September Already?

I don't think I was prepared for this. School has begun - but I should have known! I saw the ad hoc conferences happening on Labor Day. They were so serious. I knew I should have paid more attention.

But, well, I was riding my bike too, and checking out the very last day of summer to see what was happening - in Tudor City, for example.
Pretty quiet there alright ... green, peaceful ... reposed even. But I did meet one interesting fellow at work there, Jeffrey, a driver for London Town Car, waiting for his client.





Oh, we talked seriously about what his job is like, but, really, it was a day for riding the bike!




Yes, Labor Day was quite a bright and pleasant day - and as you'll see Second Avenue was virtually empty - smooth sailing all the way downtown to -
- and East Village ice cream shop where mother and daughter are both having a sweet treat on such a lovely day. Oh, I'll be some of you out there are wondering what this blog is about! "Are you going to get serious, oh Street Teacher, and tell us some arcane historical fact?"

Nope! Not today! I was just going downtown of an afternoon to get a little - coffee from Mud.

Yup, that's the name of the place, just to the east of 2nd Avenue as I came across, so I locked my bike up, and walked right up to the counter and asked the barristas for a cup of - coffee! (Really? You thought I ask for a cup of mud? No, no, not me! It's really good there, you see.)








Yes, those are tattos on my friendly barrista - this is the East Village after all.

It is still an interesting neighborhood after all these years, since I last ran down to see my friends on St. Marks Place, one block down, between 1st and Avenue A, one block over toward Tompkins Square Park. Yes, perhaps there are some of those people still here.

But what's always remarkable about the Village, and especially the East Village, being so close to NYU and Cooper Union, is that the young people never seem to leave.

So, as I sat there sipping my strong coffee, I overheard one "young" person talking to her friend about all their friends in common; and I don't think I heard anything especially remarkably different from what I would hear anywhere else.

But then they left and a young man sat down to talk to another young man. I almost assumed they were both students. But the first one began to say something very intersting:
After taking a slurp of his smoothie he mentioned how relaxing it was to be away from the wife - "you know how much I love her, but it's great to just be able to go out and chill - you know?"
Right?

Well, I suppose things don't really change all that much! Which is one of the wonderful things about that part of the East Village - formerly known as just the northern part of the greater Lower East Side.

What we know now as the Lower East Side, however, namely that area East of The Bowery and below Canal Street, where Richard Price's book "Lush Life" is based, is changing quickly and soon will have progressed beyond what my friends of 30 years ago on St. Marks could have seen. Their old neighborhood is just a little busy, just as always, and now becoming a little cleaned up - but retains all the funkiness that I used to know.

I will create a blog soon more about what this neighborhood was when it was Kleine Deutschland, or Little Germany, but not yet. I'm still on my Labor Day bike ride.
And I see kayaks in the East River on the way up and back home! Now, those people know how to enjoy a holiday!