My First View, From A Bike

Yesterday I rode Zebbie, my 1984 Mercian King of Mercia, through the brownstones and rowhouses of Queens and Brooklyn.  Such a ride could easily involve a trip across the Kosciuszko Bridge, now that it has one of the better bike-pedestrian lanes in this city.

And so it was yesterday.  Tourists on Citibikes almost always ride across the Brooklyn Bridge for the views.  But no longtime New York resident does that.  Rather, in-the-know Big Apple cyclists opt for the Williamsburg Bridge or, if we simply want a visually interesting ride, the Kosciuszko.

In the spring and summer, the view consists mainly of skyscrapers foregrounded by trees and the factories and warehouses along Newtown Creek.  But the denuded limbs of winter reveal a landscape of differing verticalities. (Does that sound like a geeky phrase or what?)

When I lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn, one of my worst fears was--moving to Queens.  Mind you, I took many good rides, and enjoyed other activities, in "the world's borough."  But my first glimpse of it came from my family's car, en route to visit relatives:

Tell me, how would you feel about a place if the first thing you saw in it was a cemetery?  I'm guessing that I probably saw it for the first time on a winter day like yesterday, with leafless trees screening, but not shielding, the tombstones.  

But I did eventually move to Queens--to Long Island City, not far from where I live now.  Since then, I've visited Calvary Cemetery.  I know that there are tours of some of this city's necropoli, like Greenwood and Woodlawn.  Anyone who has a taste for such things (which I do, sometimes) should also go to Calvary.  Largely before of it, there are--wait for it--more dead than living people in Queens. (Thomas Wolfe once claimed, "Only the dead know Brooklyn."  What would he have said about Queens?)  In fact, more people are buried in Calvary than in any other American cemetery--or than live in Chicago!

Like Greenwood and Woodlawn, Calvary is the final resting place for some famous and infamous people, as well as everyday New Yorkers.  Also in common with them, Calvary began after the 1840s cholera epidemic: At that time, most of Queens and the farther reaches of Brooklyn and the Bronx (the locations of Greenwood and Woodlawn, respectively) were rural. And there wasn't enough room left in Manhattan to bury the victims of that epidemic, so the city mandated that they be interred elsewhere. 

All of those cemeteries have chapels large enough for masses or services.  But Calvary has a full-blown cathedral (not visible in these photos) at least somewhat reminiscent of the Sacre Coeur in Paris.

It's ironic that those same trees I saw yesterday obscure the tombstones in spring and summer.  Could their lush leafage during those seasons be nourished by the "residents" of Calvary?

It's All On My Head

If you are my age or older, you may have ridden with a "leather hairnet."  Similar to the headgear worn by US football players until the 1950s, they were a lattice of foam-filled straps that might have prevented a scrape or two in a minor crash but probably were useless in a headlong fall or impact with a motor vehicle.

I had one such helmet in my youth. (Yes, believe it or not, I had one of those.) But I never wore it because it was too cumbersome and hot.  I had those same complaints when I first started wearing a hardhat--  a later-version Bell "turtle shell" nearly four decades ago--but have covered my head while riding ever since.

My "hairnet" disappeared into the mists of history. Actually, I think I lost it during a move.  I got to thinking about it when I came across this:

Why Does One Steal For Three?

 I've been told, by people who have worked in it, that the art business can be as shady as any other.  Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised:  It's a world of secrecy with very little regulation.  And, as with real estate, stocks or anything else that's bought and sold, paintings, sculptures and other created objects sell for, essentially, whatever people are willing to pay for them, which leads to all sorts of unethical behavior.

Still, I have trouble imaging that anyone has ever said, with a straight face, "Psst!  Wanna buy a Monet?"  I don't know whether I'd laugh or call the police if I were to hear that.

That is the reason why I don't understand art theft--or theft of anything but basic necessities, and then only by desperate, destitute people. (Mind you, I don't condone any sort of pilferage:  I simply can better understand the motives of a person who's simply trying to survive or feed his or her family.)  After all, what do you do with Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee? Or Van Gogh's Poppy Flowers? Or Cezanne's Boy In A Red Vest?  Hang them on your wall and invite your friends over for dinner?  I mean, if you were to try to sell those paintings to anyone who recognized them, they'd know that it was fake or stolen.  You can't make it "go stealth" the way you can with, say, a contraband high-end watch.

So it is with unusual bicycles.  Most bike thieves want to sell the bikes or their parts, so they steal stuff that's valuable but common. (That makes even more sense when you realize that for several years running, the most-stolen car was the Toyota Camry.)  I would think that it's more difficult to unload a tandem, especially a high-end one.  And I would expect that a bicycle built for three (which was misidentified as a tandem in the article in which I learned about its theft) would be even trickier to sell, "chop shop" or simply disappear. How many triplet fames have you seen?

The Rumseys.  Courtesy: Salt Lake City Police Department

Fortunately for the Rumsey family of Houston, it didn't take long for their three-seater to be recovered after it was stolen in Salt Lake City.  They commissioned the bike 18 years old, not only so Dave and Merle could pedal with Ford, their 36-year-old son with Down's Syndrome, but also so it could travel with them.  The bike can be disassembled to fit into a suitcase and has therefore accompanied the family on every trip they've taken.

So, as you can imagine, the bike entwines all sorts of memories with its usefulness to the family.  That is the reason why they were so glad it was returned to them.  And perhaps it was a good thing that the bike is unlike almost any other.  The Salt Lake Police didn't say whether they'd caught the thief. If they hadn't, perhaps he realized it would be too difficult to sell or otherwise unload and abandoned it. What would he have done with a Picasso or a Caravaggio?