It's All About the Benjamins

Jump to Comments So this past weekend I travelled to New York to visit old friends and go to a wedding. So, I’m writing down everything that happened, not just the hilarious parts. It’s all part of my new plan called “remembering the good times” – as opposed to the plan entitled “Remembering Good Times” which involved memorizing quotes from J.J. on that sho——nevermind.

So anyway I get off the plane at JFK and Alex comes and picks me up in a Zipcar. Do you know what a zipcar is? It’s kind of like a rental car, but you only rent for a few hours and take it back to where it came from. It makes sense in a place like New York or DC or whatever. The roads coming into and out of JFK are just as much a crazy mixed up disaster of a plan as are the terminals themselves, so we realize after about 10 minutes that we’re headed out to Long Island (Lon Guyland) rather than, you know, Brooklyn.

But anyway, we eventually made it to Park Slope. The zipcar went into those kind of garages they have in a city like New York – not like a proper, purpose-built parking garage with parking spaces, but the kind that’s just basically a hole in a building and the cars are parked three or four deep, right up next to each other. One of those cars was a cool old Volvo station wagon (1800?), bright orange.

Well anyway we got to Alex’s apartment. Unlike the last time I visited, Krista was there! She is rad, so that was good. Anyway we goofed around for a while (an hour, maybe?) and then went to dinner. We met Brian McNabb, his wife, his sister, and her husband at a place called Bark. It’s an upscale hot dog restaurant. Yeah, they have those in Brooklyn.

Because I’m kind of adventurous, but not that adventurous, I got the self-titled debut hotdog– I mean, the Bark Dog, and a side of fries and a root beer. I think the root beer was local production, because, yeah, they have that in Brooklyn. The hot dog was really good, which is something I don’t think I can usually say about a hotdog (usually the best thing one can say is ‘satisfactory’, really. It’s a hot dog). It was topped with relish, mustard, and really finely chopped red onions. And the fries were great: they looked like Five Guys fries, but instead of being bland and soggy with grease, they were crispy and potato-ey. All in all, it was a wise choice.

So after dinner me and the rest of the guys went to this bar/club in Carroll Gardens called the Clover Club, which is all done up on the inside like a 1920s speakeasy – the bartenders had a serious old barman clothing vibe, the waitresses were wearing evening-gown-ish stuff, etc. Okay, well, the Foursquare page lists it as being gilded-age and not 1920s, and that it’s in Boerum Hill and not Carroll Gardens, but whatever, I’m close enough. We ordered a bowl of punch – booze punch. With booze, and lemonade, or something, and fruits in it. Served in cut glass. It was a snug vibe I think we all agreed. Of course, I kind of embarrassed myself by having my wallet open to get my medicine out as the waitress walked up, so it was a bunch of dudes with little baggies of pills on the table. Nothing sketchy about that at all, no way.

Oh well, enough about that! There were totally some strawberries in there, that tasted like they had been soaked in gin for like a month. Now that’s not really what happened – I don’t even remember if there was even gin in the punch – but that’s what it tasted like, and it was pretty good. In fact, the strawberries in alcohol was only a foreshadowing of the wedding on Sunday, but that’s another post. A very long post about a lot of delicious foods and hilariousness.

Anyway, since we were in Carroll Gardens, or Boerum Hill, or whatever, we had to walk back through Gowanus, my favorite neighborhood, to get to Park Slope. I made sure that we walked back on Carroll St so we could go over my favorite bridge in New York. No, not the Brooklyn Bridge or the George Washington or even the Verrazano. My favorite bridge is the Carroll St retractile bridge over the Gowanus Canal. Yeah, that’s right, the dirty nasty filthy Gowanus Canal that probably should be designated a Superfund site. Well, the bridge is cool, see.

It’s a retractile bridge: that is, instead of being a drawbridge or a tilt bridge or whatever kind of movable bridge you may be familiar with, this bridge rolls back on rails diagonally into the shore, next to Carroll St. It also has a modern sign with a very old ordinance, warning drivers to slow to a walking pace or risk a fine of five dollars! Ouch, that’s a pretty penny right there I say. Anyway, you can check the bridge out on street view for yourself.

So we sat around at Alex’s place for a while and went to bed. I’ll post what we did on Saturday (and Sunday!) soon, but for now you can look at (and leave comments on) pictures I took on Friday and Saturday here at the pics site: http://iaatb.net/pics/october-2011-brooklyn-manhattan/