Yesterday, I wrote about seeing the cherry blossoms budding on my way in to work.
Well, my ride home included a different sort of visual spectacle. Because I was carrying a lot (and was being a bit lazy), I took the new connector bridge, which is flat, to Randall's Island, rather than the steep, zig-zaggy ramp up to the Bronx spur of the RFK Bridge.
The connector passes underneath the Hell Gate viaduct--where the Amtrak trains run--and over the Bronx Kill, which separates the rusty but still running industrial areas of the Bronx from the parklike expanses of Randall's Island.
My commute may be only ten kilometers in each direction. But I felt as if I'd experienced a whole spectrum of color, a wide panaroma of light and forms, on my way to work and back.
I have been at my current job for almost three months. Most days, I have ridden my bike there and home. It seems that I have settled into a basic route with a few minor variations. But, whichever way I go, I seem to notice something new or different, if not every day, then at least very often.
It shouldn't be too surprising, I suppose to see a lot of trees growing in the Bronx, especially given that one grows in Brooklyn. (By the way, I am not endorsing the book or any movie made from it. The title is catchy, though.) Today, it seemed, I saw them in places where I never expected. Did they grow overnight?
Best of all, some of those trees--more than I expected--are cherry blossoms, just starting to bloom.
Cherry Blossoms Bloom In The Bronx. How's that for a book (or something) about bike commuting in New York?
Some cyclists always seem to ride as if the wind is at their backs.
It wouldn't surprise me if somebody tried to create a perpetual wind-at-your-back machine. (Now, honestly, isn't that the only kind of perpetual motion you would actually want?) If it could be done for a subway train, why not a bike?
I am not making up the part about the subway train. There are several predecessors to the current New York City subway system, which opened in 1904. One of them was the Broadway Underground Pneumatic Railway, which operated from 1870 until 1873.
It was a railway in the sense that it ran on rails. However, calling it a "subway system" would be a stretch, as it was only a block, or about 100 meters (300 feet long) and included only one station at each end. But it attracted notice, in part for its novelty, but also because of who created it and how he went about constructing it.
Alfred Ely Beach, an inventor and editor of Scientific American, demonstrated an air-driven tube system at the American Institute Fair of 1867. He really wanted to show that it would be viable as an underground transportation system and applied to the New York City government, under the rule of Tammany Hall for a permit to build a tunnel. He was denied--at least for a train tunnel. He did, however, receive a permit to build a pneumatic package delivery system--one of the first of its kind--consisting of two tunnels. Then he had his permit changed so he could build one large tunnel in order to "simplify" the system. Of course, you know the real purpose of that "simplification"!
While cited as an important early development in New York City's transit history, it's not clear that pneumatic tubes could have been practical for a full-scale underground rail system. Beach's line never expanded beyond the block--from City Hall to the intersection of Broadway and Murray Streets--under which it ran. Multiple-unit traction trains and electric locomotives were developed not long after Beach's experiment ended, so investors were no longer interested in pneumatic subterranean rail lines.
Reading about Beach's experiment got me to wondering about other ways of propelling trains--and bikes. Hmm...a pneumatic pedi-train? Or how about one with a coiled spring that's wound up?
If such a system were to be built, it might come from the garage of these folks:
N.B.: Beach Street in the Tribeca neighborhood of lower Manhattan is named for Alfred Ely Beach. Very few New Yorkers know that.
