Cooper Park

Just a few weeks after walking through Stuyvesant Oval at Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, I learned that Brooklyn has a park named after Peter Cooper, the 19th century inventor, industrialist and philanthropist. Cooper also founded Cooper Union, "the first private college open to all classes, races, and genders" according to the capsule biography on the American Society of Mechanical Engineers website, where you can also learn that as a by-product of one of his glue technologies he invented Jell-O.

In 1838 Cooper relocated his Manhattan glue factory to a strategic shipping location in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn near Newtown Creek. The City of Brooklyn bought the site in 1895, and behold: Cooper Park.

Cooper Park seems to get a fair amount of use, and is in a decent if not glorious state of maintenance. It can be fun to find pockets of wild neglect, though. Just across Maspeth Avenue is a stretch of overgrown sidewalk, with a plastic bag on the pavement playing the the role of The Tumbleweed.

Cooper Park's dog run is actually one of the nicer ones I've seen in the city, with wood chips and wide open spaces. With a natural look, it hardly even looks like a dog run. Though I don't suppose that matters much to the dogs.

Ices, anyone?

Early evening shadows turn the landscape into a lushly striped panorama.

Lying in the grass seems to get some people's creativity flowing. One woman looked to be writing something on old-fashioned "paper" with a stick-like "pen" or "pencil" device, while some kids were putting the grass to a different but equally productive use.

On the other hand, there was this:

Two nearby community gardens looked to be well tended.

Red Shed Community Garden
The Olive Garden, East Williamsburg, Brooklyn

It seems intuitively obvious that a walk in the park, or any time spent in natural surroundings, is good for you. But now there's scientific evidence that walking in the park changes your brain. One of the authors appeared on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show yesterday talking about it:

Next up: a study of whether reading a blog about parks has relaxing and recharging effects too.

Stuyvesant Oval and a Cormorant at Stuyvesant Cove

With apologies to the good people of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village on Manhattan's East Side, I here present to all and sundry your great pastoral oval. Your historic apartment complexes are on private grounds, I know. But since anyone can walk through any day, Stuyvesant Oval is fair game.

It would hardly be fair to keep one of New York City's finest fountains behind locked gates, anyway.

Seems whenever I get a good action shot in a city park, there's always a trash can photobombing me. The old lady in the first photo above, sitting peacefully reading a magazine, is undisturbed. But the guy below – well, I'm afraid there's nothing I can do about it. Good catch.

You call it an Oval. I call it a Park.

On the same walk we visited Stuyvesant Cove along the East River. I covered the Cove here back in 2010. How the years fly! But so do the birds. Ever since I saw a cormorant fishing that day off Stuyvesant Cove I always associate the Cove with those graceful black hunters. And on this day we had the extra treat of seeing one drying his or her wings.

There was plenty of East River seaplane activity too. Here's one just come in for a landing.

And then, I presume, back to the Hamptons with a new load of weekenders.