A beautiful and abandoned New York subway station from 1904, complete with chandelier. Take the 6 train heading downtown. When the train makes its final stop at the “Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall” station, passengers are told to exit the train. Stay on the train and duck down so as not to be easily spotted. When the train departs the station, it will pass through the abandoned City Hall Station.

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.

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.”

Their coffee—all brewed from carefully sourced Nicaraguan beans—is truly delicious.

Daytime café, nighttime bar. Nothing stronger than 30-proof. Delicious beer and really good wine. Kind people run & staff the place. The garden in the Summer is perfect. I make near-daily visits.