You've heard about the reading room at the New York Public Library, haven't you? Then I need not go on. Just look at it. And you're allowed to hang around in there!

My favorite place on Bedford Avenue, this bookstore has both new and used titles. If you're patient and look close enough, you can usually find a book that's worth more than they're asking. Not to mention their stellar selection of magazine titles. Good for design, art, photography, sociology, fiction, and everything in between.

Brooklyn tattoo shop specializing in American traditional style work. Everyone is super nice and cool.

The Tenement Museum celebrates the enduring stories that define and strengthen what it means to be American. We share stories of the immigrant and migrant experience through guided tours of our two tenement buildings on Orchard Street and the surrounding neighborhood on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Visitors can take building tours of the recreated homes of our former residents between the 1860s and the 1980s as well as walking tours of the neighborhood they lived in.

This is where I bought Dax Snow's I love You Stupid and Richard Prince's John Duke Book both inspired me a lot.