Showing posts with label Brooklyn Heights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brooklyn Heights. Show all posts

11 July 2016

Brooklyn Heights: Another Reason I Am Not A Racer

Yesterday, I wrote about the things that caused me to realize that I am not, at heart, a racer, even though I pretended to be one for a few years.  In brief, I care more about the feelings and memories I have, or associate with, my rides than I do with how fast or how far I rode.

Well, today, I had another insight as to why, even after a third-place finish in a race, I couldn't have pushed myself to "the next level"--whatever that might have been--even if I'd had the talent, trained harder and simply wanted to win more.

This afternoon I spun Tosca, my Mercian fixed gear, through some Brooklyn and Queens streets.  Part of my ride took me through Brooklyn Heights, which today is--at least in the eyes of many--the very epitome of an urban "brownstone" neighborhood.

In 1965, the City's newly-formed Landmarks Commission--created in the wake of the outrage generated by the destruction of the original Penn Station--designated much of the Heights as the city's first Historic District.  Good thing, too:  During the two decades following World War II, Americans set their sights on modern houses in the suburbs, not historic buildings in the inner city.  As a result, those beautiful old houses began to decay, and Robert Moses thought they--and similar houses in nearby Park Slope--were simply obstacles to building the expressway he wanted to carve through Brooklyn.

I stopped to read the plaque on one of the houses that would have been razed--a Federal-style building on Middagh Street. No racer, I think, would have interrupted his or her ride in that way--or to look at other houses.  The fact that I had just a crappy cell phone with me--and, therefore, couldn't take good pictures--would have been enough of an excuse for a racer (or the racer wannabe that I was) not to stop and look at buildings.





And if I were training for the next Tour or Giro or whatever, I probably wouldn't have noticed that in a neighborhood full of Federal and Greek and Italianite Revival-style buildings--which brought the neighborhood its landmark designation--there was something that stood out:




The Cranlyn Building is beautiful, but it's not what people normally associate with the Heights.  If anything, it's practically a textbook example of Art Deco.  It would fit seamlessly on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx (though the Cranlyn is in be tter condition than most Bronx buildings) or even in Miami's South Beach.   But it's not just the visual contrast between it and the houses (and the Church of the Assumption) on Cranberry Street that's so interesting. 




To me, the Cranlyn has a different kind of energy to it. Yes, it is an apartment (condo) building with a chrome-zinc-and-glass Italian cafe on the ground floor on a street mainly of single-family homes.  More important, though, the building feels like jazz--just look at the pattern of those lines!--in a neighborhood that is, perhaps, more Mozartian.


The way those lines unite Art Deco with jazz reminds me of the relationship betwen graffiti, break-dancing and hip-hop. Just watch "Beat Street" (corny, I admit, but with great music from early hip-hip artists!).  Pay attention to the dancers and to the graffiti-covered subway trains as they rumble along Bronx viaducts:  Look at the way those lines of graffiti move, look at the dancers' movements and pay attention to the beat.  That relationship is, I think, something the movie captured brilliantly.

The funny thing is that, even though I was riding at a slow speed (for me, anyway!), I was still going about five times as fast as anyone walking the street.  Yet no one seems to notice the building, or its contrast with the rest of the neighborhood.  Even more ironically, as a pedestrian, I never noticed what I'm describing:  I first noticed it from the saddle of my bicycle.  

And, in the strangest twist of all, during my racing days, I had experienced the Heights only as a pedestrian:  I never rode through the neighborhood!

24 March 2014

Sleepless As What's Under Them

The other day I got out for a bit of a ride.  On my way home, I passed through the Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill neighborhoods of Brooklyn.  

The Heights abuts the waterfront and the Hill is next door.  Both neighborhoods have been the home of a number of writers, especially poets--including the ones everyone's heard of like Walt Whitman, Hart Crane and Marianne Moore and ones only readers of this blog have heard of, like yours truly.

Anyway, much of the Heights gentrified decades ago--in fact, one of the first landmarked districts in the United States lies within the neighborhood.  Cobble Hill is also turning into an enclave of young professionals and families.  

One result of those demographic changes--and shifts in the city's, nation's and world's economy--is that much of the city's maritime history is disappearing.  I know about those developments firsthand:  Two of my uncles were maritime workers and their union headquarters once occupied an entire square block, and a good part of another, in South Brooklyn.  One of my early birthdays was celebrated in its reception hall; so were milestones in the lives of other family members of longshoremen and other workers.  Now that square-block sized building is occupied by the largest Muslim elementary school in America and the maritime workers are relegated only to a couple of offices in the other building.

One of the last remaining vestiges of the work those men (almost all of them were male) did is seen on this building I passed on Atlantic Avenue, near Clinton Street:





The former headquarters and workshop of John Curtin's sail-making operation is now condominums, with a restaurant and Urban Outfitters store in its street-level studios. 

Riding through the neighborhood made me think of this passage from Hart Crane's masterwork The Bridge:

 Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.