Neighbors and Birthdays and Dogs, Oh My!

Tonight, in celebration of a friend-who-just-moved-into-our-neighborhood's birthday, we went to Manhattan.  That's right, folks, we outer borough folk do head into Manhattan for some entertainment and merrymaking!  Yes, we will continue to try to lure you into our realms ("I'll take you to the Beer Garden" being one of the key baits), but we also head over to the island once in a while.

Anyway, this friend and his roommate, also a friend, recently moved into our neighborhood -- a few short blocks away from our crappy little prewar apartment, in fact! -- which is very exciting because, well, as an outer borough person, most of my friends live in other, fancier outer boroughs, or in Manhattan, or even in New Jersey.  So it can get lonely out here in Queens on occasion.  But now there are people around the corner with whom we can grab lunch in a Greek restaurant, or make friends with the panhandlers on the N or Q into Manhattan, or sit at the Beer Garden and talk about how awesome Queens is, and how smart we are for living here.  I'm stoked.

But yes. Birthday.  So we went into Manhattan, and we took advantage of the absolutely beautiful day by getting a round of drinks at Pier 66 Maritime, which houses an historic barge (now a bar and grill!) and several historic ships, including a fireboat and the Lightship Frying Pan, which was underwater for 3 years before being pulled up and restored.  The weather was absolutely glorious, and it was awesome to be on the Hudson, enjoying a beer, even if the swaying of the barge on the river gave me a touch of the queasies.

Afterwards, we headed down to the High Line, a relatively new park in Manhattan, reclaimed from an old elevated freight train line that was abandoned for about 50 years.  Nature took over, and then landscape architects came in, refined the plants that were already there, built benches, and made it a really beautiful park for strolling above the city streets.  We walked the current length of it, from 20th Street down to about 14th, and I can't wait to see what the next section to open looks like.  It's a really lovely space where urban and natural mix wonderfully, and the breeze and views from that elevation are fantastic.

As the sun was setting and we hadn't eaten yet, we wandered around for a while before ending up at Benny's Burritos, which, sneakily enough, is part of the Blockheads mini-chain of Mexicali food establishments.  After a much shorter than anticipated wait (think 8 minutes instead of 40), we slid into a table in the very noisy dining room and proceeded to gorge ourselves on chips, salsa, guacamole, burritos, and 3 dollar margaritas.  Delicious, cheap, and a hit with everyone involved.

We split up after that, with the birthday guy having a bit more party in him than the rest of us, and E, our other friend and I ended up on a train back out to Astoria.  A man got on with a service dog that must have been in training.  He kept standing up rather than laying beneath the man patiently, and at one point the motion of the train must have got to him, because he vomited in the corner.  I don't think I've ever seen a dog so happy to get off a subway as this dog, who practically opened the door with his nose once they got to their stop.  He was clearly trying very hard, though.  I have a huge place in my heart for service dogs.  They're smart!  They're well-behaved!  They're helpful!  You can't pet them!  Seriously, all I want to do when I see a service dog is give it a giant hug and belly rub.  This urge is probably largely because I know you aren't supposed to distract them from their work with lovin', but it doesn't stop me from wanting to more than anything else in the world at that given moment.

Tonight was no different, because the dog was young, and trainsick, and SO SO CUTE.  If I had any ability to give away cute things, I would totally train puppies to be service dogs, but I wouldn't be able to give them up.  Also, puppies are hard.  They require walks and they puke and pee on the floor and lick you and are kind of smelly.  When my cat pukes, I tend to pretend I don't know what happened until E steps in it on his way to bed and has to clean it up himself*, so I can't handle dog puke, which is obviously much more gross.  Gosh, what will happen when I have children?  I don't want to think about it.

*This may or may not have just happened.  He's a pretty good guy!

My morning commute.

I've never really appreciated the Brooklyn Bridge the way everyone else in the world seems to. Like yeah, it's a cool bridge and all, but there are much more impressive ones out there, in my opinion.  Like the Manhattan Bridge -- I just think it's more visually striking!  However, my new internship's offices are located at South Street Seaport (and I thought it was just a tourist trap, ha), so I walk by the Brooklyn Bridge every morning on my way in.

I snapped this on my walk this grey morning -- how sad is it that my cell phone has a better camera in it than my first digital camera did in 2004? -- right after I thought to myself, "Okay, so maybe it's kind of a cool bridge."  Then I got on Wikipedia:

The occurrence of the decompression sickness (the bends) in the caisson workers caused engineers to halt construction of the Manhattan side of the tower 30 feet (10 m) short of bedrock when soil tests underneath the caisson found bedrock to be even deeper than expected. Today, the Manhattan tower rests only on sand.

At the time the bridge was built, the aerodynamics of bridge building had not been worked out. Bridges were not tested in wind tunnels until the 1950s — well after the collapse of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge (Galloping Gertie) in 1940. It is therefore fortunate that the open truss structure supporting the deck is by its nature less subject to aerodynamic problems. Roebling designed a bridge and truss system that was six times as strong as he thought it needed to be. Because of this, the Brooklyn Bridge is still standing when many of the bridges built around the same time have vanished into history and been replaced. This is also in spite of the substitution of inferior quality wire in the cabling supplied by the contractor J. Lloyd Haigh — by the time it was discovered, it was too late to replace the cabling that had already been constructed. Roebling determined that the poorer wire would leave the bridge four rather than six times as strong as necessary, so it was eventually allowed to stand, with the addition of 250 cables. Diagonal cables were installed from the towers to the deck, intended to stiffen the bridge. They turned out to be unnecessary, but were kept for their distinctive beauty.

Crazy! Also, the bridge was completed in 1883 but didn't get its first jumper til 1885, which to me indicates that the bridge lifted 19th century New Yorkers' spirits. And, in May of 1884, P.T. Barnum marched the gigantic Jumbo the Elephant (later to become the mascot of Tufts University, where they have his ashes in a peanut butter jar) across the bridge in a parade of 21 elephants to prove its stability (and promote his circus) after an 1883 stampede triggered by a rumor that the bridge was going to collapse killed 12 people.

Also on my walk to and from the train, I pass this flower stand, which always has the most gorgeous blooms out for sale.  Yesterday, though, I got a good chuckle out of this:

Ahhh, Engrish.

Happy Friday!