Car Trips: City Island

It's really kind of shameless of me to open with this photo taken on City Island Saturday afternoon. But it's such a great visual of the quirkiness of the town, and it shows the beautiful backdrop of water that surrounds the island. If only Jimmy Hoffa's grave were so well-marked.

How to describe City Island? In some ways its a quaint town that still shows its fishing village roots, while catering to a certain casual visitor who likes antiques. This would be the side of the island that one sees before 5 p.m. Near dinner time, the island turns into a traffic funnel to and from the fish shacks on the water's edge, packing in Bronxites in unbelievable numbers.

Our favorite find was a record store, Mooncurser, that lost its lease and was closing after the weekend. Despite the shutdown, the owner wouldn't cut a deal on any of the records, and says he plans to move to Ebay. It's too bad because I would definitely come back to browse through the collection, heavy on Latin and with a well-represented classical music shelves. We also got a ton of classic disco records and didn't even make it halfway through those bins. (FYI: The guy starting to pack away the hundreds of thousands of records in the store was not the dude in this article.)

Our least favorite discovery was that the fish shacks at the end of the island are overpriced, overcrowded and kind of nasty. An order of crab cakes ($11), which contained no crab, was a stupid mistake. Fried shrimp were better ($12), but that's a hard order to mess up. We saw lots of people walking out with king crab legs (fried), but at more than $20, we decided to pass.  What are the good City Island restaurants?

Next up: Our adventures at Woodstock!