Viewing NYC Articles by Jennimaria Palomaki

Boutros: Brooklyn Heights Restaurant Serves up New American with Middle-Eastern Influence

2019-09-06T16:00:00-04:00

All photos via Jennimaria Palomaki for Viewing NYC

Located next to Sahadis on Atlantic, Boutros is a new restaurant on the Brooklyn Heights / Cobble Heights border, the passion project of chef-owner Allen Dabagh. Boutros serves New American cuisine with a menu that reflects Middle-Eastern influences. Their innovative dishes pair sea bass, pork belly and loin, and chicken with seasonal vegetables enhanced with rich, earthy spices.

Boutros also offers a few vegetarian options, including lasagnette with carrot mushroom bolognese and sides that are as thoughtfully seasoned as mains. The wine list is well curated with a selection of varietals and blends representing a diversity of terroirs. They also serve craft beers (mostly American) and some specialty cocktails.

The atmosphere evokes home-style warmth without skimping on Brooklyn-style cool. Exposed brick, concrete, and other industrial elements are balanced with botanicals and soft lighting. Renovation of the space revealed a mosaic tile floor that the restaurant has wisely preserved, lending an eclectic feel to the space. Great for an intimate date or a meaningful family gathering.

Start with the Foie Gras Fritters, the burst of savory flavor will instantly put you in a good mood. Trust the staff for a wine pairing with the mains. Finish with the Saz-Arak, it’s smooth, balanced and generously poured.

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Madame Morbid's Trolly Tours Offers a Unique Way to Learn About Brooklyn's Gruesome History

2018-01-24T13:00:00-05:00

Photos via Jennimaria Palomaki. Blurriness due to trolly's spooky fog machine!

Just opening its second stop in Williamsburg, Madame Morbid’s Trolley Tours picks up its passengers on Driggs Avenue and 9th Street for an hour and forty-five minute haunted history tour of Brooklyn. The trolley itself, as much as the tour, is part of the morbid shtick: bedecked like a Victorian-era funeral parlor with plush leather seats, dark wood paneling, lush velvet curtains with gold trim, and chandeliers that rattle pleasantly as the trolley makes its way through Brooklyn. As you ride, mini-documentaries narrate macabre, bizarre, tragic, and murderous stories from Brooklyn’s distant and more recent past as your guide points out the places where the events themselves occurred.

As disconcerting as the stories themselves are the transformations of the locations where the haunted history of Brooklyn has played out. It might, for example, surprise many Brooklynites who shop at the Trader Joe’s on Atlantic Avenue and Court Street to find out that it sits on the site of Cobble Hill Fort—a place so haunted it apparently scared a young man named Samuel Boerum to death while he was out on a beer run.

The morbid mood is lightened by the tour’s disarming brand of humor—making fun of itself and the hipster culture for which Brooklyn has become known. Appropriately, as passengers disembark the trolley when it returns to Williamsburg and round the corner to make their way back to the subway, they might just pass a mindfulness studio on 8th Street with a Kanye West quote on its sidewalk sign. 10% of ticket sales go to feed New York’s homeless.

Madame Morbid's Trolly Tour tickets are just $49, with tours running daily.

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[PHOTOS] Visit the New York Transit Museum for a Glimpse of the City's Past

2017-01-17T15:39:15-05:00

All photos via Jennimaria Palomaki for Viewing NYC

To visit the New York Transit Museum is, in many ways, to trace the history of the significant events, cultural forces, and technological advances that defined the City in the 20th and 21st centuries. The museum is underground, occupying an old subway station in Downtown Brooklyn, and is entered, appropriately enough, through the subway entrance at Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street.

Visitors begin their tour with an interactive exhibit that details the dangers of digging the tunnels that would become the subterranean tracks of the subway system. The stories of laborers, waterboys, drillers, carpenters, and sandhogs who worked and sometimes died underground are told through photographs and artifacts. The exhibit is compelling both for the vivid depiction of the perilous working environment—made possible, yet even more perilous, by the machinery of the time—that workers endured and for the cultural context it provides with description of the ethnic and racial tensions that often kept them from unionizing. Only after going through this exhibit do visitors emerge onto the upper platform of the old station, as if to impress them with the fact that where they now see gleaming tile and concrete was once just dirt and rock that someone had to transform.

The upper platform features an exhibit detailing how MTA employees responded to disasters that wounded the city down to the muscle and bone of its transportation system, from 9/11 to Hurricane Sandy. Along the opposite wall visitors can walk through and read about the evolution of the turn style, propelled as much by technological advancements as by the continual need to thwart fare dodgers. The facilities on the upper platform include a cafeteria space with a faux street scene and private event space, as well as a smaller exhibit about the 2nd Avenue Subway. And though these immersive experiences help visitors appreciate the complexity of New York City's transit system and the dedication of the people who built it and maintain it, the lower platform, which is still a functional subway stop, is reason enough to merit a visit.

It is there that the museum displays its rotating fleet of subway cars, spanning from the elevated wooden cars with wicker padding seats from the early 1900s to the chrome model we still ride today. The advertisements in the cars, as much as their interiors, help transport visitors to the City's past, with images, celebrities, and attitudes plucked right out the collective American memory. It's a testament to the importance of the subway system that so much of the life and culture of a city that extends into the sky can be found underground.

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See Some of the NYC's Best Christmas Pageantry in Dyker Heights [PHOTOS]

2016-12-19T13:14:10-05:00

All photos via Jennimaria Palomaki for Viewing NYC

The Christmas lights in Dyker Heights, a small neighborhood in southwest Brooklyn between Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst, are an annual holiday tradition dating back to at least the mid-1980s. Homes in the mostly residential neighborhood are decorated with everything from yard inflatables, giant nutcrackers, and of course, lots and lots of lights.

The Christmas lights are mostly concentrated between 11th and 13th Avenue and 83rd and 86th Street. However, the crescendo of the pageantry is on 84th Street between 11th and 12th Avenue where the home of Lucy Spata, often credited with starting the tradition, sits across the street from the Polizzoto residence, famous for its 14 foot tall, 800 pound animatronic Santa Claus.

Many of the light displays are professionally installed and cost upwards of $10,000. The yearly event draws large enough crowds to support dedicated food carts and bus tours. Dyker Heights can be easily reached by the R train. After getting off at 86th Street, you’ll need to walk only about 10-15 minutes to reach the lights.

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Boutros: New Brooklyn Heights Restaurant Serves up New American with Middle-Eastern Influence

2016-11-21T16:23:14-05:00

All photos via Jennimaria Palomaki for Viewing NYC

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Why New Yorkers Should Visit the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island

2016-11-15T10:30:00-05:00

All photos Jennimaria Palomaki for Viewing NYC

Between the seemingly endless line one must endure to board the official Statue Cruise boat, the leisurely shuffle of tourists, and the hackneyed souvenirs, a New Yorker might be forgiven for never having visited the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. But as soon as the boat gets out onto the water and the irresistible vista of the City emerges from the receding horizon, you’ll start to think the hassle might have been worth it.

The statue itself will seem almost ominous as you approach her, because you’re used to seeing reproductions and likenesses that fail to capture her immense size, the resoluteness of her gaze, and the brilliance of that singular shade of copper-green. You’ll act unimpressed– insouciance, after all, is the hallmark of city dwellers everywhere–but if you let yourself consider how many immigrants were stirred to hope when they set their eyes on her after weeks on crowded ships, you might just start to feel something like the bond of pilgrimage with all those cheerful midwesterners you’re surrounded by. If you’re set on going up to the crown you’ll need to book tickets well in advance. If you’re like me, this won’t be an option because you’re booking the tickets a week out to entertain a visiting friend or relative. Don’t let that bother you. You’ll want the energy it would take to climb the 162 steps from the pedestal to the top for the more engaging experience at Ellis Island.

The number of exhibits at Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration makes a comprehensive survey nearly impossible. If you’re crunched for time, skip the first floor of the Main Building entirely and grab a self-guided audio tour from the desk just to the right after you’ve entered through the front entrance and head to the nearby stairwell. As you ascend the steps, the audio tour describes the experience of new immigrants as they entered the bright cavern of the Registry Room that opens up at the top of the stairs. Take the time to go through the processing rooms on the west end of the third floor. As you walk from room to room, you will find it difficult not to imagine yourself as a new arrival catching glimpses of the glimmering City through windows. While New York was not everyone’s final destination, it was the port of entry for some 12 million immigrants whose descendants make up about half of the current U.S. population. It’s an important reminder that despite the insularity attributed to the city both by those who live in it and those who don’t, there is a link from every corner of the United States to The Empire City.

The Baltimore-born journalist Mignon McLaughlin, who was raised in New York City, wrote that “a successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.” She could have given New Yorkers the same advice about staying happy in the City. Going to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island won’t necessarily teach you anything you don’t already know, but it might make you fall in love with the City all over again.

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[PHOTOS] Here's What Went Down at the 42nd Annual Atlantic Antic Street Festival in Brooklyn

2016-09-26T08:50:54-04:00

Now in its impressive 42nd year, the Atlantic Antic is an annual street festival on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn that covers from Hicks Street all the way to 4th Avenue.

This year’s attendees were treated to an ideal 72° temperature as they browsed craft stands, enjoyed live entertainment, and ate everything from oysters to Italian sausage.

Highlights included the New York Transit Museum’s annual display of over a dozen vintage buses dating back to the 1950s.

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