have the best selection of films. I recently saw Pina in 3D and The Kid with a Bike here, and another time I saw Bela Fleck play the banjo after a screening of Throw Down Your Heart.

In 1963, the Italian-born sculptor Costantino Nivola filled a playground that covers an entire city block with avant-garde abstractions. In the middle of an Upper Manhattan housing project, there are cuboid cutouts sculpted in cement, a fountain made with two diamond-shaped boulders, concrete play horses, and a sand-casted relief carved high into a wall. In the northeast corner, a matriarchal figure known as “The Nanny” rises from the ground. The artist’s sculptures were built in an era when urban development incorporated art in its effort to uplift communities and express democratic ideals. “A work designed for a public space is less a work of art than a civic act,” Nivola once said. “It concerns the ways in which we live together, and in which we influence each other.”