At the Pier, Coney Island

Architectural Grille

In September

What's sweeter than a cherry ice at summer's end? The sun's still hot, but days are shortening, as summer dips into the fall.  And coming home from the train, there on the block, is the ice cart.  The luck of it! To buy an ice for a couple of bucks, and take it only steps away, and sit to eat it on the sidewalk by your door.  To spoon it in its concentrated cold before it melts, with movements both rapid and precise. By the end of it all your mouth's stained red. The ice is gone and you're the cherry flavor now.

Truth be told, the carts are easy enough to find, and stick around well beyond summer, or even fall.  I've eaten cherry ices in Detective Joseph Mayrose Park in winter, when the weather turned mild enough.  It's pretty great to eat a cherry ice outside round Christmas.  If you don't think about it too much.  But the ones in September are the best, so loaded with sentiment, what with the year turning and another birthday gone, and everything speeding up beyond control.  Eat them as slowly as you can.  But hurry. 

Penthouse Perfection

B&A Got a Mural!

The placement is excellent.

Front Yard

Happy Birthday Pres (1909 - 1959)

Frozen Water USA

Forth

The dog reacted badly to the move.  Familiar streets walked from a different home base confused and frightened him.  He refused to turn up certain blocks and one time slipped his collar and bolted.  The prospect of walks set him panting and trembling.  When it was time to go out, he hid.

He's much better now.  The panting and the trembling has gone.  Indoors, he lounges rather than skulks.  When we're out, he still wants to set his own, seemingly arbitrary routes, but is easily coaxed to compromise.  It's as though he's resetting his place in a tilted world, mapping the design of his new old territory.

I'm the same, minus the trauma.  I find I don't miss the old house a bit.  I love this geographic rearrangement.  What's your immediate neighborhood?  Five, ten, twenty blocks?  Even a short move changes the radius, and sets a lot of the regular walks into reverse.  The angles are all different.  Even a street you've walked thousands of times is new again.  For that, and this shift in the altogether right direction, thanks.

20th

Another wooden house getting an extra floor.  Are there fewer demolitions & more (substantial) alterations these days, at least on smaller parcels?  At any rate, this naff, extra-floor-on-wooden house stuff is getting to be a thing.

An 80s tax photo shows the original structure looking much the same as it does today,

but in the 40s it's quite different.  There's a store on the first floor, the old, original cornice is still there, and wild, two-tone asphalt shingles cover the building.  Early twentieth-century psychedelic!

In July of 1915 four-year-old Eleanor Maggie fell from a fire-escape back of the house with barely a bruise to show for it.