Visiting Sunset Park was something of a nostalgic experience for me in terms of community and environment. My family is Dominican, and most of them have relocated to New York in the last couple of decades and began establishing families in uptown Manhattan, in a neighborhood known as Washington Heights. It became immediately apparent to me that the latin-american immigrant culture was just as powerfully represented here as it was in the neighborhoods in which I spent much of childhood. I was greeted right off the bat to what I consider to be a staple of latin neighborhoods, the latin bakery. Here I found baked goods that I hadn’t gotten a chance to enjoy since the last time I visited my Aunts a few months ago, and while Sunset Park’s Las Rosas bakery’s coffee and bread pudding might be amazing, I still have an admittedly biased preference towards the ones I get on Dyckman in the heights. I failed to ask the patrons their ethnicity, as I am now retroactively curious if the different manifestations of the same carribean treat were due to slight cultural differences as opposed to simply a matter of craft.

Close by to the bakery was a Peruvian chicken restaurant, a clear sign of the dense variety of cultures within the latin american communities of New York. There was also the classic Limousine Car service business. My grandfather was responsible for opening and operating one of the same vein in the Heights, so I am quite familiar with the role these businesses play within the community. As a whole I felt very at home within the culture of those few blocks at least. The differences in architecture between the two neighborhoods manifests itself in Sunset Park feeling more open, definitely less crowded, but the space also made the neighborhood feel slightly more menacing to me once the sun began to set. I walked to the neighborhoods titular park.

I noticed on the way the transitions from latin to chinese businesses. I dont think I ever made it into the Chinatown proper, but I definitely saw the influence of the community spreading into what seems to be the predominantly latino sectors of the neighborhood. The park itself is beautiful but by the time I made it there  it was already dark so I don’t think I was able to appreciate much of the primary interactions that would typically take place in a park during the daytime. It would be interesting to see how the different cultures come together and interact socially.  I could still, however, appreciate the amazing view.

The cold in general made it very difficult to appreciate much of the communal aspects of the neighborhood as I imagine most people were in doors avoiding it, and I myself had my face buried in my hood most of the time. I am planning on visiting again in better weather for sake of appreciating the park. That was quite the discovery for me. I’d only first heard of it through articles I read in preparation, and having seen the view I don’t understand how it isn’t a more popular attraction.