Before decamping to Brooklyn for the month I saw this on a utility box on Riverside Drive. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to share thoughts about Columbia University.

But the daffs were out and there were others busy stamping their ideas on the sidewalk by the park. 

These were presumably inspired by Jonathan Haidt’s new book – The Anxious Generation:

How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness.  

Haidt has four suggestions to relieve the anxiety:

1. No smartphones before high school.
2. No social media before 16
3. Phone-free schools
4. More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But over to Brooklyn for an earthquake we didn’t feel, and an eclipse viewed from a rooftop with NY Harbor to the west. Stickybeaking in the neighborhood we left in 1996. 

 

 

 

 

This sign on a wall was a reminder that earlier generations dealt with fear anxiety and uncertainty too. Although without benefit of the algorithms and emotional manipulation of social media.

A barge heads downstream on the East River with the South Street Seaport in the background.

Many signs of Spring at the Botanical Garden, along the Promenade, and in Brooklyn Bridge Park, front yards, and on stoops and steps.

 

 

 

The Promenade in Brooklyn Heights extends from Remsen Street to Orange Street with great views of the Harbor and downtown Manhattan. 

See how the side of the lamp that faces the apartments is blacked out. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was also a party – in the Village. We celebrated Kay’s 95th.

The Cass Review

The big read of the month was the long-awaited and magisterial Cass Review of gender identity services for children and young people commissioned by NHS England and four years in the making. 

Check it out. Essential reading for those interested in evidence-based care. No more nonsense about social transitioning, “affirming” care, and suicide risks, please.

 

 

Here’s a lamp under scaffolding on Montague Street just along from the Brooklyn Cat Cafe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Top number of cats on window display at any one time – four.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here is our own elderly item with her essential cardboard stairway. She was camped out too and adapted well.

 

 

 

 

Lots of literary history in Brooklyn Heights. This one lived here and that one there.

The “February House ” where W.H. Auden presided – so called because so many residents had birthdays in that month – was lost to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway.

 

Auden also lived on Montague Terrace – just around the corner from where Arthur Miller lived and along from Thomas Wolfe …and so on.

So many interesting architectural features.

And here’s the carousel 

One of the rides, and the illustration – a rural haymaking scene.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The harbor and the East River are busy with watercraft – pleasure boats, NYPD patrol boats, ferries, barges, and tugs.

Here’s a tug heading north under the Brooklyn Bridge. 

Back to Manhattan in time to hear the April 30th evening roar from Columbia as the NYPD took over the Columbia campus and cleared Hamilton Hall of occupiers.

The next day it was as if nothing had happened except for the locked gates and the mass of news trucks and interviewers gathered across the street looking for drama.

Two more signs of the times from Riverside Drive on Sunday which still had the police barricades and buses at the ready. Transexuals? How quaint!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The featured image is one of Greg Lefevre’s bronze panels embedded into the promenade depicting historic New York City scenes. This plaque shows the 2001 Manhattan skyline with the World Trade Towers.  Other plaques include etchings of sailing ships from 1776, a picture of the steamship from 1880, and a rendering of Manhattan’s skyline in 1935.