Always amazing installations - great bookstore 

Little skips is my place when I need to refill my energy with some morning sunlight. The big windows facing the street let all the light in while you can drink some coffee. My favorite thing to eat is the grilled cheese sandwich with some avocado. Out of rush hours or weekend mornings, it's a pretty good space to take your laptop and get some work done.

7 months before moving to New York I visited for the first time. I was immediately enraptured and felt a deep connection to the city that I had never experi- enced. It was in this massive hall at The Met that I decided I would be leaving Los Angeles and coming to NYC as soon as I possibly could.

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.”

Easing in the park, the city facing you and traffic honking its way over the Brooklyn Bridge. Best enjoyed on a late-summer afternoon/night.