New Museum For Old Bikes In Newburgh?

I have been to Newburgh, New York twice in my life.  Both times I got there on my bicycle:  once on a day trip there and back from New York City, another time during a long weekend mini-tour of the Catskills.  

Although a decade separated the two visits, I had almost exactly the same impression both times:  It's rather like a miniature, and more compressed, version of The Big Apple, my hometown.  What I mean is that it's the sort of place where you can see grandeur and despair side by side, and see them together again on the next block, and the block after that.  

It's as architecturally and historically rich as any place I've seen in the US.  I say that as someone who has spent time in large cities like San Francisco, Boston and Philadelphia (and, of course, New York) as well as smaller but impressive towns like Savannah and Providence.  The Downing Mansion would be impressive anywhere, but its setting on the Hudson River, with the mountains in the background, makes it even more so. 

Nearby is the house that served as George Washington's headquarters during the final year of the American Revolution.  It was there that he issued the Proclamation of Peace, effectively ending the war and beginning the independent American nation.  In that house, he also rejected the idea that he should be king and ended the so-called Newburgh Conspiracy that would have left the government controlled by the military.  And, while there, he also conceived or made other contributions to the founding of this country, including ones that influenced the writing of the Constitution.

That house became the first publicly owned historic site in the United States.  The Downing Mansion and other beautiful old houses have been preserved through doting private owners or the efforts of organizations devoted to preservation.  

But literally steps (or pedal strokes) away from those houses is urban blight that reminds people of places like Camden NJ or the South Bronx during the 1970s and '80's.  I saw lots, and even whole blocks, that looked as if bombs had been dropped on them.  In fact, they are the remnants of "urban-renewal" projects begun and aborted or abandoned, for a variety of reasons, decades ago.  And there were other blocks where people huddled up in homes splintered and full of holes, like coats they wore through one winter after another.

Many of those people, I learned, were parolees, current and former addicts and welfare recipients placed in those houses by social service agencies because there weren't any affordable places nearby.  Yes, it was essentially a taxpayer-funded Skid Row.  

But there have been attempts to "bring back" Newburgh.  Across the river, the town of Beacon is often called "Williamsburg on the Hudson" because of the hipsters and gentrifiers that have created a colony of trendy restaurants, bars, galleries, microbreweries and the like.  A similar wave is, from what I hear, finding its way to Newburgh.  

Actually, one successful attempt to keep an historic structure from falling apart--or falling altogether--has been the creation of a motorcycle museum by a city native.  Gerald Doering bought a 1929 Indian Scout locally in 1947, when he was twenty years old.  He loved it, and motorcycling generally, so much that he rode it to Miami, where he sought work with a Newburgh dealership that relocated there.

When that didn't work out, he started an electrical contracting business--and the seeds of his collection, which is centered on the Indian brand and bikes from the early days of motorcycling.  That collection became the foundation for Motorcyclepedia, the museum they opened in 2011.

Motorcyclepedia board member Jean Lara with one of the bicycles to be housed in Velocipede, a bicycle museum planned in Newburgh, NY.  (Photo by Leonard Sparks of the Times Herald-Record.)

Turns out, he and his son were also collecting bicycles, also mainly from that period, though some are earlier.  In a way, it's not so surprising, when you consider that most of the early motorcycle makers (and some current ones) were originally bicycle manufacturers.   Moreover, bicycles and motorcycles were even more similar in those days than they are now.  

Now Doering pere and fils are seeking approval from the Newburgh planning board for a museum called "Velocipede", which they want to house in a former labor union hall they purchased in December 2015. 

Hmm...I may have to make another trip to Newburgh.  I'd like to do it on my bike, again!

What I Did To Avoid A Race Today

Yesterday I said I love sports.  Let me qualify that:  I love most sports.  Among the exceptions is horse racing.  Fortunately, I never had to write about it. 

I also have never been keen on dog racing.  In fact, I don't care much for anything that involves training animals to put themselves at risk to entertain humans.  Making animals fight each other simply disgusts me:  I fail to see what is entertaining or even thrilling about bullfighting, cockfighting, dog fighting or camel wrestling. 

Believe it or not, that last abomination exists:  I saw a match when I was in Turkey.  During camel mating season, males are tied up and left in a dark room.  Then, just before they're walked out into the ring, they're adorned with embroidered capes and such.  By the time they get into the ring, at least one of them is foaming at the mouth.  If I were an animal-rights activist rather than the mere animal-lover that I am, I probably would have been foaming at the mouth, too.

Seeing that camel wrestling match was the only thing I hated in Turkey.  I don't get quite that worked up over horse racing; I simply don't care for it.  And, if you are here in the US, you probably know that the Belmont Stakes was run today.  There was a lot of buzz about it because of American Pharaoh, who had the opportunity to become the first horse in thirty-seven years to win the Triple Crown.  He did not disappoint those who bet on him.

What that means is crowds and lots of traffic on the roads leading to the Belmont Park race track, which is 25 to 30 kilometers from my apartment, depending on which route I were to take.  Once I rode in the direction of the track on the day of the Belmont Stakes, and even the side roads and some residential streets were clogged with SUVs piloted by testy, impatient drivers.

So, of course, I made it a point of avoiding all of that today.  Instead of a horse race, I saw another kind of sport:

No, it's not baseball.  It's one of its forerunners:  cricket.  I wish I could have gotten a bit closer, or that I had my camera with me.  I was relegated to taking that photo with my cell phone.  I also had to push my limited skills to the limit to capture this image:

OK.  So now you're thinking, "She went all the way to England to get away from a horse race?"  If only...

Actually, I rode in the opposite direction of the race track and found myself riding through the Bronx and Westchester County.  Believe it or not, both of those photos were taken in the Bronx.

Van Cortlandt Park is the second-largest park in the Bronx and the fourth-largest in New York City.  Its northern boundary is the city line with Westchester County.  To its south and east are longtime Irish enclaves  Norwood and Bedford Park.  That is where the players in the photo live, or have lived.

On a nearby field, there was another game of cricket in progress:

Adjoining Norwood and Bedford Park is one of the city's largest enclaves of immigrants from the Anglophone West Indies, centered along Gun Hill Road.  The players in this photo probably live there, or possibly in one of the West Indian neighborhoods of Brooklyn.  Although there is no Jim Crow policy in place in Van Cortlandt (or anyplace else in New York) and, from what I understand, the players were not segregating themselves by race (they were merely playing with friends and family), it was still a bit jarring to see white players on one field and blacks on another.

The house in the photo is in a nearby neighborhood almost no one would associate with the Bronx.  The street on which I found the house is private, as are the streets surrounding it.  A couple of blocks away is the Fieldston School, where the tuition is higher than the salary I earned in any of the first twenty or so years I worked. 

Anyway...I saw the cricket games on my way up to Westchester County and the house on my way back.  In Westchester, I rode as close as I could to the Hudson River and was treated to a vista of the Palisades:

What most people don't realize about the Hudson is that south of the Tappan Zee, it's not really a river:  It's actually a tidal basin.  And I could tell, by the way the water was churning, that the tide was coming in. It turns brownish-green then and looks more like a river when the tide is out.

I pedaled against the wind going upriver, so the wind blew me back into the Bronx and to my place.  And I avoided the throngs of gas-guzzlers people drove to watch little men drive horses in the service of bettors.
 

Riding Again At Sunset

I'm so happy to be back on my bike again.  Late the other day, I took a ride that wasn't a commute for the first time in weeks.  I was going to meet some people for dinner in the Village, which meant I would have to lock my bike on the street.  And I knew that there was still a lot of ice and sand on the streets. So I took my LeTour, as its tires are the closest things to snow and ice treads I have.

It wasn't a long ride, but enough to stimulate my senses.  I got this glimpse of dusk on the Hudson River near Christopher Street in Manhattan.

And this--with the relatively rare sight of ice on the Hudson--just north of 14th Street:

I did what I could with my primitive cell phone. But I think I captured something of what the light, if not the cold air, felt like!  If nothing else, they're whetting my appetite for more riding.

Frozen Retreat

This winter, it’s seemed that days without precipitation have been merely interludes between snowstorms.  The funny thing is that none of those storms has left a particularly large accumulation of the white stuff.

The worst part, though, is that the temperature has rarely risen above freezing on those days when it hasn’t snowed.  So, if the snow wasn’t plowed, shoveled or salted, it sits on top of the stuff that already covered the ground.  The deepest parts have turned to ice.

Much of the glacier-in-the-making I’ve described has formed on the streets I normally ride to work.  Even the main streets and roads, which are plowed more regularly, are dotted with ice patches and lined by what look like stretched-out icebergs.

In other words, conditions are treacherous for cyclists.  I haven’t been riding to work, let alone for sport, because I simply don’t see the point of risking myself in that way.  Perhaps if I had studded tires, I’d take the chance.  I’ve never bought a pair because winters like this one are rather unusual for this part of the world:  In most years, there might be only a few years in which such treads would be useful.

Although I miss riding, I don’t feel guilty about not being in the saddle.  About the only riders I’ve seen during the past couple of weeks are men—yes, men—delivering lunches, dinners and snacks from restaurants and pizzerias. 

This weekend, I participated in a retreat about 100 km up the Hudson River, near Ossining.  I was without my, or any other, computer and my cell phone was turned off.   I remained offline yesterday, the day after I returned.

 Of course, I thought about how I could have ridden to the retreat had the weather been different.  There was even more snow and ice up there and the bike lane along US 9 was not plowed.  

Still, I enjoyed the retreat.  How could I not, given its setting?

It’s been years since I’ve seen so much of the Hudson River frozen.  Of course, one day—perhaps weeks, perhaps a couple of months from now—it will thaw and the bare trees will bud.  Perhaps I’ll ride up there for another retreat

.  

Following An Old Ramble

 I haven't done as much cycling as I'd planned or hoped to do this week.  One reason, I guess, is that I am recuperating from the cold (At least, that's what I think and hope it was) I was denying I had.  

But today I took a decent ride.  Although I slept fairly late, I managed to get a 40 mile (65 km) ride in, with a few short but fairly steep climbs.

I took a rather circuitous route to a place I used to cycle through and to regularly when I was living in Washington Heights.  Back in those days, Yonkers--at least the part west of the Thruway (a.k.a. I-87) was the sort of place for which, it seemed, the word "depressed" had been coined. Nearly all of it was as poor--and, not surprisingly, black--as some parts of the neighboring Bronx.   But, unlike some of the Big Apple's poverty pockets, it seemed utterly listless--as if there wasn't even enough energy to be angry, let alone get into a fight.  

So why did I ride there?  As I mentioned, it was close by and had a few decent climbs.  Also, there used to be a bakery that made fresh pita. (There was, and is, a Middle Eastern community.)  Depending on how much time I had (or how much I wanted) to ride, I could continue further into Westchester County, to Sleepy Hollow country.  Best of all, the city skirts the Hudson River and offers some fantastic views up- or down-stream:

Downstream.  The George Washington Bridge is in the distance.

Across:  The Palisades

Part of the purpose of my trek was a test ride.  More about it, and some other things I've used lately, later.

A City Ride After Lunch, Thirty Years Later

Today I rode into Manhattan for a couple of errands and to have lunch with Bruce.  Even though I rode my "beater" (the Le Tour), I decided take a bit of a ramble around the city.

Somewhere along the way, it seems, a hipster couldn't bear giving up his bike when he got married and had a kid:

This Peugeot "Nice" was parked across the street from where the World Trade Center once stood.  I've seen bikes like it--which may also have been Nices--in France and Montreal.  But this is the first time I've seen one  here in New York.

To be fair to hipsters, that paint job is pure '80's.


Aside:  I didn't go anywhere near the WTC for a couple of years after 11 September.  Although I didn't lose anyone I knew, I simply couldn't bear to be around it.  


I continued down Broadway to the ferry terminals.  I missed the day's last ferry to Governor's Island and I decided I didn't really want to take the ferry ride to Staten Island, as much as I enjoy it.   

Another aside:  Staten Island is at its closest to the rest of New York at the Verrazano Narrows, where the eponymous bridge crosses it. At that point, SI is about 4300 feet from New York.  However, the island is only 600 feet away from New Jersey. After the English took New York and New Jersey from the Dutch (who took it from the Lenape Indians), they supposedly settled the dispute over whether Staten Island belonged to New York or New Jersey with a boat race:

Was anyone accused of doping?  Maybe they can use the Tour de France to decide whether France or Spain gets Andorra.


Anyway, I rode up the Greenway that skirts the Hudson.  Lots of the cyclists I saw today probably moved to New York in the last few years.   They don't remember the city without the Greenway.  They also probably think the Christopher Street Pier always looked something like this:

I remember when it looked nothing like that.  My earliest memories were more like what you see in this photo Ross Lewis took in 1993:

Believe it or not, I actually ventured out onto the pier when it was something like that.  My first adventure there was during my high school years, in the mid-1970's.  I don't remember much about it because, well, I did something teenagers sometimes do when they're someplace they're not supposed to be.  I don't think I would've gone onto that pier if I weren't intoxicated.  In fact, I probably wouldn't have crossed under the elevated West Side Highway.  A truck crashed through it in the early 1970's; although it was closed immediately, it wouldn't be demolished for another 15 years.  In the meantime, only those who were intoxicated, adventurous or simply had noplace else to go would cross under that highway to get to piers that were, in some cases, literally falling into the water.  


For a long time, those derelict quais were among the few places to which the public had access on New York City's hundreds of miles of shoreline.  New York is different, in that sense, from other seaport towns like Boston, San Francisco and Istanbul:  Until recently, there was really no individual or civic pride in the waterfront. It seemed as if one's social status was directly proportional to how far one was from the water.  That might be the reason why addresses along  Fifth Avenue, which is further from the waterfront than any other New York City Avenue, became the most prestigious in the city.

I have long said that New York could be, by far, the most beautiful city in the world if its waterfront were cleaned up.  I'm glad to see that's happening, finally.  Still, it's almost surreal to see the shorelines become places of recreation. 

 One of my uncles worked on the Brooklyn docks; as a teenager, my mother worked in a factory just steps away from those docks.  When I was a child, my father worked in a factory that was less than a block from the 57th Street pier, which is only about half a mile from the Intrepid.  Those workplaces, not to mention those jobs, are long gone.  In fact, the old Maritime Union headquarters in Brooklyn, which took up an entire square block, is now Al-Noor, said to be the largest Muslim elementary school in the United States.


I continued up the Greenway past the Boat Basin, Harlem toward the George Washington Bridge

On my way back, I saw this charmingly theatrical facade:

This building was the old Audubon Ballroom.  Many jazz performers played there; in addition, the Audubon was a movie theatre and a meeting-place for labor activists.  However, it seemed not to recover from having been the site of Malcolm X's assassination until Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center turned it into a research laboratory during the 1990's.


How much else will change by the time I take another ride like the one I took today? 

The Almost Unbearable Lightness of a Late-Day Ride

Gunnar and Velouria may not have ever met.  But they have created a monster.


You see, they both used the word "pretty" in talking about the photo someone took of me the other day.  So, when I stopped during my ride today, I asked random strangers to take photos of me.  


Here's the first one, taken by a young Japanese woman on the George Washington Bridge:

OK, so it's not going to get me an endorsement deal, much less a modeling contract.  But at that moment, I understood what Salvatore Quasimodo meant by writing the shortest poem I know of: 


M'illumno
D'immenso.


That I was riding over the bridge at the beginning of rush hour but not dealing with the rush hour traffic was, in and of itself, pretty exhilarating.  But it was an utterly glorious day:  Yesterday's heat and humidity were nothing but memories (or bad dreams).   Pedalling across the bridge felt like flight.


On the Jersey side, I turned left and pedalled down the road that winds a descent from the top of the Palisades to the shelves of rock that line the Hudson, which looked like the sun-filled atrium of one of those very peaceful houses in which  everyone would like spent his or her childhood-- and some can visit in their dreams.  


I spun the cranks of Arielle, my Mercian road bike, as I descended layers of sunlight to the ferry piers at Port Imperial.  Then I followed the riverside road to Hoboken, where young people who work in downtown Manhattan were ascending from the PATH station.  A day like this really feels like an ascent when you're coming from the grimy subterranean depths, and when you feel a cool if strong breeze before the sun begins to set.  

In back of me is the old Erie Lackawana railroad terminal on the Hoboken waterfront.  At times like that, I wish the government hadn't taken over the still-existing railroads after the Penn Central bankruptcy of 1970.  After all, what use will anyone have again for such a beautiful word as "Lackawana?"


I continued down Washington and Jersey Avenues to the Jersey City waterfront.  Marlon Brando's character certainly wouldn't recognize the place now.  He might, however, recognize Richmond Terrace and the views from it:

I stopped in a nearby deli for something to drink during the boat ride.  That, ironically, caused me to miss a boat, with the next one half an hour later.   I had to spend that time in a penned-up "secure" area.  Staten Island's terminal of its eponymous ferry feels more like a series of airport security checkpoints.  A TSA employee even brings in a dog to sniff the bicycles.


Anyway, here I am in their version of Checkpoint Charlie:

Still, as you can see, I was in a great mood.


You may have noticed something pink attached to the saddle of this bike, and my fixed-gear.  It's one of the more interesting products I've tried lately:  a Bike Burrito.  It's so named for the way it folds (or rolls) up.  Inside it are a few small tools and a spare inner tube.


Back in the day, when I was poor, I used to roll up my repair kit inside a bandana and strap it to my saddle rails.  The Bike Burrito is basically the same idea, except that it has pockets inside and is made of very sturdy duck cloth, much like Carradice bags.    That canvas comes in various colors as well as a few prints as Jayme, who sews the Bike Burritos herself, finds them.  I ordered the two pink ones with black interiors.  They are "negatives" of a combination she offers regularly:  black outside, pink inside.  (That might be more anatomically correct, but what the heck.)  I also bought another, in a multi-colored paisley, which will go on my Miss Mercian.  That bike, because I'm building it with the Velo Orange "Porteur" bars, won't have the tape you see on my fixed and road Mercians.


Anyway...I recommend the Bike Burritos, which are available in three sizes.  Jayme is very sweet and accomodating, in addition to being a talented designer and crafts person.  And, her creations are compatible with Shimano, Campagnolo and SRAM shifting systems, as well as all other current and vintage components and bicycles.


And I recommend late afternoon-early evening rides along the Hudson that culminate in ferry rides back to the city!