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.
