I thought I’d give myself something specific to aim for:

In the end, however, the gnome was safe:

Before visiting, I feared I’d want to move to LA immediately, because I love sunshine and warmth and hate winter and darkness (feared, because moving to LA would mean getting a car and driving for the first time in a decade).  But it turns out, I’m not as much as a sun person as I’d thought.  My skin doesn’t lie, apparently.  I kind of thought that everyone in LA would be as sun-phobic as NYers are – I mean, LA is the land of eternal-youth obsession after all.  My friends in NY would sooner attack their delicate facial skin with razor blades than sit in direct sunlight without a high SPF.  We are shade seekers.  But in LA, it’s all, ‘Let’s have brunch on the patio – no need for an umbrella!  Aren’t you hot in that sweatshirt and wide-brimmed hat?  Don’t you feel insane in that veil and poncho?’  And then there was all the driving – hours and hours of driving with direct sunlight just plowing through the windshield.  I felt like an ant under a magnifying lens.  I could hear myself sizzling and feel melanomas and sun spots springing up from deep in my dermal layers.  I could feel the thin skin around my eyes and lips shriveling into dry, crone-like crepe.

So, there was that.  But LA is really beautiful.  Just postcard pretty, everywhere you go.  And all the people are really beautiful, too, which is annoying.  It doesn’t feel urban, though – more suburban.  I always think I hate crowds here in NY, but being in such semi-deserted big spaces while clearly still in a city made me uneasy, like maybe someone had sounded an alarm and I hadn’t heard it.

Socially, LA is more outgoing than NY – I’m pretty sure I can say that definitively, even based on my limited experience.  I mean, twice while I was reading in public, a total stranger came up to ask what I was reading and introduce themselves.  And they weren’t even creeps, or crazy people!  Never before in my life has that happened, and actually, I liked it.  I wish I could always make friends without having to take my nose out of my book and initiate eye contact.  Otherwise, people do ask you what you do in LA and expect you to have an answer, which I hate, but they do that in NY, too.

Money-wise, rent isn’t that much less in LA, but you get a lot more for it.  My friends out there mostly live in gorgeous, sunny spaces with washer/dryers.  I thought food and alcohol was considerably pricier, but maybe that’s just because I’ve lived in NY long enough to know where and where not to go.  Thrift stores are much, much cheaper, and apparently, they don’t have bedbugs out there yet.

Overall, I think that unless you have a career-related reason to be in LA (which I’m sure most people do), it’d be better to live in Southern California, somewhere more remote.  There are definite advantages to being right in NYC, rather than outside NYC, but I don’t think LA itself is that much of a draw – it’s more the general atmosphere of the region.  NYC is a cooler city, but LA is more livable and a prettier place.  There, that’s my (terribly original) sweeping pronouncement on the subject.

Here are some pictures, and I’ll probably post more, too, at some point:

And of ’20s swimwear:

There were also a bunch of old autos:

To get to Governor’s Island, you have to take a ferry from Battery Park.  It took us a little while to find the ferry.

Once we found the ferry, we boarded with a hoard of people, then quickly went to the back deck, where we found an empty bench.

H took advantage of the short ferry ride to french braid S’s hair:

The ferry had a lot of very well-dressed ’20s-style folk aboard.

Here are what the ferry slips look like from out on the water:

Once we got to Governor’s Island, we disembarked and walked around looking for the lawn party.  Governor’s Island is a state-owned park that was a military base forever, back through the Civil War.  More recently, it was used as a Coast Guard base, until the mid-90s when the government sold the island to New York State.  Since then, there’ve been a number of large-scale art installations,attractions and programs on the island aimed at getting people to take advantage of the free ferry and enjoy the island.  Currently, there’s free biking certain days of the week, and rental bikes the rest of the time.  There’s a Civil War fort in the middle, and a number of lovely wood-and-brick homes and tree-lined avenues.  There are also abandoned facilities – a library, a dental clinic, etc. – from the recent past.

Here are some photos of the houses and lawns:

But we had a party to attend . . .