One of the best curated visual art books in New York and the World, with a bent towards a crossover of music/art/psychedelics. A place to feed the art habit, remembering that the greatest images are still locked in books and not online.

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.”

This is my local spot and one of my bad habits. The bartenders make sure I don't do anything to embarrassing and its full of regulars. Has dangerously replaced my living room. It's one of the only real dive bars on Smith street. Layers of funkiness help keep away the frat boys and bachelorette parties. Never closes before 4am so all the other neighborhood bartenders, cooks, and waiters stop by after work. Needless to say that only the best business decisions get made here!

If only places can speak...yet they have their own language with their texture, smell, vibe, mood...new york is waking up 

Unlike a lot of neighborhoods the sidewalks in this area are often still paved in the original slate slabs. You can see “extra” pieces sometimes chained up outside like this…. Why pour concrete?