Entering And Reaching During A Ride

The other day, I pedaled along the Queens and Brooklyn waterfronts from my apartment to the Williamsburg Bridge.  After crossing, I turned onto Clinton Street and crossed the Lower East Side and Chinatown before crossing under the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges. 

Then I decided to channel the bike messenger I was many years ago and zig-zag through the narrow steel, granite  and concrete  canyons of the Financial District.  There, I did something that sounds riskier than it actually is (which is the opposite of so many things done in that part of town!): I stopped in the middle of Fulton Street, with a line of cars in front of,  and behind, me.

It wasn't so dangerous because the traffic was halted for a bit longer than it normally would stop for a red light.  Guys in thick boots and safety vests were doing some sort of construction or destruction, I'm not sure of which.  So they, with the help of police, stopped traffic for a few minutes, did whatever they were doing and let the traffic go for another few minutes.

That was good, for me, because there are some things for which one should stop before entering.

I couldn't help but to feel that I was riding into the entrance of a cathedral--of tourism?  Of capitalism?  Of this city itself?

When the new World Trade Center tower was under construction, about a decade ago, I was prepared to hate it.  I never cared much for the old "Twin Towers," but after they were destroyed in the September 11 attacks, I felt that nothing should be built in their place.  I thought that the twin rays of blue light that were beamed up from the site for about a year were a fitting tribute to all of the lives lost.

I must say, though, that I like the new tower.  Its curves on the outside give it the grace of a dancer rising and arching her arms as she pirouettes.  It's as if the feeling of transcendence one feels under the arches of a cathedral were the result of the cathedral itself reaching for something.

I feel the new WTC, in its architecture, honors the people lost in and around the Twin Towers.  If only they were here to see it.

Back In The Day, We...

 I admit that I've made, oh, a joke or two about Millenials and avocado toast. 

Now that I've confessed as much, I'll say that I actually respect what folks like me in, ahem, midlife call "the younger generation."  They think differently because they know they need to, and I think they'll be fine as long as we don't cook the planet.

That said, I must also say that whenever I see them while I'm riding, there's a good chance they're looking at an iPhone, Android, Garmin or some other electronic device clipped to their handlebars.  I wonder if they can imagine riding without those gizmos.

I mean, how is she going to find her way to Starbucks?

Back in the day, we...

A Ride Of Ripples

 High, wispy cirrus clouds.  The ocean barely waving, let alone tiding.  A breeze against my face on the way out and my back on the way home.

 

 

 

Everything felt like a ripple today.  It may have had to do with doing another Point Lookout ride.  I made that choice, in part, because of the direction of that breeze, as gentle as it was.  Had I gone to Connecticut, Westchester, Alpine or Nyack, I would have been pedaling against the wind on my way home.  Also, yesterday was warmer than it had been earlier in the week, and I started to ride later in the morning than I'd planned.  If the warmest part of the day was going to be warmer than the past few days, I wanted to ride by the ocean rather than inland.

 

So, when I say that the ride was a ripple, I'm not complaining.  Rather, I felt rather privileged, as if I could see the brush strokes of those ripples in the sky and on the water, as I felt them against my skin.  Also, it's a treat to ride any of my bikes--in this case, Dee-Lilah, my Mercian Vincitore Special, lived up to her name.

 

Our ride ended, not with the rain, but a ripple.  All right, T.S. Eliot didn't end " The Hollow Men" that way.  I'm not sure that he could have, any more than I could have written his poem. I am happy to write my own poems--and take my rides, whether they begin or end with ripples, or anything else.

First Ride Of The Year

The threat of rain loomed all day.  It fell, lightly, exactly in the middle of my ride, when I stopped to eat.  And it very kindly stopped just as I resumed my ride.

So went my first ride of the new year:  140 kilometers round trip to Greenwich, Connecticut and back.  The day was warm for this time of year:  temperatures hovered between 10 and 15 C (50 to 60 F), which I like at any time of year.  The air felt fresher than usual:  Perhaps the New Year's Day rain washed away some of the pollution.  It may also have had to do with the near-absence of traffic through most of my ride.  

On my way back, I stopped for the traffic light at Fenimore Steet in Mamaroneck, just across from the harbor.  When the light turned green, I proceeded and, on the other side of the intersection, noticed this:

I've noticed the De Lancey name (sometimes spelled as one word, as in the name of a Manhattan street) in the area.  Apparently, the French Huguenot family emigrated to the then-British colony of New York after the Edict of Fontainebleau, an order that revoked the Edict of Nantes, which gave the Protestant Huguenots most of the same rights French Catholic citizens enjoyed.

Given that, it's not surprising that the De Lanceys amassed such wealth and married other prominent families (whose names are sprinkled all over New York) after arriving.  One of the reasons, I believe, Louis XIV and much of the French establishment wanted to suppress Huguenots--who were Calvinists, like the Puritans--is that, because they emphasized education and didn't celebrate most of the Catholic feast days (meaning they worked more), they became, essentially, the merchant and technocrat classes of France in a similar way to  Jews in some European communities before the Inquisition.

The De Lanceys might well have remained one of the prominent families of New York, and America, had their allegiances been different.  In the Revolution, they were Loyalists.  In fact, James De Lancey--to whom the house belonged--formed, along with his uncle, a brigade that was known for its brutality against American revolutionaries. Once the latter won, the family had to give up their properties and fled to Nova Scotia and England.

Unless you are a member of an historical society in New York state or a graduate student in early American history, you probably hadn't heard of the De Lanceys before today.  But you have almost surely heard of the other name on the plaque:  James Fenimore Cooper, one of this country's first popular authors.  (During Edgar Allan Poe's lifetime, his poetry and fiction were more popular in Europe, especially France, than they were in the United States.)

I wonder how  De Lancey or Cooper would feel about the restaurant that's in the house.  I think Poe would have appreciated the view some of its patrons would have had yesterday:

 

 

Can You Imagine These Powered By Pedals?

I had lights on my bike when I did my Christmas Eve ride. Perhaps I didn’t need them: 

 "

Flights Of (Holiday) Fancy

 Christmas Eve.  The sun chased the morning rain, but not the cold. Still, the weather was good enough for a late afternoon ride to Fort Totten.

On the way out and back, I wended along the Flushing Bay promenade, past the World’s Fair Marina—and within arm’s length, or so it seemed, of the new LaGuardia Airport terminals.

Few things are driven more by technology, and less by aesthetics, or at least visual displays, for their own sake than the design of aviation facilities.  Still, for a moment, one could believe the new terminal was decorated for Christmas:

A Ride From Art To Marlee

 I've ridden to museums, galleries, plays, poetry readings, concerts and other cultural events.  It's one of my favorite ways to spend a day: I get to combine some of the things I love most.  

The problem, though is parking. I know, I sound like a motorist when I say that.  But only in a few venues can one bring in a bicycle. The Metropolitan Museum has bike racks in its parking garage and valet bicycle parking during certain hours.  But at most other events and venues, you take your chances with parking on the street.

A couple of days ago, during a late-day ride, I came across a solution to the problem:

The 5-50 Gallery is located, as the name indicates, at 5-50 51st Avenue in Long Island City.  More specifically, it occupies a garage--from what I can tell, a commercial one.  Converting industrial and retail spaces to use for art and performance is not new, but this gallery's space is uniquely accessible. 

No, that isn't a portait of Marlee on mushrooms.  It's one work by Kyle Gallagher, the artist featured when I stopped by. 

The paintings have a grab-you-by-the-collar quality, full of  colors that flash with, at once, the energy of street festivals and the urgency of flashing ambulance lights.  And the way cats and other living beings are rendered makes comics seem like a kind of mythology of the subconscious,  spun from threads of graffiti, street portraiture and abstraction.

All right, I know, you didn't come to this blog for two-bit art commentary. But there was something oddly appropriate, almost synchronistic, about encountering those paintings on a bike ride through an industrial-turned-trendy neighborhood.

When I got home, Marlee didn't care. She just wanted to know, "what's for dinner?"  

The Girl Puzzle

Yesterday I managed to sneak in a ride before sunset.  It wasn't long, but it took me to familiar haunts I hadn't ridden in a while:  a few loops around Roosevelt Island.

It's probably been a couple, maybe a few, months since I last took a spin on the island.  However long it was, enough time had passed to see something new:

 

Actually, it's been under wraps for a while.  It was supposed to be unveiled last year, but the COVID pandemic delayed that, and other things.  

The "Girl Puzzle" installation is an homage to Nellie Bly, a pioneering journalist.  Next year will mark the centennial of her death:  two years after she, and other American women, won the right to vote. 

In a way, it's appropriate that the installation stands before the lighthouse, as she shed light on all sorts of terrible, scandalous and interesting situations.  One of them prevailed at the other end of the island, in its now-closed sanitorium.  As flimsy as this country's mental health care system is, it was much worse in her day.

She was able to write an expose of it--which morphed from a series of articles into a book (Ten Days In A Mad House)--and much of her other work by going under cover.  That, of course, makes it ironic that the installation is by the lighthouse.  Perhaps equally ironic is that she was able to go undercover at a time when she was conspicuous simply by being a woman doing paid work, let alone journalism.  Then again, her first published work, in the Pittsburgh Dispatch, was a response to a previously-published misogynistic complaint about female wage-earners.

The title of that piece was..."The Girl Puzzle." While it garnered complaints and other negative reactions, the editor realized her potential and had her write more pieces.  Soon after, he hired her as a full-time reporter.

Although women in professions like journalism have become the norm, we still have to solve "The Girl Puzzle":  How do we--whatever our gender identities, however we express them--realize our potential and our dreams while remaining true to ourselves and dealing with those who try to enforce their notions of what men or women, boys or girls, should be?  

As I looked at "The Girl Puzzle," I couldn't help but to think about Simone Biles and the other female gymnasts who, yesterday, reached a settlement against their sport's governing bodies in their case against their coach--and abuser.  It sounds like a story Nellie Bly would have covered--and been appalled that she had to at this late date.

A Signal--Of What?

 Friday afternoon, I pedaled along the North Shore--into the wind most of the way out, with it on the way back.

On my way back, I stopped in Fort Totten.  As its name implies, it was an active military base.  Now one section of it is used for Army Reserve training exercises; the New York Fire Department uses another.  The rest is a park with some great views of Long Island Sound and, on a clear day, the New York skyline.

When I stopped, I chanced upon this:

I got to thinking, ironically, about a long-ago conversation with an Italian olive grower.  The trees take 100 years to bear fruit, he told me.  So, he said, I am not planting a tree for me, for my children, or their grandchildren.  Rather, he is planting for their grandchildren.

A few weeks after that trip--during which I pedaled from Rome to Avignon and took the TGV (still pretty new then) to Paris--I went to  to see my brother in SoCal, with a stop in NoCal.  I took time from doing all of the things that could have gotten me into trouble (yes, even in San Francisco) to see the millenia-old trees on the other side of the bridge.  Later, I would try to write about how it felt to look at living things--olive, sequoia and other trees--that were older than any other living thing I'd seen, and any civilization or race I'd ever read about.  They were, it seemed, almost as old as the earth itself.

Here in NY, the trees aren't quite that old.  But at least a few have been around for a century or more and have weathered all manner of natural cataclysms and human-made traumas.  But this year proved to be too much for some that fell or broke, like the one in the photo.

Somehow it made the mostly-clear sky even more stark and a harbinger of winter.  Or, could it be a signal to some other direction we (or at least I) cannot yet discern?  Was it directing me to some place I haven't seen or imagined?

I'll spare you any comparisons to the green light in the Great Gatsby!

Hues Of Exposure

 On the return leg of a North Shore ride, I saw the kind of blue, if a little darker, one normally doesn't see in the waters around New York City, except in postcards--or this:

We haven't had very many days of crystal-clear skies lately.  During the past few days, intervals of non-rain have punctuated downpours accompanied, at times, by wind gusts.  I couldn't keep a cap on when I was walking to the store; it's no wonder the branches can't keep their leaves

and their nudity seems even more stark against dark clouds.

Even the tall steel towers across the bay and river seem to need something to shield them against the impending winter, the way even a big, strong, young person needs a shawl, a cloak or something to cover his or her shoulders and frame against the coming cold. 

Sparr In Style

 Yesterday, while out for an afternoon ride, I passed Sparr's Antiques & Militaria (How often have you seen a name like that?) as I have many times before.  I couldn't help but to notice that they were displaying many of their wares outside, including something I hadn't seen in the shop before:

This, according to the owner is an "all original, except for the tires" Schwinn Spitfire--from 1957.  He says "everything was overhauled," which, from the looks of it, I can believe.  I couldn't help but to notice, though, some of the details unique to bikes like it:

Current reproductions of Schwinn cruisers usually have chromed, or at least chrome-like, rims.  Also, the forks are tubular, in contrast to the bladed forks on Schwinns of yore.

Plus, the new reproductions don't seem to get the graceful sweep of the frame tubes' curve.  It may not be a practical matter, but bikes like this one are all about style.

As is a shop like Sparr's, if in a different way.

A Cross I Didn't Have To Bear

It's been a while since I've been to church for anything but a wedding, funeral or memorial service. (At least they weren't my own!) But I have to admit that I at least stop and take notice when I see a cross looming over a landscape, like the Croix de Fer atop Mount Royal in Montreal.

For me, oversized crucifixes are both awe-inspiring and intimidating.  On one hand, I am impressed with the effort it takes to build any large structure that stands out in its environment. On the other, I can't help but to think about people who've been tortured and killed while or by hanging, whether from an upright tree or crossed staffs.  

Sometimes I wonder whether the person who constructed a large cross-like structure intended it to mean more than just its ostensible function--which, in this case, seems to have something to do with sails.

Somehow, seeing it over the water seems especially fitting today, the anniversary of Columbus' "discovery" of the Americas.  (I think Vikings, and possibly even Phoenicians, got here before him.  And neither they nor he "discovered" anything:  There were plenty of people living on this side of the ocean already.)  Colonizers claimed lands in the name of their church as well as the rulers of the countries from which they sailed.

Although I was pedaling into the wind when I saw this "cross" during a ride along the World's Fair Marina, my trek wasn't nearly as difficult as anything a "cross" represents!

 

The Waterfront, And Echoes Of Shell

Yesterday, I wrote about last weekend's varied rides.  Not only were the locales and sights different on each ride; so were the bikes I rode.

There was also variation within the rides, as there always is.  As an example, my Friday ride took me into Brooklyn and included two utterly different neighborhoods.

The metallic hues of New York Bay and its piers, docks, towers and bridges formed the vista of Red Hook

where one bridge rims the curvature of the earth, while another doesn't go far enough.

A few miles inland, a post-industrial streetscape stands a few blocks from where I grew up, at the edge of Borough Park, now one of Brooklyn's two major Hasidic neighborhoods.  

Change, however, can't seem to efface old identities and purposes:

Tell me that wasn't a Shell station.

I was tempted to check out the convenience store.  Perhaps I will if I take another ride out that way.  Whether or not they're different, I hope it doesn't sell sushi:  There should be a law against selling it any service station convenience store.  

But at least one law says it's OK for folks who'd shop in a place like that to eat sushi.  According to every interpretation of Halakhic law I've read, sushis made with vegetables or raw fish comply with Kosher dietary laws.  I don't imagine, though, anyone who likes sushi, whether or not they follow any religious edicts about food, would eat sushi from that place!

By the way, I had vegetable enchiladas after the ride.

Images And Icons

 Yesterday afternoon I meandered through back streets of central Brooklyn and Queens.  It still amazes me that even after riding those byways so many times over so many years, I still find things I hadn't noticed before.

In a still-ungentrified part of Bedford-Stuyvesant, when I chanced upon one of the best names for a house of worship.

I can't help but to wonder what services--and the music-- are like in a place called "Rugged Cross."  I also wonder who came up with that name.  Could that person have been thinking about the kinds of lives so many people in the neighborhood have lived, and still live?

Or could that person have anticipated what someone would paint directly across the street from it?

You can't paint something like that if you've grown up on Park Avenue and 72nd Street or Fisher Island--even if you watched every single Pink Panther cartoon!

A couple of miles away, in Bushwick, I had to search for the name of this church.

Even if I hadn't found it--Saint Barbara, by the way--I would've remembered the wonderful carvings and towers on it.  

The building next to it seems to have been a rectory or convent, or to have served some other church-related purpose.  Now it's the Bushwick center for El Puente, an organization that, for nearly four decades, has worked to keep young people from becoming tragic statistics.  Its founder, Luis Garden Acosta, understood something that, I believe, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were coming to understand just before they were assassinated:  Social justice comes with educational and economic equity.  

I am not religious, but I understand that for many people who live in neighborhoods like the ones surrounding Rugged Cross and Saint Barbara, their churches were places where they could find refuge from the hardships they faced.  Knowing that, it's not so surprising to find a very urban murals across the street from one church, and next to another, in the heart of Brooklyn--and to have the privilege of seeing them on an afternoon bike ride.