Happy Valentine’s Day, UESiders!
Happy Presidents’ Day and Happy Lunar New Year, too!
And add to the pleasures of a long weekend and the upcoming Year of the Sheep/Goat, some lovely Greenmarket news:
Janice and Lew of Cherry Lane Farm welcomed son Lewis IV into the world on February 2nd!!
Baby Lewis IV
Lew III and Baby Lewis IV
One wonderful way to launch into a jam-packed new week:
Saturday, February 14th: 82nd Street/St. Stephen’s Greenmarket
82nd Street between First and York, 9am –2pm
Compost & Clothes Collection – 9am – 1pm
Saturday, February 14th: Shred-A-Thon – Valentine’s Day Edition
82nd Street between First & York, 10am-2pm
The clock is ticking… A matter of hours and the great Shredding Truck will be in position on 82nd!
So bring on that paper in spades!!
But one last time… NO cardboard or handled shopping bags.
REMOVE those paper clips and spiral bindings, please.
And NO HARDCOVER BOOKS. (But we’ll take paperbacks.)
(Get those unwanted hardcovers over to Goodwill.)
AND one big thank you to Council Members Kallos and Garodnick and Kallos for their grants!
Saturday, February 14th: Central Park Ice Festival
Naumberg Bandshell, Mid-Park 66th to 72nd Street, 3-7pm
Celebrate your love of Central Park (and an abundance of no-chance-in-hell-it’ll-melt ice) this Valentine’s Day! Watch as ice artists carve 3,000 pounds of cold stuff into a twin of the Park’s Romeo and Juliet sculpture! Disco dance 1980’s-style on the Mall! Open to and appropriate for all ages. Free. For more…
Sunday, February 15th: Washington’s Birthday Ball
Mount Vernon House Museum & Garden, 421 East 61st Street, 1-3pm
Party like it’s 1790 and just like George and Martha with period music, dancing (experts will show you and the kids how), refreshments and toasts to our great first president. Total family fun! Members and children under 12: $10. Everybody else: $15.
Thursday, February 19th through Sunday, March 1st: Lunar New Year Celebrations
All Around Town
From the Houston Street to Sunset Park to the Prospect Park Zoo… Think Chinese folk performance, martial arts, firecrackers and more and all courtesy of NYC Parks! Free. For the lowdown…
Saturday, February 21st: Inside the Holographer’s Laboratory
Holographic Studios, 240 East 26th Street, 11am-12:30pm
Trust the Obscura Society to come up with the truly far out… As in time up close with holograph pioneer/artist Jason Sabon, his gallery of holographic portraiture and laser laboratory! $25. For reservations/tickets…
And in the miscellaneous department:
Congrats, Frankfurt, Germany! You are now the #1 most sustainable city in the world!
Of course, we’re not alone in feeling besieged by ill-considered alterations to our neighborhood landscape… Case and point: Wood vs. cement to repair Sandy damage to the Coney Island boardwalk…
You are correct, friends. Flooding in the U.S. and river floods, in particular, are a more frequent occurrence…
Great that there’s an EPA program to replace aging – and polluting – school buses with greener models...
Hardcore downtowners may miss the the graffiti and decay. We’re always happy when even the smallest bit of our worthy architectural past remains in place and is given new life.
Fingers crossed the same happy fate awaits Loew’s 46th Street Theater out in Brooklyn… (Why not another fabulous movie palace restoration?)
Still in the architectural mode: Check out the evolution of the Met from 1880 forward…
Come spring/summer, there’ll be a lot of milkweed plants – not a weed and food vital to monarch butterfly survival – gracing our First Ave Bike Islands and our stretch of the Esplanade (Stuyvesant Cove is an official stop on the Monarch Butterfly migration route!)… But there are right and wrong varieties. For the right ones to be putting in your garden (or the Bike Island you adopt)…
asclepias incarnata (AKA milkweed)
Many a feathered friend (and friends of feathered friends) this time out:
Commencing with humans who studied animals… Like the astonishing number of female ornithologists in Cornell’s Class of 1921!
Ahem! Heart-String-Tugging/Cuteness Alert!! Australia’s oldest man – 109 and going strong – knits tiny sweaters for penguin victims of oil spills… Really.
And we close with this from the Hudson River Almanac:
1/24 – Manhattan, HRM 7: A male common redpoll visited the Evodia Field feeders in the Ramble in Central Park today. – Ed Gaillard
Shivering but green,
UGS
