A Walk in NoLita, Sometimes Speaking French

To get to the New Museum of Contemporary Art on the Bowery from where I live in the Village I walk through the precious neighborhood of NoLita. I say "precious," because this neighborhood North of Little Italy is home to many attractive small boutiques and stylish bistros, and it feels like it could be bottled and sold for a large price. In fact, that's happening. The prices for several new condos in the neighborhood's attractive renovated Victorian-era buildings start in the six- and seven-million dollar range. And the proximity of the New Museum solidifies NoLita's stature as a hot neighborhood, with galleries, shoe boutiques and other art-friendly places popping up here and there.

Walking along Prince or Spring toward the museum, I have several old and new, ecclesiastical and secular, places to note along the way:

Buildings: The St. Patrick's Old Cathedral at Mott and Prince, served as the Roman Catholic Cathedral until the big St. Patrick's was built on Fifth Avenue; and The Fourteenth Ward Industrial School, a Victorian building designed in 1888 by Calvert Vaux and George Radford, on Mott, built by the Astors for the children of neighborhood immigrants;

Food: Chibi's Bar (devoted to sake) and Cafe Gitane on Mott, Ceci-Cela on Spring.

Edification: McNally Robinson Booksellers on Prince. I could name many more places I like.

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While walking in NoLita yesterday, it seemed like 83% of the people were speaking French. Places like Cafe Gitane and Ceci-Cela attract French visitors, or possibly, local Francophiles practicing their language skills.

NoLita is not gentrified on every square inch. Along another street it's possible to see long-time residents playing board games in a concrete fenced park and children playing ball. Not everyone there is an attractive young French-speaking person, although it often seems that way.

Image and Map of NoLita by Walking Off the Big Apple.

Diversion: Hot Chocolate with Melting Peeps, and Easter Treats in the Big City

Everyone I've talked to agrees that Easter is too early this year. Not that we can help it. St. Patrick's Day and Easter in the same week is wrong. The presence of two parades of that magnitude in New York City in the same week is wrong.

With the winter chill still lingering, wool coat collars turned up against the wind, I'm not feeling appropriately pastel. I'm willing, nevertheless, to make the best of the situation at hand. In that spirit, I decided that nothing would be better this afternoon than a winter cup of hot chocolate with a couple of melting yellow Peeps.

It's prettier and tastier than I imagined, and the Peeps looked sweet during their final sleep of drowning chocolate death.


Edible Easter Creations in the City

In strolling about the city, I've taken note of some of the fine Easter creations of lower Manhattan's bakeries and chocolate artists. Among them (with links):

Jacques Torres (350 Hudson at King St. and285 Amsterdam Ave at 73rd St.) features chocolate-covered Peeps in milk or dark chocolate.

Duane Park Patisserie (179 Duane St.) makes pretty Easter baskets out of chocolate.

Vosges (132 Spring St.), always edgy in chocolate land, offers Easter Bunny hat boxes with caramels, 1 Red Fire Bunny, 1 Barcelona Bunny & ½ lb Bapchi's Caramel. Or go for the flying pig made out of a chocolate-bacon blend. Hmmm....

I recommend MarieBelle's Aztec Hot Chocolate for at-home science projects involving melting Peeps. 484 Broome St.

Image: melting Peeps in hot chocolate. Walking Off the Big Apple, at home in her kitchen, somewhere in the free Republic of Greenwich Village. March 18, 2008.

Tribeca Living: A Building for Chocolate and One for the Wool Trade

The Powell Building (1892) at 105 Hudson Street (at Franklin St.), shown on the left, was designed by Carrere & Hastings, the architects of the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street and the Frick mansion, among other others. In 1890, Henry L. Pierce, the head of a chocolate company in Massachusetts, wanted a nice building for his company, a step up from the plain vanilla of industrial architecture. Hence, this elegant Beaux Arts-style building.

After Pierce died his estate sold the building to candy manufacturer Alexander Powell who, in turn, hired his architect to enlarge the building and add stories. In the 1970s the building's higher floors were converted into residences. The Japanese restaurant Nobu (restaurant website) is on the first floor, in the same place that Powell once displayed his chocolates.

The Renaissance revival building at 260 West Broadway (at Beach St.), its curved entrance shown on the right, was built as the New York Wool Exchange in 1894-96. The wilier wool traders of New York hoped to trump the wool traders of Boston with such an edifice, but the scheme never worked. In 1907 the American Thread Company took over the building, and since the 1920s it's been known by that name. Now, not surprisingly, the building is operated as a condominium.

Images by Walking Off the Big Apple. Part of the series, Walking Off Tribeca.

For those in search of chocolate and were disappointed reading this post, please see Wee Willy WOTBA's Downtown Chocolate Walk, for chocolate locations north of Tribeca.

See related posts:
The Woolworth Building
Establishing Shots: The Tribeca Film Festival
The Tribeca of Duane: Duane Street and Duane Park
Tribeca's Most Tripped-Out Vista
In Search of the Lower West Side: Before Tribeca
Walking Off Tribeca and Remembering Mostly Lunch
Walking Off Tribeca: The Lay of the Land
Walking Off Tribeca: Starting at Square One

Walking Off Tribeca and Remembering Mostly Lunch

When I returned from my long walk and lunch in Tribeca today, I felt over-stimulated but more tired than usual. Traveling can be both stimulating and exhausting at the same time. Beyond the physical demands of exploration, an encounter with new sources of stimuli can induce mental fatigue. Walking around unfamiliar streets takes more work than the ones you already know.

Some of my haphazard impressions of the day in Tribeca:

enjoying the facades of the buildings along White Street;
the glimpses of the Hudson River and all that blue;
Duane Street and its gentle and elegant restraint;
the jarring presence of neo-Brutalist towers juxtaposed with more human scale nineteenth-century buildings;
a painter putting the finishing touches on a propped-open door of Robert De Niro's not-yet-open Greenwich Hotel and catching a look at some of the fine detailing;
the eight-foot crater on Church Street where a water main blew this morning, and hundreds of city workers trying to fix it;
a flower market with seasonal tulips and hyacinths;
a wide and busy Church Street;
cell phone conversations, 90% of which were about Eliot Spitzer.

Mostly, I remember lunch. I didn't have a particular spot picked out in advance, and I walked around until I was hungry. The Cosmopolitan Cafe at 95 W. Broadway looked good. The cafe was intimate and well-decorated with tables close together and a selection of books lined against the wall. I chose a table in the back. I enjoyed the quiche of the day - spinach and gruyere, and it came with a nice salad with lemony dressing and a selection of fruit. Afterwards, the proprietor surprised me by placing a cup of hot chocolate and a plate with a ginger cookie on the table and saying it was their "treat."

After that gesture, I enjoyed the walk home, even if I'm too tired to remember anything now. I may live in Greenwich Village, but Tribeca seems far away.

Here's a find! A blog about food in Tribeca: Taste of Tribeca.
Website for the Cosmopolitan Hotel.

See related posts:
The Woolworth Building
Establishing Shots: The Tribeca Film Festival
The Tribeca of Duane: Duane Street and Duane Park
Tribeca's Most Tripped-Out Vista
Tribeca Living: A Building for Chocolate, and One for the Wool Trade
In Search of the Lower West Side: Before Tribeca
Walking Off Tribeca: The Lay of the Land
Walking Off Tribeca: Starting at Square One

Walking Off Tribeca: Starting at Square One

The Square Diner at the corner of Leonard and Varick in Tribeca smells of strong coffee and a hot griddle full of pancakes. Housed in one of the last authentic rail cars, with a ceiling of handsome wood paneling and a row of wide sliding windows facing the street, the diner is the kind of place you trust for breakfast and where catsup is comfortably within reach.

This morning, after I sat down in a booth in the Square Diner, I ordered the big breakfast to which many of us have grown accustomed - two eggs, bacon, toast, New York-style breakfast potatoes, and lots of coffee. The meal didn't disappoint, and while drinking the last cup of coffee I turned to look out the window to look at what was happening on the street.

Across the street I could see a little sliver of a park with a handful of trees. Finn Square, it's called, named for a hero of the Great War. To the left, I could see a handsome tall red brick building, and then beyond the park, a couple of buildings with Italianate facades along Franklin Street. Immediately across the street, trucks lined up in front of the non-descript ConEd facility. Over to the right, I watched the construction crews work on the steel skeleton of a new law school building, and just across the street from the diner, more workers digging the foundation for a new condominium development.

After leaving the Square Diner, I walked west on Franklin and then turned north on Greenwich Street. As I crossed the intersections heading home, I could see the bright blue sky and the Hudson River to the west. Along the street, many well-kept and renovated nineteenth century buildings, once storage facilities and the site of textile businesses, now house some of the most affluent residents of the city. As is the case for many sections of Manhattan, the building boom has not ceased in Tribeca for the city's new well-heeled class of global workers.

I don't know much about the lives or interests of these loftiest residents of Tribeca. I hope to find out more in the days ahead. But, at least for the start of my explorations, I've found a good place in this triangular neighborhood for a nice square breakfast.

Note: This is the first of a series of posts about the Tribeca neighborhood in lower Manhattan.

See related posts:
The Woolworth Building
Establishing Shots: The Tribeca Film Festival
The Tribeca of Duane: Duane Street and Duane Park
Tribeca's Most Tripped-Out Vista
Tribeca Living: A Building for Chocolate, and One for the Wool Trade
In Search of the Lower West Side: Before Tribeca
Walking Off Tribeca and Remembering Mostly Lunch
Walking Off Tribeca: The Lay of the Land

University Place: Pedestrian, Yes, But in a Good Way (Slideshow)

University Place, a relatively short street in lower Manhattan, links Washington Square Park to the south with Union Square to the north. A thoroughfare frequented by NYU students, neighborhood residents, and office workers, the street enjoys a democratic mix of bars, coffee shops, diners, restaurants, boutiques, laundries, shoe repair shops, florists, and even a bowling alley. A few haunts of old New York can be found along in here - the Knickerbocker Bar & Grill, a favorite of the late Brooke Astor, and Patsy's, one of Frank Sinatra's preferred stops for pizza pie. Residents try to keep straight three similarly-sounding places - Café Spice, Space Market, and Spice.

University Place is pedestrian in both senses - it's an ordinary street, nothing to write home about, but it's also a good place for walking. I frequently walk up University Place to shop at the green market on Union Square, but sometimes I like to just stroll up the street for no good reason at all. Many of the eateries provide seats at the counter facing the street, the perfect place to sit and watch everyone walk by.

A few changes are afoot, as they say. At the intersection of University Place and 8th Street, Joyce Leslie, an inexpensive popular clothing store for women with bodies and tastes unlike like my own, is relocating to Broadway. Across the street, on the east side, the bbq restaurant, where I often enjoyed watching people drink gigantic frozen margaritas in the summertime, has left the building and will now be the home of a bank. No fun. I hope the rest of the street stays its sweet pedestrian self.

Photos by Walking Off the Big Apple. March 5, 2008

Monday Roundup: Chelsea Planning Tip, Whitney Biennial, Green Peppercorn Sauce, and Other Items

Visiting Chelsea. Maybe the following quick Descent Into Art Hell in Chelsea has happened to others: I hate when I'm in Chelsea and I've just realized I wanted to visit a particular gallery but it's four streets back now and I walked right past it earlier and I don't feel like trying to find the stupid door on the self-important gallery anymore and I hate looking at art in this part of the neighborhood in the first place where there are hardly any trees and curse the person that thought warehouses and factories for baking cookies were good places to view art and where there's no place to sit down and it's kinda far from the subway and I don't feel like going back there now. I'm going home.

Golly. WOTBA needs some HELP. Look at that little girl on the horse. She looks like she's spoiled and could cry. I'm better now, thank you. I've started planning my trips to this well-known art mecca in advance through the website chelseaartgalleries.com, and I am a better person for it. The website includes a feature that allows you to plan shows you want to see by organizing them by street, and then you can print out the list. With organizing my excursions, I can enjoy myself now and even include some impromptu gallery visits.

Food. I've found good places for hamburgers. I like Rare on Bleecker, Soho Park on Prince, and now, I like Stand on E. 12th. I went to Stand last night and ordered the hamburger with green peppercorn sauce. Best thing ever. I prefer the lighting in the other places, however. Inside Stand, the spot lighting is a little too theatrical for me, and where I was sitting I thought I'd be called upon to deliver a monologue.

I met some friends for lunch the other day near MoMA. We gathered at Sushiya (Menu Pages) at 28 W. 56th Street, between 5th and 6th Ave., and I thought the sushi was some of the best I've had in New York. Very fresh, sublime texture. They kept replenishing our green tea, so we had to cover the glasses with our hands.

Lecture on Raymond Hood. For those who enjoyed reading about the architect on this website and will be in NYC this week, Carol Willis, the director of The Skyscraper Museum (39 Battery Place), will be delivering a lecture titled "Raymond Hood 'The Brilliant Bad Boy' of New York Architecture" on March 4th, 6:30-8 p.m.$10. More info here.

The Whitney Biennial 2008 opens this Thursday, March 6. The website is up and running, with bios and images of the participating artists. Ideas of fluidity, ephemera and displacement prevail among this youngish group of artists, and it looks like we'll all be invited to blog along.

Image: Myself, on horse, as a small child. Place: A Bar A Ranch, Encampment, Wyoming. Year: Once upon a time in the West.

We're Not All Like Dubya: A NY Map for Texas Independence Day

Not all Texans are like the former governor of Texas who currently serves as President of the United States (324 days left, and counting). I have to explain this difference when I meet some New Yorkers and they find out where I'm from. I, for one, prefer to think that the Texas Man, if we're talking gender, is better represented by Robert Rauschenberg, Freddy Fender, Terry Allen, Luis Jimenez, Tommy Lee Jones, Willie Nelson, Bill Moyers, Buddy Holly, Kinky Friedman, Tommy Tune, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Rip Torn, and Alvin Ailey than by Dubya. Call it Texas pride. I, as Texas Woman, like to think that I follow in the kick-ass traditions of Ann Richards, Barbara Jordan and Molly Ivins, women who made some horse sense of politics.

Today is March 2, Texas Independence Day, the day to commemorate the adoption of the Texas Declaration of Independence on March 2, 1836 in the town of Washington-on-the-Brazos. Here I am in New York City. Three Texas cities are in the top ten U.S. cities by population - Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas. That's an important fact, because it's not like all Texans wake up to look out on a vast plain of nothingness. I have to explain this, too. Many people have that image from watching movies.


View Larger MapAnyway, here's a map of some Texas "points of light" on the island of Manhattan. Most of the places on this map are bbq restaurants I like or ones recommended by friends. I threw in some corny places here, such as places to buy western wear and cowboy boots.

Let me tell you an amusing story. I sometimes dress like Johnny Cash, but so do many New Yorkers. One day, while I was living in South Carolina, I decided that I needed more black shirts of the western sort. I went into a vintage clothing store and found nine black western shirts. When I took them up to the cash register, the owner of the store and a friend of mine looked at me and said, "You do not need nine shirts that all basically look the same." So, she picked out three shirts and made me put the others back.

I don't know if I'll do anything in particular for Texas Independence Day, but I know for a fact that many flag-waving native Texans in the Big Apple will at some point today gravitate to Hill Country.

In the News:
Clinton Irks Texas Democrats by June Kronholz (WSJ)

In the Blogosphere:
I recently came across these hilarious Texas sisters and their videos. I urge all New York actors assigned to imitate a Texas accent to study these videos hard. Here's one I particularly enjoy.

Image: Beaumont, Texas. Women shipyard workers leaving the Pennsylvania shipyards. Vachon, John, 1914-1975, photographer. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, [reproduction number, e.g., LC-USF35-1326]

More Walking Off the Big Apple Maps

Roundup: The Plaza Hotel, Sondheim's Seurat, the Texas Primary, and the Upcoming Gelato Showdown in the Village

As I gather my thoughts about the Chichester Festival Theatre's entertaining production of Macbeth that I saw last night at BAM, I would like to pass on a few updates and news items:

• I've now assembled all the posts from The New York of Raymond Hood, Architect self-guided walk onto new pages and placed them under the list of walks on the site's sidebar. I've added a small slideshow of more images of the buildings.

• The Plaza Hotel reopens Saturday, March 1, and I look forward to visiting. I've been meaning to comment on the story, "It's Lonely at the Plaza Hotel," by Christine Haughney from the February 17, 2008 edition of The New York Times. Apparently, the new condo owners are lonesome, as not everyone can afford a place in their legendary hotel. The story quotes one woman who told the reporter that she "wouldn’t mind meeting someone other than the decorators, real estate brokers and other service workers fussing over the apartments." I know exactly how she feels. All I can say is that I'm available. I would love to hang out in The Plaza. Anyone living at The Plaza who might be reading this and who would enjoy some company, please write walkbigapple@yahoo.com.

• Mapping Texas for the Primary. As a native Texan, I have many opinions about the upcoming Texas presidential primary. I recommend reading Randy Kennedy's NYT article, "Pieces of Texas Turn Primary Into a Puzzle," that explains the diversity of the vast Texas political landscape. My mother, a proper East Texan who wore skirts, hose, and high heels her entire life, thought I would become uncivilized if I spent any time with West Texans. Of course, I rebelled. No further evidence is necessary beyond looking in my closet and seeing what is not there.

• Art lovers suffering from a Seurat withdrawal after the closing of the exhibit at MoMA should make note that a new production of Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George, now playing at Studio 54 (254 West 54th Street), has received good reviews and extended its run through June 15, 2008.

• (Image) Yesterday, I spotted the sign for the new gelato place coming to Bleecker Street later this spring. GROM's first NY location is up on Broadway on the Upper West Side. The Village location, an excellent site on Father Demo Square, will set up a showdown between this Turin-based upstart and L'Arte del Gelato on Seventh Ave. It will be like a spaghetti western but with gelato. As I posted earlier, I am observing a strict gelato diet for Lent. It's not going well.

Wee Willy WOTBA's Downtown Chocolate Walk

Yesterday was the colonel's birthday, so he asked me to go over to Bruno Bakery and buy a couple of cakes for an impromptu celebration. It's a hard job, but someone's got to pick out the chocolate cakes. Now, facing the prospect of Valentines Day, I must once again go back into the world and find chocolate candy. Gee, life's tough. Fortunately, chocolate has known health benefits, so I can rationalize any purchase. Buying a little chocolate also helps the economy by boosting consumer "sentiment."

I first devised this self-guided chocolate walk for visiting friends who expressed interest in such a thing. I sent them to chocolate meccas in SoHo - Vosges, Mariebelle, and Kee's, stores within just a few blocks of one another. Now I feel compelled to broaden the walk to include Jacques Torres, Chocolate Bar, and a few pastry shops that also feature quality chocolates. I'm also partial to the very elegant La Maison du Chocolat up on Madison, but that's too far off my personal grid.


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Shopping for Valentines Day should also include a roundup of chocolate-covered strawberries, red velvet cakes, a big bouquet of red roses, and a bag of those little hearts with sayings on them. Greeting cards may be involved. After festively decorating the dining room table with these items, you've pretty much taken care of your own needs and could consider what to get for anyone else.

Image: Inside a case at Bruno Bakery (musical pleasures await at the website), LaGuardia Place. February 2008.

Lost in the West Village? So Eat

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Last week I walked down E. 4th Street and noticed that the color red dominated the visual landscape. Walking on W. 4th the palette veers to the blues, greens, and teals. The cool colors dominate on the west, while the hot colors splash on the eastern blocks of 4th Street. I attribute this visual duality in large part to the cultural history of the two areas - the West Village is more Western European while the East Village blends southern European with Latin American cultural heritage.

The West Village is often confusing and disorienting, because the streets run off grid. I spend a lot of time helping lost souls regain their bearing, and sometimes I'm lost myself. Last week a woman approached me near the intersection of Bleecker and Thompson and asked me how to get to Washington and Perry. She actually looked lost, with that glassy-eyed averted glance of trying to understand the mysteries of space and time. I had to go into a trance to be able to help her.

I attribute the success of the West Village restaurant scene to the trap that the denizens set for the lost souls wandering in the neighborhood. My own personal compass is informed by the knowledge that Bleecker Street and the parallel W. 4th take tricky turns toward the north beginning at 6th Avenue. That's really all I need to know. Walking north on Bleecker after 6th Avenue, for example, I know that turning left will take me further west.

I've started to compile a list of restaurants and cafes in the West Village for anyone who is interested in veering into such a trickster neighborhood and has some patience with getting lost.

Another way I orient myself in the West Village is to take my big dog with me. She loves the Hudson River pier so much that she will drag me there.

The Foodie Blocks of Bleecker Street, and a Map

I feel like such an enabler. Some people come to this website seeking help on walking to lose weight, and I stick up pictures of food in their face. I should explain.

Bleecker Street, just a few steps out my door, is a well-recognized food haven for many visitors and New Yorkers. I am of the opinion, however, that beautiful food, made locally by people who are trained in tradition, adds to the quality of life. In an earlier post, I extolled the virtues of handmade gelato. The people who make my favorite gelato consider themselves true artists. A sense of artistry is part of the best culinary traditions, just as many craft traditions maintain the standards of beauty that mass production forfeits.


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I often visit the food blocks of Bleecker just to pick up the lasagne at Murray's, the bread at Amy's or the pignoli cookies at Rocco's. Even during the times when I'm shopping at Pet Central acquiring the gourmet items for Snoopy and Lassie (not their real names), I enjoy looking at the windows of these food establishments. Food can look beautiful, and I don't have to eat anything.

Walking Off the Big Apple's Lenten Gelato Diet

While walking on Bleecker Street yesterday and looking at all the food in the windows of the street's foodie blocks, and stopping for awhile to watch the firemen put out a fire above Indian Taj (all of which I'll show you soon), I held in my hand the item you see before you until it disappeared. Gelato, I thought, would be my answer to the Grapefruit, though I greatly enjoy the grapefruit in its ruby red variety, in much the same way as that of my fellow countryman, President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Waking up on this Wednesday and noting it was to time to count all the sins of omission and sins of commission for the next forty days, as I was well trained by the priests of the Episcopal Church, I have set upon a diet plan based on gelato. As the Ice Cream Diet seems to be resurrected every decade, I think it's time to move on to the softer, more artisanal version of frozen wonderland. I am sort of over frozen yogurt. Gelato incorporates less air in its making than ice cream and should be lighter in fat.

For the Gelato Diet I will incorporate a twice-weekly indulgence with the 10,000 steps-a-day program, for, indeed, that's the 4.5 to 5 mile walking range that should allow me to walk off most of it. I also plan to cut back on portion size at every meal.

Twice a week for the next forty days, I will also order the gelato on a cone, as the cone provides practical and aesthetic pleasures while walking. Walking down the street with a cone of gelato frees the other hand to wave at friends and admirers.

Image: Stratchiatella and dark chocolate nutella gelato. L'Arte del Gelato, 75 Seventh Avenue, NY, NY.

NY Party Time for Super Tuesday, the NY Giants Parade and Mardi Gras

Call it a Trifecta, but the convergence of the multi-state primary day, including New York, this morning's downtown ticker-tape parade for the Super Bowl Champs, and Fat Tuesday make for a mighty Party Time Harmonic Convergence.

Time to pull out the cookbook. Pigs in a blanket? A little guac? How about a Mardi Gras cake with a little figurine of Eli Manning or Ron Paul hidden inside?

I just discovered the delightful Betty Crocker's Cookbook for boys & girls (1975) at the Internet Archive. For anyone who enjoys the artistry of baking and cooking, I think it's time to put kids back in the kitchen and whip up the magic for the whole family.

I'll be reporting on the exciting events of the day, in addition to items previously scheduled. The only bummer is the weather forecast - ground lightening is forecast for later this morning around the time of the Giants ticker tape parade. Also, Transit Advisory! The Mayor (who sort of runs for President) asks that anyone going to the parade this morning should stay off the 4, 5, and 6 trains, because they're too crowded anyway with regular commuters. So, walk! And wear galoshes.

Images: Pigs in a Blanket from the Betty Crocker's Cookbook for boys & girls (1975). Not in Copyright. See full text at Internet Archive.

Weekend Frivolities: Cupcakes, Buildings, Obama, Comments Now Open

• After finishing that last self-guided walk, Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos, I felt like I had walked from Fifth Avenue to Santa Fe and back. That was a big walk! I'm still putting together the interactive map of Fifth Avenue, but the rest of the walk is now fully assembled on new blue and beige pages HERE. From analyzing the site feed, I see that a lot of people liked that walk.
• For blogger-types who like to write long posts like myself, I highly recommend using Google Pages, a feature still in the Google Labs. That's how I'm putting together the complete versions of the walks.
• The cold weather makes me hungry, so yesterday I decided to visit Sugar Sweet Sunshine on Rivington and drink some coffee and eat a red velvet cupcake (or rvc, as I like to call them). They have two kinds, one with white icing and another with chocolate icing. I don't advocate walking to a bakery as a destination if weight loss is a goal, but I decided that if you walk far enough, you can walk it off and it's OK.
• I like the building on Avenue A with the BURGER KLEIN and Gracefully signs, so I took a picture of it. The other picture here is of the RV cupcakes.
• I have a hard time remembering the name of the place I got the cupcakes, and I think they should change their name to Rivington Bakery. Another place I like is Connecticut Muffin on Prince Street near the New Museum, but last time I was there they had taken the sign down. With the New Museum, the name didn't sound cool enough and so they plan on just going by 10 Prince Street. I have to agree that Connecticut Muffin sounds too uncool.
• When I was walking back home along E. 4th Street, I saw the color red everywhere, and I plan to go back to take photographs of all the red things.
• I lost a lot of pretend money in CNN's Political Market last night. It's a site for trading shares in a prediction market about the presidential campaign. I thought Obama was going to beat Clinton in the South Carolina Democratic Party primary by around 10 points, but he won by a much much wider margin with 55% to her 27%.
• I've been writing Walking Off the Big Apple for over six months now, and it's time I turned on the Comments section. Everyone's welcome to play.

Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Dining New York by Southwest

See the related posts for Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge, Georgia O'Keeffe, and New York City.

I'm a Fritos-type person, and in my experience it's always the skinny vegetarian person who shows up with the blue corn tortilla chips at a party. Blue corn, however, is the spirit of New Mexican cuisine, in addition to posole, green chili peppers and Chimayo chili powder. While there's no exact match in New York for dining in an adobe courtyard and smelling the piñon wood burning in a horno oven while looking at the stars, the city does have a few good Southwestern restaurants worth visiting.

Mesa Grill
102 5th Ave, New York 10011
Btwn 15th & 16th St
See Frank Bruni's revisit to Bobby Flay's popular restaurant here. This review is fresh, at the time of this posting just a day old.

Agave
140 7th Ave S, New York 10014
Btwn Charles & W 10th St

Los Dos Molinos
119 E 18th St, New York 10003
Btwn Irving Pl & Park Ave

Miracle Bar & Grill
415 Bleecker St, New York 10014
Btwn Bank & W 11th St

Santa Fe Grill
62 7th Ave, Brooklyn 11217
At Lincoln Place

If in Santa Fe and Taos, these are the Classics:
Santa Fe: La Casa Seña, The Pink Adobe, Santacafé, The Shed, Coyote Café.
The Pink Adobe's Steak Dunigan, a New York Strip with sautéed mushrooms and green chili, is cow heaven. Casa Seña features a trout wrapped in banana leaves and baked in adobe, so you have to smash it open at the table. Mark Miller's Coyote Cafe, representing the Santa Fe craze of the 80s, can be a fun, though expensive, theatrical dining event.

Taos: Bent Street Cafe and Deli, Doc Martin's at the Taos Inn, Ogelvie's Bar and Grill.

My favorite southwestern chef is Stephan Pyles, but eating at his restaurant requires a trip to Dallas.

Image: The Pink Adobe, on the Old Santa Fe Trail, Santa Fe, New Mexico, with turquoise bike and dog. Photo by Walking Off the Big Green Chili Pepper.

Dining Near Washington Square Park

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Visitors to Greenwich Village may enjoy some of these food options around Washington Square Park. The list of places is particularly suited for visiting NYU. In 2008 the park underwent major renovations, and so dining near the park may be more enjoyable than staring at a construction site. I still cherish small eastern sections of the park that are set aside for later renovation.

As someone who lives near Washington Square Park, I've enjoyed many of the nearby cafés, tiny eateries, bakeries and restaurants. This map points to places that range from very expensive to everyday fare. While finances don't allow me to frequent the high end places like Blue Hill, Il Mulino, Cru, or Babbo, they come highly recommended. I'm trying to keep this list confined to a few blocks from the park. Still, I am tempted to add a couple of places just a block or two farther away - Jane's on Houston and Bellavitae on Minetta, for example, my two reliable favorites for special dining.

I regularly visit Marumi for excellent sushi, La Lanterna for pizza and desserts, Think Coffee and Joe for coffee, Leela Lounge for Indian, and Sam's Falafel. For brunch, I always enjoy North Star, the restaurant associated with the Washington Square Hotel. Order the "sampler," with eggs, chicken apple sausages, potatoes and pancakes. Their bread basket is beautiful. Try to make reservations for jazz brunch.

The Hot Tamales of Avenue A

Having grown up in Texas, I am accustomed to the tradition of Mexican tamales at Christmas time. So I decided to walk out the front door of my building in Nueva York and search for some. Labor-intensive in their making, these pockets of masa, lard and meat (pork, chicken, beef, etc.), hidden in corn husks, are best served steaming hot and accompanied by red and green salsa. I could have traveled to many far-flung neighborhoods of the city in search of the great hot tamale, but I don't like tamales well enough for them to require multiple forms of transportation.

After some internet research, I headed out to the upper reaches of the East Village to Zaragosa, a Mexican deli (215 Avenue A, between E. 13th and E. 14th St.), and hoped they had some tamales. I didn't even call first. I needed the walk anyway, as I had veered out of dietary guidelines with respect to daily gingerbread consumption. And, yes, they had some tamales that day, but just of the chicken variety. After I sat down and tried one, I brought home ten more hot chicken tamales for the colonel and company. The home-made tamales at Zaragosa are large and caliente, especially with their home-made green and red sauces. The owners are from the large city of Puebla, the birthplace of mole poblano.

The round-trip walk from Washington Square Park (not pretty right now with all the construction) to Zaragosa is about 2.5 miles. Winding my way through the streets I thought that parts of the East Village were funky enough to stand in for my memory of South Austin.

Image: Frida and tamales from Zaragosa in the East Village, now at home in Greenwich Village. By the way, I recommend the cookbook, Frida's Fiestas: Recipes and Reminiscences of Life with Frida Kahlo by Marie Pierre Colle and Guadalupe Rivera (Clarkson Potter, 1994), if only for the photos of Frida and Diego's kitchen.

Weekend Frivolities Holiday Baking Special: Freestyle Gingerbread

The image says it all. Rolling out dough for gingerbread cookies, I realized that the slab was nothing more than raw material for sculpture or a blank canvas on which I could apply paint. I looked at the cookie cutters on the counter and decided I didn't need them. It was time to get real.

It was time to get POP. So thinking about the most popular artist in the world, who is no longer with us, I pulled out a knife and started slicing through the dough. And then I thought, "What about my needs?," and so I made other shapes that spoke to my personal interests.

Decorating cookies is a fun artistic medium, especially with the edible gels and decorative frosting. The latter is nothing more than confectioners sugar, a little vanilla, a bit of beaten egg white, and food color. It's possible to make anything. I could bake an abstract expressionist collection, emphasizing the work of Franz Kline, or maybe just all Mark Rothkos. Those would be so beautiful. Or maybe I could do my own work and not be so derivative.

Anyone can do this. I used the recipes for both the gingerbread and the decorative frosting from The New York Times Cookbook by Craig Claiborne. The book is one of the best Southern cookbooks, in my opinion, because Claiborne was from Mississippi. Watch out, though, for the trans fat. I also tried a recipe for a healthier gingerbread that used egg substitute and light molasses, and though I didn't care for it as much, the sugary frosting canceled out its weaknesses.

Image: (in random order) Shoe, bananas, famous artist, cowgirl boots, flowers, portrait of Chinese leader, walking man, squirrel. Edible gels and decorative frosting on gingerbread. 2007.

How Not to Blow Your Diet During the Holidays, Illustrated

At this time of year I read many articles about unnecessary holiday eating and drinking, the kind that adds pounds that never come off. I can easily visualize the quantitative portions of various holiday desserts and appetizers that I should not consume, but alcohol is sometimes hard to ration.

Here, as illustrated in the photo, I've set out three different size wine glasses and poured one serving, or 5 ounces, into each of the glasses. The amount of wine appears different from glass to glass, n'est-ce pas? I love the short stemless glass in front, but the 5 ounces appear small in there. In the tallest wine glass at back, one serving doesn't even fill half the glass. The wine glass on the right seems perfect for one serving. By the way, I bought this particular wine glass at a restaurant supply store in the Bowery that's going out of business.

One serving of wine equals 100-120 calories, so walking off one glass will require walking one mile.

What did I learn from this experiment? I learned that if I want to enjoy just one glass of wine for a holiday get-together, I need to choose the glass that looks like it will hold just one serving of wine.