CAP Beauty has reached a cult-like status amongst New Yorkers who try to live their lives a little more like Gwyneth Paltrow, and a little less like Lindsay Lohan circa 2007. But you don’t have to be a health nut to appreciate the natural beauty store’s mission to bring a carefully selected range of products and brands that are actually kind to our bodies to consumers.

Bill Brand presents an animated movie to passengers on the B and Q subway trains coming into Manhattan from Brooklyn. The project was modeled after the zoetrope, a 19th-century optical toy, which animated images inside a revolving cylinder, so that they appeared to move when viewed through narrow slits. Brand mounted 228 hand-painted panels in self-contained, illuminated units along the three-hundred-foot platform. Hop on a Manhattan-bound B or Q train at the Dekalb Avenue stop (corner of Dekalb Avenue and Flatbush Avenue Extension). Look out any window on the right side of the train.

Bluestockings Cooperative is a community-supported bookstore and activist space.

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.”

German Expressionism makes me giddy. All my favorites are here at any given time - George Grosz, Otto Dix, Egon Schiele, Gustave Klimt - and the building was designed Carrére and Hastings, the same architects that designed the New York Public Library.