Long Island City Iced Tea: Heavy on the Water

Ingredients

• Tim Gunn
• Waiting 25 min for an $8 apple + brie sandwich
• Pepsi
• Not Tim Gunn
• Long Island
• Sunburns
• A slight smell of fish
• Happy people

Instructions

I am hard pressed to scrounge up any remotely negative ingredients for you-- challenged to surmise any real potential disasters for your time at my now 2nd Favorite Place in New York City: (no, Roosevelt Island isn't the first): Gantry Plaza State Park.

My friend Maia, a born and bred NY local, doesn't even live in Long Island City and yet she travels to Gantry more often than I do. Not difficult, seeing as today marked the 4th time I've been there-- but they were long, meaningful stays! And very concentrated, once I found this oasis. Regardless, the fact that anyone is coming to the wee edge of Long Island City is saying something. Because, even though LIC is a mere 5 minute train ride from Grand Central (an 8 minute ride from Times Square, a 12 minute ride from Union Square), everyone's eyes glaze over when I say the word "Queens." I could say Brooklyn and receive a much more positive response, despite the fact that most of Brooklyn is further from everything than everything else. I long for the day when "Queens" is no longer a dirty word, and "Long Island City" is not confused for being in Long Island.

After Maia and I waited perhaps longer than 25 minutes for our overpriced apple + brie hot pressed paninis no onions (a sandwich made for early-20s hungry but modest artists looking to ruin their financial situations), we walked along the entire (presentable portion of) Long Island City waterfront. You start at *COFFEED, a bougie/hipster/someoneactuallydefinethesewords coffee & food stand at the head of a modern-squiggly-themed wooden deck; 

walk past a huge soccer/general-good-time well-manicured lawn field thing; 

notice the old train tracks that aren't even creepy, because they've been turned into a community-oriented contemporary art "rail garden"-- and when has that ever been creepy?;

stroll up and down the docks, turning over your shoulder to see 2 massive Long Island signs-- Long Island, like the separate zipcode, separate entirely city of Long Island; 

it's confusing; cover up in the shade underneath a willow tree or lay out in a contemporary, permanent version of a beach chair-- a stocky wooden, bodily-curved reclined chair for extreme suntanning; 

pop a squat under the Pepsi Cola sign and reminisce about how your family is a Pepsi family and no one gets it-- until now;

people watch & gossip on top of a rolling green hill, gazing out at the sparkling water or the joyous playground; 

turning around at the kids' community garden behind you as you walk back to the life of the streets for the train. 

You see, Gantry isn't an escape from NYC. You can see the skyline. You can watch cars drive into Manhattan. You can feel, quite palpably, the gentrification of the luxury high-rises blazing down upon you. It's not like my #1 Favorite Place in NYC: Fort Tryon Park, a secluded park at the top of a hill in Upper Manhattan, at 181st Street, overlooking the Hudson and peering not over Manhattan but into New Jersey. [Here it feels like you're in a nature reserve, and when it's covered in snow it feels like you're snowshoeing up a mountain without snowshoes (so you hate it for, like, a second, but then it's magical again).] But, whilst gushing over Gantry, Maia did tell me that she'd give me her "official" (quotes mine) list of best places to escape NYC in NYC, so that means she, too, sees Gantry as a restful, spiritual break from this damn dark structural monstrosity of a city. 

Gantry is incredibly still, comfortably clean, open yet quiet, and yearning to be photographed. Quite seriously it's the Instagrammer's dream. Or a real photographer looking for views of the skyline, but I think we're all more concerned with Instagram these days in a really healthy way. Gantry is a place where a young couple strolling their stroller waves and bursts into a genuine "hey!" with another young mother strolling her own stroller. And where a lucky/unlucky (depends on the kid) 1-year-old takes the most maturely urban 1st Birthday photos. Hey. I think I see yet another notch to be made on your metaphorical NYC Staycation Belt. 

Oh. Nope. No, that's just Tim Gunn. What I'm seeing is Tim Gunn. Right, yes, I thought we were sitting in the middle of a film set! I knew that man with a walkie who's been standing in the same place for twenty minutes was not a creep but a PA. I'd shoot a film about anything at Gantry-- murder scene supposed to take place on the deck of a WWII submarine? We'll make it work. Ah, yes, back to Tim Gunn: He emerges from the group of the first shot: wind blowing his grey pants, sun illuminating his white hair... and no one around. Runners have run by, strollers have continued strolling, we chatters or nappers on the grass hadn't even noticed he was there. Now we're the only ones snapping quick photos of him as he struts down that walkway by the water. In an attempt to be discreet, as if he could care any less, I don't look into my iPhone as I take my shoddy pictures. This leaves me with photos of the couple standing 20 feet away from him. 

Not bad. 

I hope you all can figure out how to **point your phone towards Tim Gunn, consider wearing sunscreen, forget the infrequent slightest smell of fish, and swallow your prejudice towards Pepsi. Herein lies a million likes on Instagram.


*Guys, is it Cof-feed or Coffee-ed? Too much? Maybe later.
** Fine, I did it:

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***In Websites No One Asked For today: a website that tells you what is shooting in several popular cities and almost exactly where, OnLocationVacations.com! Found for you by me, someone who sadly yet excitedly knew something unnecessary would pop up when she searched "filming today."