My Favorite Things with Keith R.A. DeCandido

They might not be raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, but that doesn’t mean that we love them any less. Welcome back to My Favorite Things, the weekly column where we grab someone in speculative circles to gab about the greatest in geek. This week, we sit down with Keith R.A. DeCandido, who has two new book releases in 2019: A Furnace Sealed, the first book in a new urban fantasy series, and Mermaid Precinct, the fifth in his Precinct series!

What does Keith love when he’s not writing about how the supernatural interacts with the big city? Spoiler alert: Keith’s essay is a love letter to his absolute favorite thing, and the inspiration behind all of his work. Intrigued? Read on to learn more!

While I have lots and lots of things I adore, when I think about what my favorites are, it often comes back to my city.

I was born, raised, educated, and still live in New York City. I turn 50 in 2019, and about 48 of those years I’ve been alive have been spent living in the Big Apple, and most of them in the northernmost of the five boroughs, the Bronx (lived in Queens for a summer and on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for eight years).

And I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. This city is amazing, and always has been. Yes, there are all the clichés about how it’s the city that never sleeps (it really doesn’t — the bars close at 4am and after that, early risers are starting to move around), that if you stand in Grand Central Terminal long enough, you’ll bump into someone you know (which has actually happened to me several times), and that you can get takeout at any hour (depends on the neighborhood).

But what’s most wonderful about this city is that there’s a little of everything here — not just crowds and tall buildings, but also peaceful quiet and green spaces, and all the modes in between. You can stand side by side with tons of people at Yankee Stadium or CitiField or Times Square or the Barclay’s Center or Rockefeller Center in December. You can also sit alone on a bench in Van Cortlandt Park or Prospect Park. Or you can wander a neighborhood that feels like a suburban town.

I love New York so much that I’ve set a ridiculous amount of my fiction there. Most of my career has been spent writing licensed fiction, but that’s still allowed me to write my city on several occasions, whether it’s a universe that actually takes place in or near NYC (Spider-Man, CSI: New York, Sleepy Hollow) or has characters who travel around and so I can send them there (Supernatural) or has some past history that enabled me to set a book there (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where they established that a previous Slayer worked in New York in 1977).

In addition, two of my original universes take place in New York. One is the Bram Gold Adventures, which will debut in early 2019 with A Furnace Sealed, which not only takes place in the Bronx, but also involves a great deal of Bronx history, going back to colonial times. The other are short stories featuring Shirley Holmes and Jack Watson, a series of Conan Doyle pastiches taking place in modern Manhattan.

And another of my original works takes place in a fantasy universe, but the city-state where most of the stories are set, Cliff’s End, is very much modeled after the Big Apple: Dragon Precinct and its sequels, high fantasy police procedurals, the latest of which, Mermaid Precinct, is also due in early 2019.

Anyhow, here are some of my favorite things in NYC:

Museums: The number of museums in the city is overwhelming, and delightful for an art-lover like me. If the art of the twentieth and twenty-first century is your thing, there’s the Museum of Modern Art in midtown, a glorious space. For art from this country specifically, there’s the Whitney Museum of American Art, also in a glorious space downtown (much nicer than its old, rather boxy Upper East Side location). In the outer boroughs, you’ve got the Queens Museum, filled with magnificent odds and ends from the city’s history and art and science; you’ve got the Bronx Museum of the Arts, focusing on the art created by the people of the Boogie-Down; and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, filled with huge exhibits and magnificent art from dozens of eras. Plus, you’ve got the specialty museums up and down Fifth Avenue, from the Pierpont Morgan Library (on Madison Avenue, truly) to the Frick Museum to the Museum of the City of New York to the Jewish Museum to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (worth it for the circular architecture alone…).

But my two favorites are the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. The former is one of the largest museums in the world, and contains multitudes from ancient Greece and Africa all the way to modern artists, and everything in between. My personal favorite place to go is the Astor Court, a re-creation of a Chinese garden, and one of the most peaceful places in the world.

Astor Court || Photo by Keith R.A. DeCandido

The latter is a delightful celebration of science, from biology to astronomy to geology to paleontology. Stand in awe under the blue whale, or see an amazing space show in the Hayden Sphere, a superlative planetarium.

Zoos: The Wildlife Conservation Society has five locations in New York, including four zoos and one aquarium. Four of the five boroughs are represented — Brooklyn gets two, with the Prospect Park Zoo and the New York Aquarium, while Queens, Manhattan, and the Bronx each have their own zoo.

The aquarium got hit hard by Superstorm Sandy in 2012 but has mostly recovered, and it’s full of colorful, beautiful, and in some cases very playful aquatic life. The zoos in Prospect Park and Corona Park in Queens are less well known, but great fun to visit (Queens in particular has a superb petting zoo), and definitely worth a trip across the East River.

The most famous are the Central Park Zoo and the Bronx Zoo, famed in song and story. The former is small, but impressive, a very good use of a very small space, with some great exhibits. The latter is arguably the greatest zoo in the world (San Diego and Sydney, among others, might challenge that). It’s a huge expanse of land filled with massive enclosures where the animals wander and gambol about. My personal favorite is Tiger Mountain — tigers are my favorites — but there’s also the Congo and Madagascar and Wild Asia, and so much more. You could take a dozen trips to the Bronx Zoo and not see it all.

Madagascar exhibit at the Bronx Zoo || Photo by Keith R.A. DeCandido

Baseball: I’m a Yankee fan through and through, but if I was to recommend one of the Major League Baseball stadiums to attend, I’d sooner say CitiField, which is a much more edifying experience. Both Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium were replaced in 2009 with more modern parks, and while no one will miss Shea (part of the wave of industrial, symmetrical, spectacularly boring baseball stadiums constructed in the 1960s and 1970s), the previous iteration of Yankee Stadium had way more character. The new Yankee Stadium was constructed with corporate box holders in mind, a type of attendee that disappeared after the crash of 2008, just in time for the new Yankee Stadium to open in 2009 to lots of empty seats in the expensive part of the park.

Both places, though, do a good job of showing the history of their teams — and, in CitiField’s case, the history of the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers, the previous National League teams to call the Big Apple home, until they moved to California in the 1950s. And if you’re lucky, you’ll get to see Noah Syndegaard or Jacob deGrom pitch at Citi, or see Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton hit monster home runs at Yankee.

Jumbotron at Yankee Stadium || Photo by Keith R.A. DeCandido

Little Italy: Not the one in Manhattan, which is mostly a tourist trap and a place for people looking to figure out where the flashback scenes in The Godfather Part II took place. No, I mean the one up in the Bronx, where E. 187th Street and Arthur Avenue meet. Lots of Italian expats still live there, and they have some of the best restaurants in the city — Mario’s, Tra Di Noi, Zero Otto Nove, Dominick’s — and also the best food shopping, whether it’s meat at Biancardi’s or Vincent’s, fish from Cosenza’s or Randazzo’s, bread from Addeo’s or Madonia’s, pastries from DeLillo’s or Marrone’s, cheese and cold cuts from Tino’s or Calabria’s, or general shopping at the big Retail Market or at Teitel’s.

Plus, two of the best pizza places in town can be found in Little Italy, one right at 187th and Arthur: the Full Moon. The other is closer to nearby Fordham University, on E. 191st Street between Hoffman & Hughes: Pugsley’s. Run by Sal Pugliese since the 1980s, Pugsley’s is a colorful, beautiful, joy-filled place filled with pictures and tchotchkes — plus the pizza is just phenomenal. If you’re lucky, he’ll play his saxophone for you. (If you’re not lucky, he’ll bang the big gong when you’re not expecting it.)

Green spaces: Generally, the image people have of New York is of skyscrapers, buildings all shoved together. But the city is just filled with parks. One of my favorite is the New York Botanical Garden (right next door to both the Bronx Zoo and Little Italy), which is a huge, multifaceted garden. But there are also parks all over the place, from the massive Central Park (843 acres of land in the center of Manhattan), which includes large open fields, lakes, fountains, tree-filled pathways, a theater, a zoo, a carousel, and so much more.

New York Botanical Garden || Photo by Keith R.A. DeCandido

There are also cemeteries, from Greenwood in Brooklyn to Woodlawn in the Bronx, which are peaceful places to wander about and pay tribute to the fallen. Plus each borough has tons of other parks, whether it’s Corona Park in Queens, Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Inwood Park in Manhattan (allegedly where the Dutch settlers bought the island of Manhattan for $24, a spot marked in the park, in fact), or Silver Lake Park on Staten Island.

My hometown has inspired me in so many ways for so many years, not just in my writing, but in my life. It really is the greatest city in the world, and it remains one of my absolute favorite things.

Keith R.A. DeCandido has three new novels coming out in 2019: Mermaid Precinct, the fifth novel in his fantasy police procedural series; Alien: Isolation, based on both the movie series and the 2014 videogame; and A Furnace Sealed, which will launch the Bram Gold Adventures, about a nice Jewish boy from the Bronx who hunts monsters.

Author photo by Lauren A. Lang

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