November 21, 2023
It’s amazing how much you can fit in a single day when you’re traveling. A week of activities and experiences of normal life can easily take place between one sunrise and sunset whilst on the road.
On my grand East Coast tour in November 2023, I took advantage of an opportunity for a short layover in New York City. I reserved a one night stay on a friend’s air mattress, and booked a seat on an early morning bus from Virginia. I scheduled my departure in the early afternoon on the following day via Metro North to the Hudson Valley.
In the 12 waking hours after disembarking my I-95 express bus, I:
drew for several hours on a sketchwalk with 2 friends, one who was visiting from Korea and one NY resident,
walked across town to meet another friend for dinner,
another 40 minute walk downtown took me to a samba show in a speakeasy,
took the train into Brooklyn to stop by at the cool kids internet cafe,
played cabinet arcade games in (!) my friend’s apartment before passing out on her air mattress.
Just one of those activities would be plenty of activitiy in a day at home, but I did it all on a random Tuesday without trying that hard. Only in NYC!
However, this post is about how I spent the following morning, in Bushwick: my home between 2014 and 2017.
My only desire was to Walk Around Alone in Bushwick. It was very difficult to plan this layover: because you can literally do anything in NYC, so how can you do anything? But I knew spending time in the neighborhood would be a fun and good use of time, especially to recharge my introvert batteries going into Thanksgiving events.
I appreciate my former neighborhood much more now than I did when I lived there. It’s gritty but warm, with lots of good texture and life on the streets. It’s really not a beautiful Brooklyn neighborhood, there are no big trees lining the streets or brownstone buildings…but it does definitely have character.
Bushwick is two neighborhoods east from the river, on the north side of Brooklyn. Recently mainly a Puerto Rican neighborhood, but it gentrified quickly in the last decade; Catholic and gamer/anime street art proliferate. It has lots of interesting areas for sketching material around the elevated J/M/Z trains.
One thing that helped me appreciate this was seeing European sketcher Hugo Costa’s Bushwick drawings, which I unfortunately didn’t find until I was about to move away. He loves Bushwick so much so how could I not see it with new eyes!
First thing was to figure out my timing,: when exactly to get on the M train, so I could grab my suitcase where it was stashed on W 30th st a tennis shop, jump on an uptown bus, find my way through Grand Central Terminal and get on the Metro North.
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