Crossing over . . . and over

Just got back from a three-bridge walk - across the Brooklyn Bridge, under the Manhattan Bridge, and back to Manhattan via the Williamsburg Bridge. The mnemomic device for the order of the bridges, south to north, is BMW. Easy, right?

Our leader, a guy in his late sixties named Cy, showed up in pinstriped baseball pants and an ancient cap with "Shorewalkers" imprinted on it. He had a way of stopping at certain points along the walk as if he had some amazing bit of history or lore to impart, only to tell us that we had five minutes to use the bathroom in a park or a cafe.

We started out at the Manhattan Municipal Building, built around the turn of the last century and designed by McKim, Mead & White in classical and Italian Renaissance style. It sits just next to the Brooklyn Bridge and across from City Hall, and still functions as the main office of city government. This area of Lower Manhattan is really lovely - though I'm guessing that as many people visit it to go to J&R Electronics and Century 21 (a discount department store) as are there to see the historic sites.

Up and over the bridge we went, fighting the tourist and stroller tide on this lovely wasn't-it-supposed-to-rain sort of Sunday. Then back under the bridge through Dumbo, right past my office, under the Manhattan Bridge and on to Vinegar Hill.

Vinegar Hill is a nabe that overlooks that old Brooklyn Navy Yard and was settled by Irish immigrants and named after a place in Ireland that was the site of a battle with the British during the Irish Rebellion of the late 18th century. Several charming streets remain - little slices of brownstone and frame, store-fronted houses surrounded by Dumbo, city electrical substations, warehouses, a large soundstage, and a huge public housing project (many people here still call them projects - not the polite Seattle nomenclature - public housing).

On we marched to Fort Greene, the centerpiece of which is Fort Greene Park, a large space that was in fact the location of a fort and is therefore on high ground with grand views (this is where yesterday's Michael Jackson birthday party was supposed to have been held before it was moved to the much larger Prospect Park). Surrounding the park are leafy streets lined with brownstones and large Victorian and Edwardian mansions with wide staircases and genteel porches (though many of the mansions have been broken up into apartments.

From there we made our way to an area of Williamsburg that is home to a sect of Hassidic Jews called Satmar. One of my walk-mates told me that this group is particularly insular and traditional, which seemed evident on the street. Men in black coats and hat and women with their heads covered and little boys with the traditional curls. All of the children wore contemporary clothing but in a more conservative style - dresses and tights - very covered up. Except for the trendy strollers and one (Satmar) woman in Chanel and gold leather flats, it really felt like you were walking back in time. What's incredible about this neighborhood is that it's not walled off or anything - it's insular in the middle of the diversity and worldliness of the huge borough of Brooklyn. How you accomplish that through belief and tradition alone is hard to imagine. It's faith and devotion personified.

We stopped at a little cafe on Lee Street where the food was all kosher, of course, and very good. Middle Eastern in character and all freshly made - grilled vegetables, shawarma, pita, and Israeli salad (cukes and tomatoes). Like a lot of inexpensive New York eateries, it was a plain place in decor terms, but with excellent food.

By now our group had dwindled in size as some people headed off to explore the trendier confines of Bedford Avenue in Billyburg, where hipsters parade their angst and their pricey sneakers. There's art, yes, and chic boutiques and espresso - in fact, one of my Pine Street Cottage neighbors, J.D., owns two coffee shops in Williamsburg, both called Oslo (he and his family live in Brooklyn most of the time and in Seattle in the summer).

The remaining 15 or so us of the group headed towards the Williamsburg Bridge, which has walkways/bikeways on both sides. To my surprise, the Williamsburg span had lovely art nouveau detailing at both ends. Between, it's rather utilitarian as a structure, but there was tons of interesting graffitti, which you don't see on the Brooklyn Bridge, and way fewer tourists. Also, on the car level below us, we witnessed a car fire -

The Williamsburg Bridge empties out on to Delancey Street on the Lower East Side, where the walking group parted company. I went north to Tompkins Square Park to take in a little of the Charlie Parker Jazz Fest before heading home - a nice little respite after an 8-mile walk.

Next time you come to New York, I'll take you on this walk myself, and I promise to have more historic info in hand than Cy.

Bye for now.

Dual-purpose weekend

Last Saturday: I would never have expected to go to a national park and see laundry hanging from a line strung between trees. But there it was, on Governor's Island, where there were two events competing for visitors' attention: a camp of Civil War reenactors and an African-American culture festival. A perfect combo on one level, but an unusual one on another. Nonetheless, the feet-on-the-ground African dance lessons, with drum accompaniment, didn't seem in conflict with the occasional cannon blast from the (faux) Grand Army of the Republic. (The laundry belonged to the GAR folks.)

That's the kind of thing that happens on Governor's Island, a former military installation (for two centuries) that was nearly doubled in size ages ago when it was filled out with dirt from subway excavations. Now, you can bike or walk around it (about the same distance as walking around Green Lake) or rent a six-person pedal carriage sort of vehicle (it has pedals in the two front and middle seats, so four people can pedal at once). There are old officers quarters, a former military prison, lots of contemporary art work, and much open space on the old parade grounds and here and there around the island. They're still tearing down some of the more contemporary buildings on the island and that will add to the open space.

The only way to get to Governor's Island is by free ferry - it's only a 10-minute ride from Lower Manhattan, but, as this is New York, you have to wait in line for 45 minutes or longer on weekends to take this brief excursion. The ferry slip had a sign stenciled on it that said "At the Same Moment." Not sure what that means, but it was certainly a big topic of discussion among the passengers. Interestingly, the return ferry had signs indicating that one side was for Sheep and the other for Goats. (I was directed to the Sheep side, which is good because, as you know, Sheep go to Heaven and Goats go to Hell.)

Last Sunday, I landed in an entirely different New York landscape - the West Village - where I took a literary/dessert tour nominally in honor of the 81st birthday of Andy Warhol. Our guide was part of a great little company called NYC Discovery Tours, which does history and literary walks through various city nabes. I've done a few of these tour walks, and these folks are definitely the best.

Among the highlights: I learned that lovely Washington Square was a burial ground at one point, and the bodies are still there. Basically, the park was constructed over them. Many were paupers or, sadly, criminals who had been hanged from a large tree that still thrives in the park. Looking down on this cemetery at various points were Eleanor Roosevelt and Edith Wharton, among others.

Another highlight was the desserts - cannoli freshly made for us in a little bakery on Bleecker called Rocco's, and rugelach fresh from the oven at a place on Hudson (I forgot to write down the name).

The tour ended at one of the later locations of Andy Warhol's Factory and the place where he was shot. It's actually the Decker Building on Union Square, an area that now seems so upscale that it's hard to imagine it as a radical art enclave (the Williamsburg BK of its day). The Factory is now a hangout for fashion models, according to our guide.

This weekend's plans: a walk around BK, from Bay Ridge to Manhattan Beach, and maybe a look at a John Currin exhibit in Chelsea. What are you up to?

Family vacation

No, not my family - Susanne's. Rusty, her brother his wife, Amy, and their son John. Cousin David, his wife, Debbie, and their daughter, Wendy. The weekend before last, I met up with Susanne in Ithaca and then drove up to a spot on Cayuga Lake, one of the Finger Lakes, where they'd rented a cottage for the week. Cayuga juts northward from Ithaca and goes for 40 miles. The cottage had a lovely little yard that ran right down to a dock, where Rusty had a small sailboat. The weather was at least 10 degrees cooler and lots less humid than the city had been.

It's kind of odd to hang out with people you've heard about for years but never met - you know things about them -- some things that are maybe not so positive -- that you can't mention. So there's a strange sort of dissonance. They turned out to be very nice people, quite hospitable and fun to hang out with. They were the people I had heard about in some ways, but not in others. As much as we talk about our families to our friends, we can't really convey the absolute truth about them, because there is no absolute truth - just our experiences and peculiar biases and conflicted feelings about the people we love.

So, Susanne, thanks for the pleasure of your company on Cayuga Lake - and for the experience of meeting your family - not so different from my family, after all.

Switch gears now, to the trips up and back. I took the Greyhound, and I honestly don't think I've been on a Greyhound since taking a trip to Port Angeles sometime back in the '80s, before Sophie was born. This was also my first trip upstate since moving here.

The trip north was pretty uneventful, except for the fact that the bus driver at the Port Authority (the infamous Port Authority) had some sort of system for seating his passengers that he couldn't explain very clearly. Some seats were "reserved" but not really, so people would sit in them and then he would make them move, get off the bus, let more people on, and then make another group of transgressors move. Then suddenly, all bets were off and those seats were open to anyone. Before we got on the road, he announced over the mike that he wanted us to know he wasn't showing any bias towards any individual or group - just following some arcane Greyhound rules. But to my ear, he sounded like the Emperor of the Bus, a petty tyrant with a tiny, mobile kingdom all his own. Not a bad guy, but definitely happy to be In Charge.

My fellow passengers made up a sort of low-rent UN - there must have a dozen nationalities represented, and several entire families with kids, aunts, uncles, grandparents, many with Canada as their ultimate destination - 12 or 13 hours on the bus. (My trip was only about 5 hours.)

I got off in Binghamton and tranferred to a Shortline Bus for the last leg to Ithaca. The bus station was stuck in the '70s - see the yellow plastic chairs in the picture -- and in some lonely corner of Lost America. It was nice to get back on the bus again and cruise through the low, green Adirondacks towards Ithaca.

After three days in Ithaca and environs, I was back on the bus. This time, it was a different cast and crew. The conversation between the two guys behind me quickly drifted to drugs. The older of the two - he later said he was 40 - was full of advice for his young seatmate, who was maybe 18 or 19. The relative merits of Perc and Oxy, Beck's and PBR, the cost effectiveness of buying a kilo of coke for $8K, splitting it into 8-balls, and selling them for $100-$150 each. By Mr. Big's calculations, you could turn the $8K investment into $25K.

"I get everything wholesale. I buy two kilos, keep one for myself and sell the other." By now, Mr. B was clearly enjoying his role as teacher to The Kid. I had the impression they had just met on the bus. The younger guy said he had been visiting family upstate and was heading back home to Florida (another unbelieveably long bus ride . . .). Mr. Big assessed the status of Utica and Ithaca as drug markets and came down on the side of Utica. He bragged about having fought the police when he was arrested at some point in the past - his punishment for resisting, he said, was that they confiscated his expensive sneakers. He told his stories in a raspy, supremely confident New Yorkese. He was from the Bronx.

Pretty soon, a sale was made and the Kid took his pills and drifted off to sleep. (I didn't see any of this, mind you - just overheard it.)

Mr. Big also had an appreciation for good cheese. "Once, I went on this trip to this place where there was nothing but Amish. They make this cheese, man, and it is SO soft. They send their guys to the city and they don't even know what they're doing. They look like f--king Jews."

The conversation shifts to tourism as we near the city. Two women on the bus mention that they've never been to New York - they're looking out the windows for the skyline and keep mistaking Jersey cities for NYC. Mr. Big explained that there were certain places they should avoid but he wouldn't be more specific than "parts of Chinatown at night" or certain areas around Times Square. They said they'd heard the Bronx was bad, but he demurred. "It used to be," he said, "but now you go to the Bronx and you think you're in Queens, it's so pretty. They got cul de sacs and everything."

Welcome home.

(more pics here)

My favorite lesbians

I went with Sophie and Melissa to the NYC Pride parade last weekend - it was an especially auspicious year for this celebration because it was the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Seeing the veterans of Stonewall riding by on a float was at once heartening and sad. Many are now old men, and they still can't legally marry or live entirely free of fear that they could be the victims of anti-gay violence - even on some of the streets of liberal New York.

I imagine their stories are hard for people of Melissa and Sophie's generation to grasp, though they and the other younger people in the crowd absolutely recognize the contribution of these gay elders and they cheered them as they went by - they are heroes to all of their gay "children" and "grandchildren." And to people like me as well - parents of young men and women who are just trying to get on in the world and live their lives as free Americans. Stonewall is Selma.

This week's New Yorker quoted an article called "The Homosexual in America" that was published in 1966 in Time magazine: "[Homosexuality] is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste—and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness."

Back in those days, when I was in high school, I read Time voraciously. It was a sort of pop culture Bible to a certain people of my generation, and I am horrified to think that I was reading that sort of crap.

Times change, but not that much in some ways. I will never forget stopping with Sophie in Laramie, Wyoming, when we drove cross-country from Seattle to Poughkeepsie in 2003. It was just a few years after the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, and we pulled over to take some pictures of one of those lonesome stretches of fence that go for on for miles in that part of the west. Suddenly, Sophie started to cry -- and I knew right away what she was thinking. This was much like the spot where Matthew had been tied to a fence, beaten, and left to die. We both realized the horrifying implication -- that you could be targeted for violence simply because you were gay, plain and simple.

Now, 40 years after Stonewall and 11 years after Matthew Shepard, a parade seems a slight way to recognize the veterans of the struggle. But it does provide a moment of solidarity, and a chance to remind people of the gay rights issues that are critically important right now -- the fight for marriage equality and the struggle to get rid of the Defense of Marriage Act and Don't ask, don't tell.

Bare butts and drag may seem frivolous, but in a way that's what it's all about - the freedom to pursue your own happiness. See more pictures here.

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.