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.

Rhythm of the city

I hear the R train rumbling deep beneath my apartment - not loud but a deep and consonant presence, reassuring in its regularity, like an earth mother.

That's one of the sounds that I associate with my new life in a city that thrums with noise. I'm not the first to observe this, of course. The poet Federico Garcia Lorca said that "New York is Senegal with machines," which just about sums it up on some days.

Outside as I write this, a siren is "burping" - squealing in short bursts in a frustrating attempt to get vehicles to move out of the way, which they will - eventually. That's another part of the rhythm of the city.

On my way to the Y tonight, I walked past a street that the police had blocked off, thinking maybe there was a domestic dispute in progress or something like that. I got a few blocks further and realized that it wasn't just that street but a large area cordoned off by the police. In Seattle, if something like this had been going on, you could stop and ask bystanders what was happening and they usually wouldn't know. No one had thought to ask the cops. But here, I asked a woman and she already had the whole story - suspicious package, the bomb squad was poking around trying to figure out what it was, no big deal.

By the time I left the Y, the excitement was over and the streets were back to their normal rock and roll: Cars moving in that peculiar speed-up-slow down pattern that always reminds me of something David Letterman says - "Traffic signals in New York are just rough guidelines."

Back at home, I hear another rhythm - the murmuring of people walking by my windows on their way to here and there, all part of the flow. I like that sound because it's the sound of life going along, moving with the pace of time.

Just another emigre in Brooklyn

I went to a reading the other night for an Irish writer, Colm Toibin, at BookCourt, my favorite neighborhood bookstore (they have a different writer practically every night). His new book is called Brooklyn, and it's about a young woman who comes to Brooklyn from County Wexford in the 1950s. I've just started reading the book, so I can't give you a review. And I've never read anything else by Tiobin.

But what interested me in this book and reading was an article in the NY Times about Tiobin and his take on Brooklyn and Irish immigration.

As a double emigre myself (from Kentucky to Seattle and from Seattle to New York), I can relate. And as a third generation descendent of an Irish immigrant (my maternal great-grandmother), I'm always interested in most anything Irish.

But Toibin talked about something I'd never heard of, a phenomenon in Ireland called the American wake. What that means is the family get-together right before someone heads off for America. It's been such a common occurence over the decades because there have been succeeding waves of immigrants from Ireland, forced by economic circumstances to go -- and possibly never return.

This was the case for my great-grandmother, who came to America (via New Orleans) as a 9-year-old. The two salient facts about her, according to what I heard my mother say many times, were that she never had any contact with her family in County Kilkenny again, and that she always looked sad - indeed, I have a picture of her that is the essence of sadness.

In the 1950s, when Toibin's main character came here, at least there was the possibility of writing letters, even making phone calls. The huge numbers of Irish people who came here in the 1980s could fly back home more easily, and now cell phones and the Internet mean that almost constant communication is possible.

But emigres are always at a loss in a certain way, even if they can talk to those back home or visit often. I think you pick up the spirit of the places you live in - good, bad or indifferent -- and carry that with you wherever you go.

I'm a little Louisville, a little Seattle, and maybe I'm becoming a little Brooklyn, who knows?

I'm not even sure what that means. But the guy at the Korean grocer's where I buy fruit actually wished me a good evening tonight and smiled, which he's never done before. And tourists stop me on the street and ask me where Grimaldi's is or how to find the Brooklyn Bridge -- as though I look like I would know. And I do.

Behind in my work

I've renewed a promise to myself to write a new entry at least once a week. So here goes.

It was great seeing all of you in Seattle, where the weather was wonderful and the company even better. Thanks, Susan and Tom and Mary, for making room for me in the middle of your busy weekend. And thanks to the rest of you for doing your usual best to put together an impromptu party with fabulous snacks.

Here in NYC, we're having Seattle weather - rain, rain, rain. Lucky for them, Sophie and Melissa are in Puerto Rico and missing the precip. Specifically, they're on the Isla de Vieques, where the horses run wild and the water in a certain bay is luminescent.

On Saturday, I went on a garden tour of the Lower East Side. The area we were in is also called Loisaida (pictures here), a word that even appears on street signs as an alternative name for Avenue C. It comes from casual use but also from a 1974 poem by the Nuyorican poet Bittman Rivas. Over the decades, the Lower East Side has changed from Jewish working class to Latino and Puerto Rican to hipster - and it's still changing.

I went there with a walking group called the Outdoors Club - I've done several walks with them, and this was by far the most interesting, culturally speaking. The gardens we visited were mostly community gardens and of wide variety - some purely floral, some with hardscape built by hand, many with found-object decoration. One was filled with stuffed animals and toy robots. These things hung from trees and walls and popped up out of the ground like little buried treasures.

The best was more like a wild prarie field, filled with grass and sculpture. The Kenkelaba Sculpture Garden was a on a lot between two buildings that the community fought fiercely to keep from development when an old building was torn down by the city -- the same was true of many of the other gardens spaces.

The Kenkelaba garden was next to an an apartment building that's run as an artists' coop. Across the street was a gallery owned and run by the guy who owns the apartment building. He came out to talk with us and show us around his gallery, where he has pieces by most of the major African American artists of the last half century -- Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, even Muhammed Ali. A tiny little place filled with treasures, plus a back garden full of chairs made of tools, computers, jerrycans, just about anything you can imagine.

The day ended with a visit to the central courtyard of Stuyvesant Town, a planned community built by Met Life after World War II - very much like the place where Susanne grew up, Parkchester in the Bronx, where affordable housing was made available to veterans, teachers, and other middle-class workers. Stuyvesant Town was recently sold to a corporation and now apartments are being rented at market rates, much to the dismay of the people who live there. Their rents won't go up - it's rent-controlled - but a woman on the tour who lives there said that the new owners have set up a class system, where new tenants can use certain facilities that are no longer open to old-time residents. There's now a private library and a private bar/cafe. Seems like there's a lot of resentment building.

Despite that, the central garden of Stuyvesant Town is lovely -- mature trees, a huge fountain, lots of lawn and park benches. An idyll in the middle of the city.

But in New York, nothing is an idyll for long . . .

A moment of Zen

That's what Jon Stewart calls the little fillip at the end of The Daily Show. For me, in New York, there are a lot of moments of Zen, mostly having to do with suddenly seeing the city from an odd angle, or unexpectedly coming upon a place I've heard about but never seen. And a lot of these moments are about seeing the Empire State Building from every which way - sometimes it looks small and distant and it's hard to believe it's the tallest building in the city.

Other times, it's right there in front of you, looming in such a way that you can't really even see the top of it. If you're literally in front of it, you're aware of its presence as a monument (a weak word to describe it), an icon, a surreal thing that is in reality just another building. You notice it more at the level because of the crowds that are always swarming around it.

Sometimes, for me, it's like a lighthouse: I can tell that I'm heading in the right direction because I can see it - there it is, so I'm know I'm heading north or south or east or west. A quotidian thing, useful and amazing at the same time.

On occasion, I've been walking somewhere in Manhattan and I'll realize that a little clutch of people are looking up at something, transfixed, and when I follow their gaze they're almost invariably looking at it. It's a religious experience, like when the sun and clouds accumulate in a certain way and you can see the luminous rays falling to earth - I always call that phenomenon God light, a strange thing for a non-spiritual person like myself.

There are certain things that define a city, and it's almost silly to say it, but the Empire State Building IS New York in some fundamental way - like the subway and the Met and Battery Park, only so, so much more so.

Sometimes I look at the Empire State Building and I get a little shiver of fear that something terrible could happen to it like what happened to the Twin Towers. But then it just seems so singular and strong and tall that the fear goes away and the awe sets in again. It's just a building, but oh, what a building.

(A note about the picture: I took it one night while walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, so it encompasses three monumental structures: the Empire State, the Manhattan Bridge and the BB.)