Waiting At The Bridge

What do you do when you're riding and have an unexpected roadblock?


Normally, you go around it by taking a slightly different route.  But, sometimes that's just not possible, or feasible. Such was the case when I was crossing back into Queens on the Pulaski Bridge:

Just as I got onto the bike lane, the gate swung shut and warning bells clanged.  This meant, of course, that the drawbridge was about to open.  


It's far from the first time I've encountered a bridge opening when I wanted or needed to ride across it.  At least, today I wasn't really in a hurry. I had moderate time constraints: I'd had to attend to a few things later in the day, so I had to get home, shower and prepare myself.  But I'd budgeted more time than I thought I would need.


The wait for the bridge didn't seem particularly long.  At least, the weather was nearly perfect, and even the normally turbid (and sometimes rancid) waters of the Gowanus Canal were nearly a reflection of serenity as the boat churned through it.


What was interesting about this wait, though, is something you may have noticed in the photo:  I was far from the only cyclist there.  In fact, I can scarcely recall seeing so many other bikes and riders at any other opening of a drawbridge.  As it turned out, there were just as many cyclists, if not more, waiting on the other side of the opening. 


That there were so many cyclists makes sense when you realize that the Pulaski connects what have become two of the greatest concentrations of cyclists in the NYC Metropolitan Area: the neighborhoods of Greenpoint, in Brooklyn and Long Island City in Queens.  I can remember when both of those communities were blue-collar enclaves in which almost nobody rode two wheels.   It seemed that the only time I saw other cyclists, besides myself, in those neighborhoods or on that bridge was when the Five Borough Bike Tour transversed them.


Some of the cyclists I saw today weren't even born then.

Is This What The Vikings Had In Mind?

Today I am going to create a post that will get lots and lots of views for all of the wrong reasons.  I will express shock and moral indignation. (What other kind of indignation is there, really?)  I will protest some more...and more.  And, well...we all know what happens when the lady doth protest too much.




Sometimes I think a good working definition of the word "model" is "someone who is better--or, at least more attractive--than the product he or she is being employed to sell."   Such is the case with the young woman in the ad for Crescent Bicycles, which appeared in Bicycling! in 1975 or thereabouts.

The bicycles she was trying to entice young men into buying were made in Sweden and bear no relation to velocipedes bearing the same name that were made in the USA at the end of the 19th, and the beginning of the 20th, centuries.  The bikes looked cool in a funky '70's sort of way:  orange paint with checkerboard (that, I think, was supposed to represent a checkered flag) graphics.  That, actually, was fairly surprising for something that came out of the land of Queen Christina.  

Even more surprising was the workmanship--or, should I say, the lack thereof.  This was even true on the higher models made from Reynolds 531 tubing.  I worked on a few of those bikes and found, not only fairly sloppy braze works around the lugs, but globs of molten metal that cooled into unfinished edges of metal at the points where the bottom bracket shell and seat lugs met the frame tubes.  This made it difficult to fit parts such as bottom bracket cups and seat posts accurately.


Perhaps the worst problem of all, though, was the toe clip overlap.  Mind you, I don't mind some toe clip overlap.  But I think that had my shoes been any bigger, I could have flicked the quick-release lever on the front wheel with my toes.  All right, that's an exaggeration.  But I don't recall any other bike--not even the most extreme track machine--that placed a rider's lower digits so close to the front wheel spokes.  As Michael Kone and Sheldon Brown wryly noted, most of these bikes probably "met untimely deaths in commuter hell accidents."


Those young women really should have been wearing helmets and using foot retention!

Hitched And Kickstanded By Stephen Baird

One of my favorite non-cycling blogs is Nikon Sniper.  In it, photographer Stephen Baird showcases his beautiful and, at times, touching photographs.


Apart from the visual lushness (Is that a word?) of his images, I find myself drawn to his blog, in part, because it is so different from my own.  His posts consist almost entirely of his photos with occasional brief comments; mine are lots of words (I'm a writer, after all) interspersed with images that are nowhere near the quality of his.  


When I fist started following Nikon Sniper, most of Stehen's photos seemed to be of natural settings:  sunsets on bodies of water and in canyons, flora and fauna (although, thankfully, they didn't fall into the sentimentality that is a peril of such photos), mountains and the like.  That makes sense, as Steve is obviously an outdoorsman.


However, lately, Steve seems to have branched off into "slice of life" and shots that are the still-photo equivalents of cinema verite.  Or, perhaps, he'd been making such photos all along, and simply decided to start sharing them.

"Hitched And Kickstanded" by Stephen Baird, In Nikon Sniper

In any event, I decided to post a photo he posted today.  Not only does its content appeal to me, but also the feelings it evokes in me.  It reminds me that, in at least one way, a bike is a metaphor for life:  It doesn't have to be perfect to be beautiful and useful, and to make its owner happy.


Plus, as wedded as I am (for now, anyway) to city life, I'd love to be able to park my bike with such a thin cable lock!