Street Cleaning Vol 13: Do Nothing Somewhere

Street Cleaning is the monthly feature of quick takes, links, and nonsense. Have something interesting you think I should share? Send it my way!

Seoul: More humid than the Devil’s gym sock. London: brown and dry, might as well be Bakersfield. New York: non-stop schvitz. All the cities in my life are at the brain-fogged end of the hottest summer of all time. I am like a fat sponge waiting to be squeezed out by Fall. In this state, the urge to write about serious urban planning is low. Also, no one seems to be reading posts recently… which is good! Truth is, despite the heat, city summer is fun, and I hope you are out living it up. Summer is traditionally thought of as vacation, a time to flee the city. But I don’t see the point of paying to puke from heat stroke in Provence when I can go to a free concert in Central Park. In my childless era, let me travel in Fall and Spring.

If you have a free weekend or evening in NYC, the Mayor’s office has pulled together a very nice website of all the free things to do this summer. There are a free concert series, open museum hours, and street fairs. There is a lot of stuff, but there are also a lot of great places to do nothing. Doing nothing, somewhere, is a lost art. There are certain points in the city that, through their dramatic setting or mix of people, are entertaining simply to be in.

I like the pier to nowhere at Transmitter Park. It’s so long it feels like it gets you into the middle of the river. At night, the full twinkling wall of the skyline is arrayed before you. Seaplanes land in the water, sometimes they crash. A sandwich or a beer on this pier is an hour well spent.

I once biked by the lighthouse at the tip of Roosevelt Island and saw an NYU engineering frat having a great-looking cookout. I have a $40 butane camping burner that I use for hot-pot at my house. It fits into its own little briefcase, and I’m tempted to take it there with hot dogs for one or two. Either there, or I want to hide under the cantilevered viewing platform in Hunter’s Point Park and cook at the edge of the wetlands. Both of these are great places to post up, with grill or without.

City beaches are obviously great places to do nothing. Everyone has the wrong attitude about NYC beaches. People like Fort Tilden and Riis because they think if they squint past the trucker hats and tattoos, it could be Martha’s Vineyard, but you can’t squint that hard. Embrace the urbaness! A city beach is its own wonderful category of beach. Go to the busiest part of Rockaway like I did last weekend and see a guy fully clothed bury himself in the sand and fall asleep. Go to Brighton Beach and eat lamb ribs like I’m doing tomorrow. The water at Riis is just as dirty as the water at Coney Island and a lot less fun.

Or don’t go anywhere. Just take your shirt off and sit down right where you are. Grab your dog and scroll through your phone on a road median, it’s better than doing it in the dark inside.

• Some more on Andy Burnham’s promise to decentralize the UK Government away from London, and how this could ironically be great for London.

• I love storefronts so this terrifies and angers me.

• I really enjoyed this piece from one of John Surico’s journalism students on the British theater industry. Live shows are a huge part of the cultural and economic life of any major city.

• New York is Old