In the middle of the journey of my life, I am--as always--a woman on a bike. Although I do not know where this road will lead, the way is not lost, for I have arrived here. And I am on my bicycle, again.
Yesterday, I took another ride to Connecticut. The day could hardly have been better: neither the warmth nor sunlight were oppressive, and only a few high, wispy clouds floated across the sky. I pedaled into a fairly brisk wind most of the way up--which meant, of course, it blew me back to Astoria. And nearly into the path of a deer. I was gliding through a turn on the Pelham Bay Park path, just before it crosses an entrance to the New England Thruway. Trees cover one side of the path and line the other; just beyond that line is a marsh, with the hulking structures of Co-op City in sight.
The World Cup football tournament starts in a couple of weeks. Perhaps even the US, which didn't qualify, is getting ready:
Will the "ball" go through the" posts"? If it does, and Andres Cantor isn't there to announce it, does it count as a goal? Interesting, what you can see on a bike ride in the Bronx!
What is the difference between "dawn" and "sunrise"? Someone, I forget who, said that if you call it "dawn", you probably aren't awake for it. Whatever you call it, it's early in the morning.
I'm not complaining. I was just thinking of a title for this post. "Dawn In The Bronx" seems like a Chamber of Commerce slogan. So I opted for "Mott Haven Morning." Whatever you call it, I was up for it. And it was good.
Last night, I stayed at work later than I'd planned. I figured it would be easier to finish grading a bunch of papers in my office than at home. That meant I couldn't go via Randall's Island, as the Queens spur of the RFK Bridge closed for repairs at 8 pm. So I rode into Manhattan via the Willis Avenue Bridge, which lets cyclists off at 125th Street and First Avenue. It was already past 9:30 by the time I got on my bike, but I figured that if I channeled the messenger I once was, I might get to the Queensborough (59th Street) Bridge path before it closed for repairs at 10pm. Well, things didn't quite work that way. The Queensborough path was indeed closed when I got there. At least a bus is provided. Actually, there's a bus and a truck. Each cyclist is given a number for his or her bike as it's loaded onto the truck. The bus follows it across the bridge. Not a bad arrangement, right? Well, the bus and truck are nice, and the drivers are prompt and helpful. There are two problems, though. One is motor traffic on the Bridge: I never realized there would be so much after 10 pm! The other is that the bus and truck have to take circuitous routes to get onto the bridge, and once they leave the bridge, as some streets are one-way and others are narrow and don't allow buses or trucks. So, it took about 45 minutes from the time we left 59th Street and First Avenue in Manhattan until we disembarked on 23rd Street at Queensborough Plaza. In other words, that trip took twice as long as it took me to pedal from my job, at 149th Street and Grand Concourse in the Bronx, to 59th Street and First Avenue in Manhattan!
I won't whine about the inconvenience: We got across the bridge safely and as quickly as conditions would allow. And, as I said, the drivers and truck-loaders were courteous and helpful. I can't help but to think, though, that whatever reduction in carbon emissions any of us might have acheived by riding from wherever to the Bridge was negated by all the time the bus and truck was stuck in traffic on the Bridge.
Yesterday, I wrote about seeing the cherry blossoms budding on my way in to work.
Well, my ride home included a different sort of visual spectacle. Because I was carrying a lot (and was being a bit lazy), I took the new connector bridge, which is flat, to Randall's Island, rather than the steep, zig-zaggy ramp up to the Bronx spur of the RFK Bridge.
The connector passes underneath the Hell Gate viaduct--where the Amtrak trains run--and over the Bronx Kill, which separates the rusty but still running industrial areas of the Bronx from the parklike expanses of Randall's Island.
My commute may be only ten kilometers in each direction. But I felt as if I'd experienced a whole spectrum of color, a wide panaroma of light and forms, on my way to work and back.
As I mentioned in a previous post, a bicycle/pedestrian connection between Randall's Island and the Bronx has opened. It's actually very good: It's well-constructed and makes a smooth transition to the pathways on the island. Also, it's wide and closed off to motorized traffic, though there is a rail crossing--albeit one that doesn't seem to be used very often. My only real complaint about it is that it's that most people would have a difficult time finding it from the Bronx side.
Still, I sometimes choose to ride up the walkway on the Bronx spur of the RFK Memorial/Triborough Bridge. One reason is that it has a fairly steep incline, which adds a small challenge to my daily commute. Also, while the new connector makes for an easy entrance into the Bronx, the old RFK walkway makes the entrance, shall we say, a bit more grand
and perhaps a bit more dramatic, even a bit Gothic, on an overcast day. It's not exactly noir--more like gris, perhaps. Plus, you have to admit, there's something imposing about seeing a cross--or something that looks like a cross, anyway--as you are riding up to an arch.
Don't get me wrong: I'm enjoying my new job, and the commute to it. Truth be told, the part of the Bronx where I now work is more interesting than the part of Queens where I had been working. And, oddly enough, even though I don't see a lot of people in the neighborhood riding bikes (a few of colleagues in my department and elsewhere in the college ride in), somehow I don't feel as conspicuous as I did at my old job, where practically nobody rode. And I couldn't make the kind of entrance I make when I pedal up that ramp into the Bronx!
I am teaching early morning classes in my new gig. That means, for now, that I am pedaling to work around dawn. Someone remarked that I am "bringing the morning to the Bronx", where I am now working.
Should I bring the morning in a pair of panniers? A bicycle briefcase? Or some other kind of bike bag?
While pedaling across the RFK/Triborough Bridge, I saw the morning arrive in another conveyance
Perhaps I wasn't bringing morning through the Gates of Hell. But some of my students probably thought I was bringing them hell this morning through the campus gate!
The weather during the ride I took to Connecticut on Monday was a sign of Fall's impending arrival. Today, during--you guessed it--another ride to Connecticut, I saw yet another sign the season will soon be upon us:
This trail, part of the East Coast Greenway, connects Pelham Bay Park, City Island and Orchard Beach with Westchester County. Along the way, it passes by a horse riding academy, golf course and the shores of Long Island Sound before twisting its way through woodland that straddles the line between the upper Bronx and Pelham Manor. Although the temperature was slightly higher (rising to 25C by mid-ride), it really didn't feel that way, in spite of the bright sunshine. As I mentioned in my post about Monday's ride, the days are growing shorter, so the ground and buildings aren't absorbing as much heat as they did even two or three weeks ago. But, perhaps more important, the wind was even more brisk: At times, it reached 40 KPH. And, yes, I was pedaling into it on my way up. The wind didn't deter these folks who were enjoying the light and vistas of Mamaroneck Harbor:
Back to the subject of signs: When you ride, you see the kind I've mentioned as well as the ones posted on buildings. I hope this isn't a sign of things to come:
All right: The name of the bowling alley has nothing to do with firearms or survivalists. Rather, it's located near the intersection of Gun Hill (great name, huh?) and Boston Post Roads in northern Bronx. What amazes me is that the sign looks so pristine while keeping to the look of the 1950's or early 60's. I don't believe it's anyone's attempt at self-conscious irony: There are no hipsters in the neighborhood around it. (Most of the residents are Caribbean immigrants or their children; not long ago it was a blue-collar-to-middle-class Italian-American neighborhood.) I think life throws enough irony at those people. Seeing such a sign on an absolutely beautiful and bright day, as Fall knocks at our door, is plenty or irony for me. I love it!
Today I took another ride into Connecticut. I figured--correctly--that I wouldn't encounter heavy traffic even along Boston Post Road, as Route 1 is known in Westchester County. Most likely, folks from the Nutmeg State already took off for the weekend yesterday, or even the day before. Also, riding to Connecticut means riding away from most of the beaches in this area, which is where most travelers are going or have gone this weekend, which includes the Monday holiday of Labor Day.
I thought about taking off for some place or another this weekend. Now I'm glad I didn't: The ride I took today is more emotionally relaxing and satisfying than just about any trip I could have taken on a crowded train, plane or bus. Also, Greenwich, Mianus and Byram aren't full of tourists, and the people who stayed in town are relaxed and friendly.
This weekend, I also plan to ride again and meet a friend or two here in the city, which is strangely idyllic. Perhaps we'll go to a museum or show, or just "do lunch."
But I digress. I took slightly different routes through the Bronx and lower Westchester County than I had on previous rides. I also wandered through an area of Greenwich--up a hill--I hadn't seen before. There are houses built on stretches of land that could serve as game preserves. ("Deer crossing" signs were everywhere.) I stopped in a park where I was reminded that this is indeed the unofficial last weekend of summer, and the fall--the actual season as well as the autumn that includes the march of time across people's lives:
All right, I'm making more of this photo than is really there. The park itself is a well-kept spread of lawn with a single picnic table. I didn't want or need anything else.
Behind me, this tree stood authoritatively. It seemed such an indignity for it to share the same ground, from which it's grown for decades (if not centuries) with a fence and a garbage can.
That tree seems like a New England tree: It belongs where it is. Trees I see in the city, as lovely as they are, so often seem like they are where they are only at the pleasure of some land owner or agency that can evict or "retire" (I've heard the word used in that way) it to make way for something more profitable or convenient.
The ride back took me up and down more hills, past more palatial estates. Nowhere did I find a sign one normally finds when leaving or entering a state. I knew I had crossed back into New York State only because of a sign from the local police department--in Rye Brook--asking people to report drivers who text.
A few miles up the road, I passed through a city I had always avoided: White Plains. Somehow the name terrified me: I always imagined folks even paler than I am chasing away....someone like me? OK, maybe not me, but certainly most of the students I've had.
(For years, New Hampshire was one of two states that didn't observe Martin Luther King Day. I actually wondered whether it had something to do with having the White Mountains. Then I realized Arizona, the other state that didn't recognize MLK Day, had no such excuse!)
White Plains was a bit bland, though not terrible. It has a road--Mamaroneck Road--that actually becomes rather quaint, in spite of the chain stores on it, after it passes under the highway and continues toward the town for which it's named.
The rest of the ride was as pleasant as the warm afternoon with few clouds and little humidity. Even though I pedaled about 140 kilometers, I barely broke a sweat. But the relatively pleasant surprise of White Plains was balanced by a signal of The End of the World As We Know It:
Two years ago, the former chief of the French National Police caused a stir when he said that certain parts of Paris were starting to resemble the Bronx.
He was making reference to the increasing crime in those Parisian arrondissements--namely, the 18th, 19th and 20th. (It also just happens that those neighborhoods contain the city's greatest concentrations of African and Middle Eastern immigrants.) He is not the first Frenchman, or European, to make such a comparison: the worst parts of cities, or the banlieuesare often likened to New York City's northernmost boroughs, usually based on impressions gleaned from such films as Fort Apache, The South Bronx. While I certainly wouldn't compare Port Morris with the Place des Voges, not all of the Bronx is poor and crumbling and even its worst parts aren't quite as dangerous as some other urban neighborhoods. But I guess "Camden" or "North Philadelphia" or "The South Side of Chicago" doesn't have quite the same ring.
Anyway, there is a certain irony in the former police chief's comparison. It can be seen in certain areas, such as a stretch of the Grand Concourse near Yankee Stadium where I rode today:
While the buildings are in need of maintenance, some are quite nice: People actually lived in them by choice. More to the point (for the purposes of this post, anyway), they bear the influences of Art Deco and classical architectural styles found in many Paris buildings.
Also, you may have noticed that the Grand Concourse, like the Boulevard des Champs-Elysees, is wide, has a parklike median and is lined with residential as well as commercial buildings.
The parallels I've described are not merely coincidental. At the end of the 19th Century, most of the Bronx was still wooded or farmland; all of its industry as well as most of its population was concentrated in the southernmost part of the borough. But new waves of immigration would fill Manhattan's tenements and trains almost to their bursting point, and many longtime Manhattan residents sought bigger apartments as well as more open space but wanted a manageable commute to work. The city's subway and trolley lines were extended into the Bronx, and new street and apartment buildings were constructed.
Around this time, a man who had been a surveyor, mapmaker and engineer for the New York Central Railroad (then the second-largest corporation in the US, after the Pennsylvania Railroad) was appointed the chief topographical engineer for New York City. His name was Louis Aloys Risse. At age seventeen, he emigrated to the US from France, where he was born in 1850. Thus, it comes as little surprise that while on a hunting trip (!) in the hills of the North Bronx, he conceived of a boulevard, inspired by the Champs-Elysees, that would connect one end of the borough with the other, and with Manhattan.
So...Do you still think it's so odd that I'd take a ride in the Bronx while still in the afterglow of my trip to Paris?
In an earlier post, I alluded to a bike/pedestrian bridge under construction--for aeons, it seems--between Randall's Island and the Bronx.
Actually, saying it's been "under construction" isn't quite accurate. Perhaps it was at one time--say, around 2009--but for the past few years it's been frame surrounded by a chicken wire fence that serves mainly as platform for signs claiming that it's undergoing an environmental review.
The problem is that the land on the Bronx side is part of the Harlem River Yards. The State Transportation Department owns the Yards, but leases them to developer Harlem River Yards Ventures, which in turn leases parts of it to other companies. (Where else but in New York, right?) Well, now it seems that some of those companies gave easements to the state and, when I rode by the site this morning, construction of some sort was going on.
I hope...I hope...I hope.
Even though the project is still behind schedule, it's still being done in a more timely fashion--and with much smaller cost overruns--than the Second Avenue Subway. Nothing like a little perspective, right?
