Hanging out with NYC Urban sketchers

I'm visiting my daughter in Brooklyn and had made arrangements to join the New York City sketchers. Mark Leibowitz, the organizer for NYC USk, sweetened the pot by choosing my daughter's neighborhood for the site. 

We started at Pier 11 in lower Manhattan - pretty much the southern tip - where a free ferry will deposit passengers first at IKEA, then at Fairway market - about a block from where I'm staying. 

A couple of quick sketches on the boat . . .

Ferry passenger

View from the ferry

First ferry stop

 We hit Hometown BBQ for lunch... 

... then hit the streets. First stop: the Red Hook Yacht Club

Red Hook Yacht Club

A one-time plan to build a trolley system in Red Hook to connect to downtown Brooklyn started with a string of vintage streetcars. Because there is no subway line in Red Hook this was a popular idea.  Back in the '90s Bob Diamond, the visionary for this project bought a dozen vintage trolleys that had been rescued from an old tunnel and arranged for a half-mile of track to be laid back on the streets of Red Hook.  Soon after Bloomberg became mayor of NYC, the plan was pulled from the drawing board. Hurricane Sandy caused more damage to the streetcars and they quickly deteriorated. Recently all the old streetcars were removed except this one. It remains an icon to a different era. 

Street car 3303

In the middle of all this, before doing the sketch of the streetcar, we met at XXX for socializing and show and tell. After a few rounds of whatever you were drinking, each sketcher showed the group their day's work explaining a bit of their process. Everyone at the table, by that time about 10, got full attention from the others as they told the story of their day.  

Later Saturday evening I walked past Hometown BBQ again. The sun was casting a golden glow on the building face and painting the sky a rosey orange. I decided to do one more sketch for the day. After all, that's why I had come to NYC early before the rest of the family arrived for Labor Day Weekend. So I plopped my stool down and proceed to draw yet another sketch of Hometown. 

Then . . . oops. Not only did I misspell "Hometown", but I even put my "correction" in the wrong place. I guess there's a limit to how much sketching you can fit into a day.