There's No College There, But There's An Education

This weekend included a change of seasons and cultures--and rides.

While, officially, we're deep into Fall, from Thursday through the middle of Saturday, it felt more like early summer.  I took Friday's ride, to Connecticut, in what I might wear around Memorial Day or Labor Day--a pair of shorts and a fluorescent green T-shirt.  The breeze took some of the edge off the humidity.

Saturday morning, I pedaled out to Kesso's for some fresh Greek yogurt.  Alas, they were closed.  I hope everything is OK there: Perhaps they, like so many other shops--and people--couldn't get some thing or another they needed because of the interrupted supply chains that have emptied store shelves.  Later in the day, wind drove hard rain against leaves, windows and faces.

Yesterday, the wind let up--for a little while--and temperatures were more fall-like.  I took a spin along the North Shore of Queens and western Nassau County, which took me into a neighborhood frequented by almost nobody who doesn't live there--in spite of its proximity to a mecca for in-the-know food enthusiasts.

On a map, College Point is next to Flushing.  But the two neighborhoods could just as well be on diffeent planets.  The latter neighborhood, one of the city's most crowded, has been known as the "Queens Chinatown" for the past three decades or so.  There are dozens of places where one can sample a variety of regional cuisines, and have everything from a formal dining experience to chow on the run.  Those places are centered around Roosevelt Avenue and Main Street, at the end of the 7 line of the New York subway system--and one stop away from Citi Field, the home of the New York Mets, and the US Tennis Center, site of the US Open and other events.

College Point is "off the grid," if you will--away from the city's transit systems and accessible only by winding, narrow streets that dead-end in inconvenient places or truck-trodden throughfares that, at times, resemble a moonscape, that weave through industrial parks, insular blue-collar communities and views of LaGuardia Airport and the Manhattan skyline one doesn't see in guidebooks.

Until recently, College Point--which, pervesely, includes no college--was populated mostly by the children and  Irish, German and Italian construction workers and city employees who were the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Irish, German and Italian construction workers and city employees.  Their houses were smaller versions of the nearby factories and warehouses: squat brick structures framed by latticeworks of steel or wooden trellises, cornices  and fences.

In that sense, this place fits right in:

The New York Hua Lian Tsu Hui Temple is--you guessed it--a square brick building framed with wooden cornices and a steel fence.  The cornices,  though, are different:  They signal the purpose of the building, and signify other things.  Apparently, Chinese and Korean people who needed more space to raise their kids--or simply wanted to escape the crowding of Flushing--have "discovered" the neighborhood.  

Some have families and pets:

Marlee, though, was not impressed!  All she knows is that when I'm on my bike (or doing anything outside the apartment), I'm not there for her to curl up on.

Chocolate, Quakers and Chinatown

Over the weekend, I rode on ribbons of shoveled asphalt and sand occasionally punctuated by patches of ice and slush--or mounds of snow that inconveniently appeared in my path.  Since I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, I'll assume that shoveling snow into a bike lane is an honest mistake, not an act of aggression!

Anyway, on Saturday I pedaled out to Coney Island, again, where I saw a surprising number of people strolling (and sometimes slipping) along the boardwalk, and on the Verrazano-Narrows promenade on my way back.  I didn't take any photos, as I didn't see much of anything I didn't see when I rode there a week ago.  I did, however, make a point of stopping at William's Candy Shop.  It's a real old-school seaside sweet shop, lined with ancient glass display cases filled with almost-as-ancient glass bins full of candy apples, marshmallows on sticks and chocolate, fruit gel and other sweet substances in various shapes and sizes, as well as a popcorn maker like the ones you used to see in movie theatres. William's is a remnant of a gritty beachfront strip that's quickly being swallowed up by condo towers, chain restaurants and stores, including It'sugar. (When the old flea-market stalls along Surf Avenue--including one where I bought a Raleigh Superbe--disappeared and were replaced by Applebee's, IHOP and the like, I knew Coney Island as I knew it wasn't long for this world!).  Whenever I go to Coney I stop by, in part, to reassure myself it's still there.  I bought nonpareils (an old favorite), sour cherry balls and a hunk of dark chocolate. The old man who owns the place just happened to be there, giving his gruff-but-warm old-time Brooklyn greetings and thanks, in unison with the more effusive pleasantry of a twentyish young woman (his granddaughter?) who was working there.

I brought some of those nonpareils and cherry balls with me yesterday, as I pedaled up and down the Steinway Manor hill half a dozen times on my way out to the World's Fair Marina, Fort Totten and the coves along the north shore of Queens.  I ventured a bit into one of New York's "other" Chinatowns, in Flushing.  On my way back to the World's Fair Marina, I spun along Bowne Street, named for the man who occupied this house:

It's one of the oldest still-standing habitations in this city.  But it's not just a place where John Bowne sipped his cup of tea at the end of a long day--and sometimes they were long!  There, he and the other Quakers living in Flushing worshipped.  

At that time, most of Queens was still wood- or marsh-land, and reaching the few settlements (like Flushing) could take a day, or longer, from Manhattan.  That, probably, is the reason why Bowne and the Quakers settled there:  They could live self-sufficient lives as farmers, fishers, artisans or tradespeople, "under the radar," so to speak, of the Dutch colonial government.

Here in America, one of the ways we're inculcated with the notion that winners win (i.e., get rich or otherwise "succeed") because they deserve to and losers deserve their fate for being naïve or worse is through  the way we're taught about Peter Stuyvesant.  According to the story we're taught, he bought an island for the equivalent of twenty-four dollars worth of trinkets.   

That island is, of course, Manhattan.  (And real estate developers today think they've gotten a good deal when they score a fifth of an acre in Washington Heights for a million dollars!)  In painting him as, essentially, America's first real estate mogul, the writers of our textbooks--and teachers who presumably don't know any better--leave out his brutality and flat-out bigotry.  He owned slaves which, as terrible as that was, wasn't so unusual for a man of his stature.  But even for his time, he bore an inordinate animus for Jews and Catholics, of whom there were very few in his or any neighboring colony, save for the French settlement of Quebec.  

His most intense hatred, however, was reserved for Quakers.  The best explanation anyone has for it can be found in the name of the denomination, which is really a nickname (officially, they're the Society of Friends) derived from their practice of praying so intensely they sometimes shook ("quaked").  So, no matter how quietly they otherwise lived, their worship practices made them conspicuous.  Other religions, on the other hand, were more able to worship "in the closet," if you will, in places like New Amsterdam that had official religions like the Dutch Reformed Church.

Anyway, Bowne was arrested and extradited back to the Netherlands where he made his case for religious freedom to the Dutch authorities, who reprimanded Stuyvesant and returned Bowne to America.

Somehow, it seems fitting that Bowne's house still stands in a neighborhood where signs are printed in Mandarin and Korean as well as English and Spanish--and where in-the-know New Yorkers (like yours truly) stop for congee and dumplings during cold-day bike rides.

A Masked Slash And Grab

The good news about the COVID-19 epidemic (Did I actually write that?) is that more people are riding bikes.

The bad news is that more bikes are being stolen.  What's worse is that not all of the thieves are taking unattended bikes or breaking locks on parked machines. Perps know they're harder to identify when they're wearing masks, so some have become more brazen about how they part riders from their wheels.

Such was the case a month ago, just a few miles from my apartment.  Sometimes, during rides to or from Fort Totten or Nassau County, I'll stop in Flushing--the Chinatown of Queens--for dumplings or other tasty treats.  A young man who stopped in front of a restaurant near Main Street--may have had the same idea.

Whatever his intention, another young man started to talk to him.  The distraction allowed another young man to approach him from behind--and slash him in the face.

He dropped his phone and bike.  The guy who started the conversation scooped them up and took off.  The slasher ran into a subway station a few doors away.

Everything was captured on video.  I just hope someone can recognize the perps and call the NYPD hotline (1-800-577-8477 for English, 1-800-577-4782 for Spanish).

When Getting Lost Leads To Finding A Hot Pot

If your navigational skills are anything like mine, even rides in familiar territory become adventures.  Of course, I don't share  that "dirty little secret" about myself when people tell me I have a sense of adventure.  


The malfunction of my mental GPS came when I was trying to bring Lakythia to the promenade by the World's Fair Marina.  I sometimes ride it on my way home from work.  But we were approaching it from the opposite direction from  my commutes.  So, after a couple of wrong turns, we were riding in front of the Delta and American Airlines terminals at LaGuardia Airport.


We finally got to that promenade, though.  And, at the end of it, we pedalled over a bridge that spans one of those bodies of water where a body or two might've been dumped among old car parts and wastes from the small factories along that body of water.  


At least the bridge ends in Flushing, where there might be more good Asian food than in any other place in North America or, at any rate, the East Coast.  

We shared a Korean hot pot containing, as you can see, lots of vegetables and some seafood.  I found myself thinking about having fondues and raclettes at the ends of days spent cycling in the Alps.  I saw two women, who appeared to be a mother and daughter, dipping pieces of vegetables and meat into the roiling stock.  


The restaurant was not shy about using spices.  That was fine with both Lakythia and me.  Actually, at first I found myself complaining that the food was too hot--temperature-wise, not in terms of spices.  But she pointed out something it doesn't take a college instructor to figure out (ha, ha):  If you let the food cool a bit, eating it becomes easier.  And the food is actually tastier.


My only complaint is that the sauce spattered on my tank top that matches the colors of my Mercians:

Well, that's what it looked like before it got spattered. Hopefully, the spots will come out in the wash.   If they don't, I guess I'll have to go to Old Navy and hope they have another of these tops.


I'm not sure whether Lakythia didn't get spattered or was simply smarter in choosing the T-shirt she wore:

Eccentric Rings

Tonight, on my way home, I stopped in Flushing for a bite to eat.  Now, I've never been to Hong Kong, but Flushing is what I imagine Hong Kong would be like if it were transported to Queens.  Or, perhaps, with its ubiquitous neon, it could be seen as an Asian version of Times Square.

I wonder whether the makers of this Rudge-Whitworth ever imagined it in magenta neon light.  In some odd way, bike and light are not incongruous, at least to me.  


One particularly interesting feature of this bike is its chainring cutout pattern:

Is the hand halting or waving? Whatever it's doing, it looks good doing it on this bike.  


I'm guessing that the bike is from the 1940's or 1950's.  At that time there were dozens, if not hundreds, of bicycle manufacturers who made what we now think of as classic English 3-speeds.  (Many of those companies, including Rudge, were bought by Raleigh during the 1950's.) While, at first glance, they seemed almost the same, each model had its own particular set of details that set it apart. An example is in the chainwheel you saw in the above photo. Many other British makers used chainwheels with interesting and sometimes whimsical patterns cut into them.  The Raliegh three-speed I rode last year had a heron--Raleigh, which of course was Raleigh's corporate symbol. 


I've seen other chainrings cut out in interesting patterns. Here's one of my favorites:

It's on an AJ Warrant bike from Austria.  Although there's no earthly reason to use a cottered crankset today, I wouldn't mind having the one in the photo.