Yesterday afternoon, I unwound myself with a no-destination ride. I have no idea of how many miles or kilometers I pedaled. All I know is: a.) I was hungry when I got home (I fed Marlee first!) and b.) I wandered through Brooklyn neighborhoods seen by almost no one who doesn’t live in them—streets where women in long dresses and thick hosiery pushed baby carriages while young men in colorful shirts chatted and swaggered to the beat of Bob Marley songs and other sounds from Jamaica, other parts of the Caribbean and Africa.
I also wended down streets in a neck of Queens between Jamaica Bay and the Hawtree Inlet. The narrow streets, some barely or not at all paved, could just as well be part of a New England or Gulf fishing village. It would be easy to believe they weren’t part of the New York City borough of Queens were it not for this:
Part of the neighborhood—Hamilton Beach* —lies within the Gateway National Recreation Area, which includes parts of the New York and New Jersey coastlines. The West Hamilton Beach part might well be the only part of the US National Park system that has a municipal railway running through it.
That subway line is the A train—yes, the one in Duke Ellington’s song. The Hamilton Beach section of Gateway is about 30 miles as the crow (or seagull or egret or whatever bird you like) flies from Harlem. As Ellington reminds us, if you miss the A train, you’ve missed the fastest way to Harlem—especially from one of New York’s most remote locales.
Fortunately, I was riding Negrosa, my vintage Mercian Olympic, so I didn’t have to worry about missing the train.
