Chelsea and Doughnuts

One of my favorite ways to spend the afternoon in the city is by wandering through Chelsea galleries and walking the Highline. Chelsea is a neighbourhood in Manhattan roughly located between 8th and 10th Avenues and 19th Street to 23rd Street. In this area, you’ll find dozens of art galleries, which are free to visit and often have some really interesting pieces.

My strategy for checking out art galleries isn’t very particular, I usually start on 23rd Street and 10th Avenue and walk across to 11th Avenue, searching for galleries along the way and visiting any that look interesting. I typically do this for a few more streets (24th, 25th, and 26th), and by then, I’m sufficiently exhausted by art. However, one of the best things about these galleries is that the artwork never stays in the galleries for long, so if I want to go back in a few weeks, I might see entirely new works. 

A work by Robert Montgomery that I saw in Chelsea. 

In addition to visiting the galleries, I often walk along the Highline, an elevated train track turned into a park that runs along 10th Avenue. It’s always nice to just stroll around up there and enjoy the view. And I swear you can see the Brookdale Residence from it if you look across town, but this is probably just wishful thinking on my part.

Finally, what day trip is complete without food? While I don’t often eat in Chelsea, there are a couple of places nearby that I would recommend, both of which my friend Jack showed me. First, there’s Chop-Shop (10th Avenue between 24th and 25th), an Asian lunch place that makes some pretty good vegetable dumplings. After that, if your stomach and wallet can still handle it, there’s a place called the Doughnut Plant on 23rd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues that makes the best doughnuts I’ve ever had. I don’t even like doughnuts, but theirs are fantastic. My favorite is the peanut butter & jam doughnut, I’d highly recommend it.

Words are Friends!

Did you know that the name Mercedes, a female Spanish name and also the name of a car company, comes from the Latin word merces, which means pay or wages? Though over time it began to mean mercy, that is not the originally meaning. This is also the word we get mercenary and merchant from.