Manhattan Island’s newly reopened urban greenway “High Line Park,” perched on an abandoned “el” track stretching back into time, boldly reclaims renewal by rescuing ruins. * * * “It’s a piquino paradise in the sky: I love it!” raves Zoraida Robinson, a hard-working Puerto Rican immigrant with an eye for al fresco retreats. “Here we can get away from the city without leaving the city.” The aerial Eden Zoraida is praising is Manhattan Island’s recently revamped High… Read more

As Americans we’re serious about our pursuit of happiness. We may not be happier than citizens of other nations, but we are willing to spend an awful lot of time and money in trying to be happy or to prove to others that we are. Maura Sweeney, in her new series of chapter-size 99-cent ebooks, wants us to stop trying so hard and to get back to the essentials of the pursuit by being more in tune with our mental and emotional states of contentment and joy. Under the umbrella title “The… Read more

At first view, an ocean of history and culture separates the curators of a villa built in 1928 by Le Corbusier 20 miles northeast of Paris and a group fighting for the preservation of a graffiti-covered stadium built in the 1960s by the Bay of Miami. But near Versailles—not the palace but the restaurant of the same name in Miami’s Little Havana quarter—a panel discussion of preservation experts found common ground between efforts to protect and defend 20th century architectural heritage… Read more

In Haight-Ashbury, once the center of the 1960s Hippy Flower Power Movement, I came upon a hawker selling unique chicken-claw pipes. I purchased one and held it up in the light as he passed me a tape of Ry Cooder, the famous slide guitarist who taught Keith Richards a special open tuning so it would be “easier to play on smack.” And why it’s such a bitch to figure out Rolling Stones songs in the first place. This is what San Francisco is like. Never to be called either “San… Read more

John M. Edwards remembers the bon temps of his college days in New Orleans, including live music, po boys, and cameos by Frank Zappa and Quentin Tarantino. * * * At the Napoleon House—an atmospheric inn where the “Yats” (New Orleans elite) once hatched a nefarious plot in the inner courtyard sanctum to return their Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte to the so-called Louisiana Purchase (brokered between the Little Colonel and Thomas Jefferson for only several mil)—I sat munching on a… Read more