Day 4 Brooklyn: September 29, 2025

Monday, September 29, 2025. nearly 16,000 steps.

Go Mamdani! Voting has begun in NY. Keeping fingers crossed.

Began the day with a room change here at the ACE Hotel and I am now on the very top floor with a corner room! But I’m not in the room much althoughit is wonderful to see the sun rise over Manhattan and the East River. Anyway, after a nice, quick, and later-than-usual breakfast at the Ace, we headed to the wonderful, iconic, elevated Brooklyn Heights Promenade, driving through the wonderfully tree-lined streets of the Heights and marveling (swooning over) the 19th Century. brownstones and row houses. The walk on the promenade was–as always–delightful, exposing the best views of the Manhattan skyline. We walked to the end and dipped down into Brooklyn Bridge Park–getting close to and under the Brooklyn Bridge.

We p[arked the car right at Cadman Plaza Park which forced us to take a wonderful walk through Brooklyn Heights as we meandered to the Promenade.

Along the way, we decided we needed a little bathroom break, but Brooklyn Heights doesn’t have a lot of commercial streets, so we decided to go into the NY Supreme Court building on Adams Street and see if we could use a rest room. There were about 7 guards, including two who looked like theyr were in full gear including bulletproof vests. But they couldn’t have been more friendly and quickly gave us access to the facilities!

After enjoying a scoop of ice cream at some place that falsely said its product was “world famous,” we got on the ferry to get back to the Cadman Plaza Park area where we had left the car. And then we drove to the Jay Street MetroCenter to head to Roosevelt Island to see the Ai Weiwei installation in honor of the 80th anniversary of the UN.

It was a long subway ride on the F Local. Growing up in Brooklyn, I recall the development of Roosevelt Island (which had been called Welfare Island until 1973). There had been a long abandoned smallpox hospital on the island and historically there had been a penetentiary (which had been built by prisoners), a mental asylum where conditions were horrific and exposed by the press, and perhaps some other buildings and activities. Then in the 70s a residential community was established and the major route for getting to the island was on the aerial “tramway”which you picked up on 59th St and it ran alongside the Queensboro Bridge. Today, you can take the subway to Roosevelt Island, where about 12,000 people live. It’s also the location of a very super-modern tech campus for Cornell University and the Tata Innovation Center. And you can still see the abandoned smallpox hospital and the remains of some other structures including the “lunatic asylum.”

We had come to Roosevelt Island to see the Ai Weiwei installation “Camouflage” — at the Four Freedoms Park, developed in conjunction with the 80th anniversary of the UN. Supposedly the work deals with truth and freedom and the impact of war. I was underwhelmed to say the least. Not worth all the effort to get there. But the layout of the park (which I had never vistied before) was really beautiful. So that was good.

After a brief stop at the hotel, we headed to Laser Wolf for dinner. The restaurant is on the top of the Hoxton Hotel in Williamsburg with great views that surround the whole restaurant. Laser Wolf is considred a “skewer house”–serving a bunch of different kebabs and skewers surrounded by 10 different items in their “salatim” (things like hummus and babaganoush and pineapples with celery and Israeli pickles and spicy cucumbers and Tunisian potatoes, etc. etc. Food was good but not nearly as good as Sofreh (still my favorite of all the Middle Eastern restaurants).

We taxied back and now I’m beat and calling it a day.

Fern