Tim went with me the first time. I was taking over a route that Glen had had earlier. He gave me a list of addresses with a few instructions, and that was all. I don’t think I had ever driven in New York City before, and for sure not in Brooklyn. I found the streets on a map and put together a set of driving directions for the day. In hindsight I must have been brave, or naïve.
We made it to the city alright, and found the first street. We discovered after we got there that a lot of the streets were actually one-ways, some going the wrong way, and a lot of the intersections where we were to turn, were restricted from turns with barriers and such. This meant a lot of driving around trying to get onto a street, only to be met with more one-ways and restrictions. I think I probably got a little frustrated. Surprisingly, we found some of the boxes and refilled them. After so many detours and missed turns, we were finally thoroughly lost. We found our intersection on the map, but there would be two such intersections, and we didn’t know which one we were at. It’s a good thing Tim had never been to New York City before, or he probably would not have had the patience to ride with me. We eventually finished the route and drove the car over to Manhattan to spend the rest of the afternoon.
After a few times of doing the route, I began to be able to navigate a little better. I found out there is no better thing then experience for driving around in NY. Maps generally can’t possibly have all the information a driver needs, neither do they tell much about construction and congestion, which is commonplace in NY. There were times I took my car on the sidewalks to get around a parked truck or accident. Most of the streets have a wide sidewalk separated from the street by a low curb. It’s really good planning on the part of the city. It’s not difficult to use the sidewalk when necessary. When double-parked in for instance; this feature is invaluable. These things are not marked on maps. There would usually be a street fair going on or some other activity that was not planned on our part. Every trip was very different.
I rerouted the stops and took out some of the slow moving stores. Then I filled in the gaps with new stops. In this way I was able to get a more efficient route, with far less driving. When I first began, I would drive around 40-50 miles in the city; now I only had to go about ten miles. I found out that Saturday was the best day of the week to go, due to less congestion. And after 10 am, I tried to be off the streets, or at least past the more congested areas. After this time, the streets just filled up with cars and I could spend hours trying to go a few miles. Brooklyn is a very diverse place with ethnic neighborhoods of just about every flavor. Some of the neighborhoods seemed a little dangerous for whites to walk around in -it was just something I felt, and maybe was influenced by the facts that it was dirtier and there were no whites there. When parking for the day, I would park along a busy street, preferably under a streetlight, close to a subway station.
I would go by myself a lot of the time. I left the car run outside the store, and locked it while going inside. I usually just stopped in the street and got out right beside the store, rather than trying to find parking. This was not unusual behavior for Brooklyn. If I blocked somebody in, they would just have to wait until I got back out, or use the sidewalk. After the route was done, I usually went to downtown Brooklyn, where there is some Brooklyn-style shopping and restaurants. I would eat here for lunch and maybe do a little shopping and rollerblading. I rollerbladed Prospect Park several times, and also went around in Brooklyn Heights and some of the other cleaner, nicer neighborhoods. Sometimes I went over to Manhattan and rollerbladed a few streets. There was always a Starbuck close by to get refreshed. Or I would sit and meditate in the Greeley Square Park in the triangle formed by Broadway, Sixth, and 35th. There is a water fountain there dedicated to Jerry McAuley, who founded the New York City Rescue Mission-and the concept of rescue missions- many years ago.
When I had another person along, we would usually go over to Manhattan for lunch and spend the rest of the day there. That was where all the tourist stuff was, and the interesting stuff, for that matter. Most of the time, we would rollerblade a section of the city and tour a specific neighborhood. In this way I rollerbladed through Harlem, Upper West Side, Mid-town, Hell’s Kitchen, East Village, and everything below West 4th Street. Washington Square Park was a common destination to check out the buskers and local band talent. I think I was in every Barnes and Nobel bookstore in Manhattan, and there are lots of them. One day we rollerbladed the bike path along the west side of Manhattan from Battery to the Washington Bridge while the cherry trees were in bloom. Stuff like that makes memories I hope I never forget. And Central Park with its many other bladers, runners, bikers, and whatever else. One day I did the six mile loop in Central Park three times -a record for me. There was always some new place to go, or some place I wanted to see again.
When we tired of the bike paths, we would try some of the more busy streets. Rollerblading Broadway through Times Square was spectacular, but we couldn’t look around too much, or the taxis would run over us. Fifth Avenue was one of my personal favorites. I did this street many times. I started by the Park Plaza Hotel at 59th Street, and took 5th all the way to the Arch in Washington Square Park. That was one of the fastest streets I found in NY. The traffic was 5 or 6 lanes wide, all one way, mainly buses and taxis. Talk about exhilaration! Then I’d go to my favorite cafe in Greenwich Village, sit down at the bar in my rollerblades and order a tall iced Figaro- a house espresso drink. That’s life!
I often took friends to the World Trade Center. I remember several times, sitting by the glass on the top floor in the dark, just gazing out over the city. It was my favorite observation deck. Or I would spend an afternoon in the Borders bookstore in the shopping mall in the basement. Or rollerblade through the plaza between the towers and find an empty bench to lie on my back, and make myself dizzy by looking up between the towers. I’m starting to wax nostalgic, I know, but I have to get this out of my system. The Trade Towers were beautiful buildings, and I always felt a certain awe when below them. The last time I laid on a bench in that plaza, was three days before September 11, 2001. I wonder what I would have felt had I known what was to take place. I’m sure I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. These are the good memories. I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye, nor did anyone else.
I went back two and a half weeks after the towers fell. There was still a huge cloud of smoke, and the streets were closed to traffic below Canal Street. We walked as close as we could, saw the dusty closed shops, the prayer stations, the message boards. A huge pile of debris, crawling with tiny demolition equipment. A devastated neighborhood. I’ll never forget.
I watched the pile of rubble at Ground Zero get smaller over time. It took about three years to haul it all out. I saw the AOL buildings spring up in Columbus Circle. Subway fares went from $1.50 to $2. And there were always more cool cafes and restaurants to discover. I visited Mocca in Tribeca many times. Their décor somehow made a $7 coffee seem like a bargain. Roosevelt Island never changed. The tram still accepted only subway tokens. The shops and restaurants along Vernon Blvd. were still as empty and cheap as they always were. The place seemed a little like a ghost town, with the chain link fencing separating the old hospital ruins from the general public. The buildings along Vernon looked like they had all been built about the same time: 1960 -not a good year for architecture. They overhung the sidewalks at places and the streets seemed dark, but not threatening at all, unless one thinks that elderly Russians seem threatening. The Brooklyn Bridge was another of my favorites. I never tired of walking it and stopping to read all the descriptions along the way. I am still amazed that the men of 1850 could build something so remarkable.
I rambled around New Jersey a little, too. I would take an exit and just drive as far as I could, while still having a general idea of where I would end up at. In reality this never worked. I would soon be making excuses to myself that I had really wanted to drive through that intersection twice, or actually this was a good place to end up –but really I was just lost. I gave Jersey City a chance to impress me by telling myself that a city this size had to have something of interest to the general public besides burned out factory buildings and mafia-run trucking companies, but finally admitted defeat. I rode the NJ Subway a few times. My only recollection is not good; two men fighting outside between the cars, trying to push each other off, cursing and hollering in the cold, for the duration of my ride. I found one decent shopping mall there, but I would not have walked a block down the street outside in the dark for a hundred dollars. The Palisades were worth my time detouring off the Washington Bridge. They are huge cliffs along the west shore of the Hudson River. The most impressive thing was the quiet park at the base of the cliffs, with a few men fishing off the pier, the roar of the city in the background. Here was solitude.
I went to the Garden State Plaza shopping mall in Paramus several times. I think it’s the biggest shopping mall in NJ, which means huge. There was also a Campmor store close by; the huge-mailorder-discount-outdoor-gear-store-that-everybody-has-heard-about store. It will take me hundreds of years to gain back everything I have saved by shopping there. Another one of my side trips was to Long Island. I had a damaged surfboard from San Diego, and I went out there to visit surf shops and find a replacement fin. Long Island was pretty cool, with lots of surf shops and beach houses.
Brooklyn had a few attractions that I checked out: the Kings Plaza shopping mall, which was very Brooklyn -dingy, dark, and dirty; the New York Transit Museum, definitely worth your time if you’re at all interested in NYC buses and subways; Brooklyn Botanic Garden was spectacular, the Sakura Matsuri Cherry Blossom Festival is fun, but very crowded; and Coney Island, which is not like it used to be –now basically a small, old-fashioned amusement park and a huge beach.
The city never ceases to mesmerize me in many ways. I could write so much more, and maybe someday I will. But even if I don’t, I will always cherish the memories of these five years.
Labels: Brooklyn, New York City, rollerblading