Given all of the recent controversy over the Elizabeth Street Garden, I thought that a good image to share with this digest was one taken on my last solo trip to NYC. Given its location just a few blocks south of my preferred business hotel – The Standard, East Village – it became an oasis of calm to me on the dozens of trips I took to the city for work over the past 15 years. I'm not a resident so I have less than no opinion about whether the senior development or the park deserves to occupy the space, that's for locals to hash out. But I did want to show some appreciation for its eclectic otherness with its random statuary, patches of gardens and plentiful seating. New York City's green spaces are one of the great achievements in city building in the US. If you know where to look you can make your way through the concrete canyons walking from oasis to oasis of greensward to take breakfast coffee, park bench lunch and after dinner ice cream throughout the day. I know that Europeans scoff at the relatively paltry percentage of the city dedicated to these spaces but as someone who was born in deep suburbia it always felt calming to me to know I was never far from a place to sit and gather my thoughts after the intensity of the city's streets and subways.
