Bridge and tunnel geek

The description of the walk pretty much revealed the leader, Craig's, proclivities:

RETRACTILE BRIDGES OF NYC (DUTCH KILLS to GOWANUS CANAL). Around 12-14 flat miles mostly on city streets (residential and industrial). Two of four extant retractile bridges in the US are in NYC. Visit both, and stuff in between including the Newtown Creek Nature Walk and sites in Greenpoint, Willamsburg, etc.

Craig was full of lore and could whip up a sidebar of fascinating facts at the drop of a question. Really, all you had to say was "What's that?" and he would expound on its wonders - one of the few remaining bridges if its type, a rare example of a steel frame freeway superstructure, one of 500 churches built all along the eastern seaboard by an undistinquished but prolific Irish immigrant, and then those retractile bridges.

He was a geeky guy, with glasses, late fifties, kind of overweight and sloppily dressed - someone who looked totally unfit but could walk with incredible energy and bounce. He'd get so excited when he talked that he'd spit. He was a retired R&D guy for Unilever, so he's got all this pent-up energy to do the things he couldn't do when he was working. He was planning more walks as we went - apartment buildings in Greenpoint, churches by that Irish guy, etc.

On this walk, I learned that retractile bridges roll back on tracks, like railroad tracks, usually over a patch of land the same shape as the retracting section of bridge. The one we saw was the Borden Avenue Bridge in Long Island City. We didn't make it to the Carroll Street bridge because of rain, but we did walk about 8 miles through LIC, Greenpoint and Williamsburg, sticking to the industrial streets and sights most of the way. It's a view of New York that you don't get from tourist buses.

If you're a visitor to the city and you're headed for Long Island City, you're most likely going to PS 1, the old public school that's now a satellite of MOMA. You head to Willamsburg for the hipster/arty ambiance - or to Greenpoint for the old-school Polish restaurants and shops (as well as for the new-school hipsterism that has invaded from neighboring Billyburg).

So Craig's view of the world of old Queens and Brooklyn was a revelation, an exercise in delighting in the workaday, the spine and bones of the city, not the gloss and glam.

Which is not to say there wasn't glory to be seen on our walk. The views from of Manhattan from LIC encompassed the Chrysler Building, the UN and the Empire State Building -- all in one grand swatch. And the buildings and structures Craig pointed out with unmitigated enthusiasm for the industrial past and present were also glorious - that they actually got built was a marvel in some cases, but in many instances, they were spectacularly beautiful as well as practical: A majestic art deco monolith that served as an air exchange center for subways, a wastewater treatment plant that looked like a collection of massive onion domes, a block-sized brick apartment building called The Astral that was built by Charles Pratt for his workers at the Astral Oil Company, the last patch of sidewalk in New York made of wooden pavers, the original home of the Everhard Faber pencil company, complete with terra cotta pencils decorating the top.

Altogether a great way to spend a rainy Saturday - with a guy who loves New York and wants you to know all about it.

Found on the street

Sometimes things just present themselves to you for inspection and evaluation. On a walk around the neighborhood in search of a some cottages that someone had told me about, I happened upon a pair of brown duck shoes abandoned on the sidewalk. You can see them here - just left on the street as if someone had slipped out of them for a minute to take a shower or to give his feet a breather.

There's so much stuff on the streets here - the usual newspapers and coffee cups tossed aside or blown out of overfilled trash cans, but also boxes of books, furniture, kitchen utensils, window screens - you name it, it's there to be taken. And usually it is. Come back five minutes later and it's as though vultures have descended and plucked the roadkill from the pavement.

The duck shoes seemed odd to me because, first of all, it was a pair, and abandoned shoes are usually singles. It reminded me of those pairs of shoes you see all around Seattle hanging from telephone wires or trees, deliberately tossed up in the air and across the wires, and said to indicate drug dealers' trading locales - though this could be an urban myth. (Here, the parallel is plastic bags in trees - if these plastic bags were swine flu, it'd be an epidemic.)

A few blocks past the duck shoes, I came upon a stoop sale where there was another pair of shoes, this one a kind of objet trouvé in the artlessness of its placement. Vintage but perfectly pristine white baby shoes sat atop an old school desk that someone had decoupaged in maps. The shoes appear oversized in this context, dwarfing the "world" they stand on. But their delicacy evokes a lost world of babyhood that certainly no longer exists in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, or anywhere else that I know of - baby's first shoes are more likely Nikes than stiff white leather hightops. And they were being sold as a bit of arcana, not as something real, whereas the duck shoes were actually functional footwear.

Later, with some Seattle friends in Times Square, the conversation turned to shoes as we watched the ladies of the evening parade around in 5-inch platforms and stilettos, wondering how they could navigate the streets of the city shod this way - or for that matter, how other women around us could make it around so easily in flip-flops. Neither option seemed to fit the city, but both also seemed perfect somehow. Either way, these women were working it in Times Square, and there's something to be said for standing on your own two feet, no matter what you're wearing.

Baby, you can drive my car

Walking back from the movies tonight (Up -see it!), I was thinking about how much I like to walk here. Sure, it's not always ideal - when the weather's bad, I have little choice about how to get to work - I could take a cab, but that seems indulgent, and to take the bus or subway would mean walking almost as far as I have to walk to get to work. So hoofing it there just seems right.

Walking is certainly not the same here as in Seattle. For one, it feels safer to walk here at night. I wouldn't really have set out on foot alone in my neighborhood there after dark - there was no one on the street. Here, however, there's always someone around.

I'm not naive enough to think this makes it perfectly safe - after all, just because people are out and about doesn't mean they have your best interests at heart. But for the most part, they're just making their way home or wherever - just like you are - schlepping their stuff and moving forward.

What's interesting too is the way people here overestimate the distance between point A and point B. I could walk from my house through Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Park Slope, around the edge of Prospect Park and all the way to Kensington, where Sophie and Melissa live, in about an hour. This is the same amount of time it would have taken me to walk from the Pine Street Cottages to the heart of Queen Anne. Yet here, the neighborhoods are thought of as so distinct that it's like you're crossing borders into foreign countries.

Because I'm still getting to know the area, I'm still sometimes startled to turn a corner and realize I'm somewhere I've been before, but that I'd never arrived from quite that angle. So much to see, so much to miss - and really no way to see it properly except on foot.

Oh, sure, you'd see it differently driving or from a penthouse somewhere, but the concrete and slate that make up the sidewalks here have survived the pounding of millions of feet over decades and decades - and yet they still move you forward along a path you may or may not have chosen.

I don't miss my car at all. It gave me a certain freedom, but it was also a burden. With walking, the biggest burdens are that your feet get tired or your shoes don't fit right or you can't buy the extra-colossal container of laundry soap. But you see so much more.