An Ode to Spring, Whenever It Comes

Béatrice de Géa for The New York TimesBASKING Kinga Jutkiewicz, 21, at East River Park in Brooklyn.

ACCORDING to the calendar, it’s been spring for the past five weeks. But you could have fooled me. Since the vernal equinox on March 20, the official start of the season, we’ve had nearly two weeks’ worth of days on which the temperature has not yet reached above 50 degrees. On average, this spring is two and a half degrees colder than usual. And it has rained almost 20 of those days, making the season thus far 27 percent wetter than in most years (not to mention March 24, the day that shall live in infamy, when there was measurable snowfall).

A new category, Spring Fever, highlighting the best places to enjoy the warm weather outside, joins this insider’s guide to what to eat, drink and do in New York from the staff of The New York Times.

LOUNGING An exercise in relaxation on 10th Avenue in Manhattan.?

Still, dotted amid the gloomy days and the dreary ones have been a few bright, balmy afternoons — fool’s gold, or so they’ve seemed. One of those rare warm days had me remembering another like it, when I made my way to a bench by the Hudson River — the winter’s chill barely chased from its wooden slats by the wan early spring rays — and threw myself across a patch of sunlight. There amid the roar of the West Side Highway and a gentle but slightly fetid breeze, I completed the purpose of my crosstown journey: I spent several hours savoring the memory of a kiss and its giver.

As it turned out, my love wasn’t worth the musing, but I remember that afternoon so vividly, it might have been yesterday. When I call to mind that bench, I can even feel the sun on my belly. The love was real, but I was confused about its object. What I was really in love with was spring.

“We do seem to be hardwired to associate warmth with pleasurable sensations,” said David J. Linden, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the author of “The Compass of Pleasure,” a book on why certain things feel good. “So when you’re out on a nice day and you’re feeling your skin gently warmed by the sun, you are activating that subset of your cortex that is involved in processing positive emotional responses.”

Come the warm weather, New Yorkers become pleasure seekers; we’re an outdoorsy bunch — at least when the weather’s nice. In the snow-blasted February of 2010, the last year for which data are available, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority tallied nearly 168 million trips on subways and buses combined. In March that year, when the weather broke, we took 37 million more trips outside of our homes.

We’re resourceful sun seekers, and in a city overshadowed by skyscrapers, we have to be. Suburban children may hang out in their friends’ backyards, but the equivalent for native New York teenagers is “stooping” — finding a good, sunny brownstone or other stoop to perch on for the afternoon. When I was growing up, the top-rated stoop was downtown, perpetually staked out by my best friend, Eden, and her classmates at Elisabeth Irwin High School before, after and sometimes during class. That Charlton Street brownstone stood out because the owner would pop up almost daily to chase away the urban Dennis the Menaces, much to their delight. The part of Mr. Wilson was played by Matthew Broderick.

But the stoop of all stoops is the grand, body-dotted staircase of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as much a draw for some as the Temple of Dendur. During my junior year of high school, I spent most of the sleepless night before the spring rite of the SATs on that giant stoop with my friend Jenny, lobbing vocabulary words at each other. We were “recumbent” on the steps, feeling “sesquipedalian,” unafraid of the warm night under the watchful gaze of a phalanx of Fifth Avenue doormen.?

New Yorkers rarely depend on the equinox to decree when our spring begins. We have other ways of measuring the season. In the West Village, spring is here when you spot shivering shoulders under strappy sundresses. In Central Park, it’s when the track around the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir gets packed diamond-hard under a tumult of new sneakers. In Brooklyn, springtime is when you can mistake the catwalk of Bedford Avenue for a Ray-Bans photo shoot. And across the five boroughs, it’s when lunchtime for office workers becomes a mad dash for alfresco real estate.

Like the Tree of Heaven in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” a species capable of growing out of cement or lacing through sewer grates, New Yorkers find ways toward the sun.? In Morningside Park, the turtles in the pond seem to materialize from thin air to bask. The park, once destined to be a Joni Mitchell lyric — “they paved paradise to put up a parking lot” — and razed for a Columbia University gym until student riots in 1968 quashed the plan, is home to upward of 50 red-eared sliders and other turtles, many of them former pets, that loll under the pond’s waterfall as numerous as cereal flakes in a bowl of milk.?

For the turtles, which, like many New Yorkers, spent the winter in hibernation (“brumation” is the official word), sunshine isn’t a luxury; it powers their metabolic functioning, said Sarah Aucoin, director of the Urban Park Rangers. It also just feels good. “As far as I know, they don’t have seasonal affective disorder,” Ms. Aucoin said, adding, however, “I can’t think it’s all that much fun for them to be buried in mud for four months.”

A patch of parkland in spring is hotter real estate than an apartment in the Dakota. When the clouds first break, Sheep Meadow in Central Park becomes a sea of bodies. So, too, does Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, where people lounge unfazed by the fact that under their picnic panniers are the remains of thousands of Revolutionary War victims, entombed under the hill.

But, frankly, we’ll splay anywhere there is sun, and nothing proves this more than a walk along Broadway. Yes, there are the mayor’s ever-expanding carless zones in Times Square, but the benches installed in the median islands along the avenue predate them. As a college student on the Upper West Side, I used to burrow into my course books on a bench at 114th Street, my hair tossed around by the breeze kicked up by onrushing traffic. I don’t remember ever being disturbed by the noise.

Take a casual stroll through the meatpacking district this time of year and it seems as if half the city kicks up their Manolos at jam-packed sidewalk cafes. As Frank Bruni wrote in The New York Times in 2007, New Yorkers “insist on restaurants with sidewalk cafes, apparently believing that nothing sauces roasted chicken like the exhaust from an M104 bus and there’s no music more relaxing than the eek-eek-eek of a delivery truck in reverse.”

?At the time of that article, there were 900 sidewalk cafes; today there are 1,110 and counting, according to the Department of Consumer Affairs. I’ve taken it a step further: the first day the temperature hit 70 degrees this year, I left the office to have an arugula salad while perched on a fire hydrant. No one looked twice.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 23, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the location of a brownstone owned by Matthew Broderick where teenagers gathered on the front stoop. It was on Charlton Street, not Charles Street. In addition, a slide show that appeared on the home page of NYTimes.com with this article gave a partly incorrect name for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, referring to it as the Brooklyn Botanical garden.