[What To Do In Park Slope When...] Your Manhattan Friends Come For A Fall Staycation.

Image via Eric Ryan Anderson

The word "staycation" is maybe the worst atrocity that marketers have committed in the last hundred years, but I'm using it here because it's the only appropriate word for when your friends from Manhattan "come all the way out" to Brooklyn for some rest and relaxation time. Fall is a particularly frequent time for Manhattanites to travel the full fifteen minutes it takes to get to the Slope, expecting a full on autumn Festival as soon as they haul their asses off the R train. 

Rightfully so. People actually decorate shit for harvest/Thanksgiving/Halloween in these parts, and no one loves a cornucopia like this girl. 

SO, what do you do when you being asked to provide a relaxing fall-themed day for your Manhattanite friends?

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Prospect Park Ice Skating Rinks Coming By End of Next Year

I can't ice skate. At all. But for those who can, you'll have some hockey-sized skating rinks right in Prospect Park to gracefully glide over next winter! The Prospect Park Alliance posted new construction photos to their website of the Lakeside project, which'll include a few skating rinks, relandscaping of 26 acres and -- commenters, warm your typing fingers -- a "Chase Cafe." Chase Bank has donated $1.6 million toward the $74 millie dollar project, so after skating to your heart's content, you can head over for some Home Equity loan scones and a Roth latte. Lakeside is expected to open in December 2012 or January 2013. 

[Via Brownstoner]

We give a shit: The Prospect Park Litter Mob

Photos by Marie Viljoen

Empty beer and liquor bottles. Used condoms and their wrappers. Drained containers of lube. Plastic bags. Discarded dildos. Crushed cigarette boxes. A gold belt. A T-shirt. Some paper towels. Gum wrappers. Just a few of the things you’ll find scattered among the leaves and trees of Prospect Park.

It’s not usually out in the open, of course. This isn’t the type of stuff you’d see on the Great Lawn, or by the Picnic House. But spend some time hiking through the woods, and you’ll spot them. Over broken fences. Down by the lake. In the seemingly untouched areas of the forest.  One man’s treasure is a place for another man’s trash.

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[My Favorite Park Slope...]: Tree

All photos by Park Slope Lens

Down by the boathouse in Prospect Park there's a tree whose weepy branches droop all the way to the ground. Its organic triangular shape reminds me both of the magical, house-assigning hat in Harry Potter and something straight out of a Jim Henson movie. The first time I stumbled upon it I half expected two large googly eyes to appear and invite me in for hot tea and Madeleine's.

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WHO GIVES A SHIT: Has A Bird Ever Fallen In Love With You In Prospect Park?

Cause it happened to this chick...and she lived to tell the tale.

For the record: this would be my biggest nightmare x a billion. Birds are some freaky ass mofos.