Best cupcakes ever (aside from my wife's)

My first job in the city. The family and friends and raised New York Megan. Also very good coffee. And lovely neighbors.

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.”

Giant dinosaurs. And the rest of the museum is great if you also like giant whales and outer space and especially the life size dioramas of animals and cave people, which might be the very best Art in all of the city. Sigh.

I’m crazy for pork buns and ramen. The wait is always long at Ippudo but I never regret it.