It's a gorgeous cold and clear day, and I spent the afternoon exploring my new neighborhood. Within a few blocks, I found a nice small grocery store (good produce, coffee, organic stuff, soy milk), a deli with decent beer, cigar store, divorce lawyer, a handful of pizza places, a pastry shop, little Dominican restaurants, a barber shop (I got a great haircut), florist, drug store, and a liquor store with a huge wine selection.And a 24-hour donut shop. I’m in big trouble. (There's 10 flights of stairs up from Broadway to my house, so I might get fat but my legs will be in great shape.)
Not a Starbucks in sight, thank you Jesus. Inwood is an old New York neighborhood, that -- probably, hopefully -- won’t be gentrified, at least not in the horrifying way that the East Village and Williamsburg were gentrified, because it’s already sort of nice, middle-class. Ethnically, it’s mostly Dominican now. I’m not sure what it was before that. There seems to be a slow trickle of white folks moving in. Up the street is some kind of small stadium or baseball field or something where the Columbia teams play. And of course, there are huge wooded parks and the Hudson River within a few blocks.
Here I go, falling in love with New York again.
