Category: Tours, Trails & Group Rides

Across the East Estuary (better known, perhaps, as the East River), is another world, still technically New York City, but very different from Manhattan.  I took a fascinating walk in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn recently and explored a neighborhood that was once virtually all-Italian.

Buildings aren’t as tall in this part of Brooklyn as they are in Manhattan, which lends the area a much more human scale:

I passed a shrine to Saint Lucy — a whole corner of New York real estate devoted neither to commerce nor to housing!  Dorothy, you’re not in Manhattan any more!

Much of the neighborhood is classic, gritty city,

but the sidewalks are broad, and not nearly as crowded as in Manhattan.  (Note the trees, growing in Brooklyn.)

There’s a grocery, complete with cat (it’s New York; you only worry if it’s a rodent, and sometimes not even then)

Christmas trees for sale next to a corner store

and an amazing Italian bakery.

On the same few blocks are old furniture stores, consignment shops, a dentist, a beauty shop, a general store, and more.  It’s the older institutions that caught my eye, and ended up in my camera’s lens.

But this is a changing neighborhood, and I spotted this beauty, too

It’s a gorgeous Linus bicycle, with a serious modern pannier.  (No, I don’t have any idea why that huge, expensive, lock is draped over the bike rack, securing nothing but itself.  Perhaps the owner doesn’t want to haul twenty pounds of metal back and forth, and so stores the lock on the street?)  This beauty — a sky blue mixte — is a sign of things to come in this neighborhood.

Nearby was some kind of infant recreation center/baby goods store with many thousands of dollars worth of high-end (we’re talking $600 dollars and up — mostly up) parked in the front rooms.  (One of the cheaper ones, above, a steal at roughly $700 for two seats.)  Further along the street are hipster, up-scale restaurants.  This is a changing neighborhood, at its most perfect moment, balanced between old and new.

Sadly, Basil did not accompany me on this excursion, although I was in the city to get him serviced. Neither Manhattan nor Brooklyn are  my home turf, and I’m still not brave enough to ride on city streets with Basil, though I’ve happily ridden the Greenways.

My new-found mania for scheduling blog posts has meant that I’ve gotten things a bit out of order here, and now find myself with a number of unpublished looks at holiday decor in New York City.  It’s January 1st today, though, and technically still “the holidays”, so I am unabashedly offering a few more glimpses from my December portfolio.

While Basil was in the shop, I stopped in at the Met to see the famous tree,  and the Neapolitan crèche beneath it. This was the first time in many years that I’d seen this particular exhibit; I tend to avoid the Met like the plague during holidays and school breaks.

Note the contented peasants, still earth-bound, engaging in their usual occupations in rather desultory fashion. Probably the 47% of their time, not carrying their weight at all, don’t you think?

This extravagance is a reminder that the human passion for creating small-scale inanimate worlds didn’t begin or end with Victorian doll houses.  In the eighteenth century, grown people in Italy created this fantastic, and unrealistically euphoric, vision of worlds (terrestrial and celestial) in harmony . . . and adult lovers of model trains continue to do the same today, if not always on this scale.  (Also, model train scenes tend to lack the euphoric element; that’s just for the model-makers to experience, perhaps, as they work.)

As it happened, I picked my day (and hour) well.  The low temperature and overcast sky apparently discouraged the hordes I’d expected to see.  Having gone on a weekday morning probably didn’t hurt, either.

Amusingly, the Met was strung with a banner advertising an exhibit called “Faking It” (“manipulated photography before photoshop”).  The crèche, doll houses, and even model trains represent another kind of fakery: the representation of reality in a static, perfected, form, more tangible than mere photographs.

It almost seems ridiculous to take these photos oneself, when the Met bookshops are full of excellent views of this traditional exhibit.  But modern cameras, even little point-and-shoots like mine, do such a good job, and it just feels right to capture the viewing experience at the moment of individual engagement. Apparently I’m no less susceptible to the pleasure of miniaturization than were the Neapolitan artisans who first built this tableau. (Just less ambitious!)

From this side, in late fall (or, if you prefer, early winter) this bridge resembles an abandoned industrial site more than anything else.

Keeping stonework clean in a city is a never-ending job, and a costly one.  Skirmishes are won here and there, but it’s a long war.

Stone arches; how I love them.

There are three transportation modes hidden in these pictures:  the bicycle/pedestrian trail on which Basil and I are standing; the river, upon which scullers and other passengers travel; and that dreaded horror, The Schuylkill, which is a highway.

If you look very closely, you can see the green directional sign in the open arch, hanging over the highway.

while in New York, I’m afraid, not actually on Basil.  For the first time in a long time, I ran about the city checking out the holiday lights.  All the stuff tourists check out, rather than New Yorkers.  First, the tree in Rockefeller Plaza, which I think I hadn’t seen since I was a small child.

It was big.  And bright.  But not precisely decorated.  Nonetheless, it was a cheery sight.

The plaza was lined with trumpeting angels.

A very small tree nearby, in the window of the Metropolitan Museum shop, was artfully contrived, with all the requisite frou-frou.

Blue lights and metallic flags ringed the area. For a minute, I thought I was at the UN Plaza.  (Well, not really.  But all those flags did create the association.)

I’m a sucker for white decorative lights. Why is that, do you suppose?  Perhaps because they are star-like?

I was in the city during Chanukkah, and saw many chanukkiahot, but didn’t feel comfortable photographing them.  Christmas in the USA is an almost exclusively secular affair, but a single, lit, chanukkia is still very much a religious symbol.  I enjoyed the candle lights (even the electric ones), but was not inspired to capture their images.

SEPTA, the beleaguered southeastern Pennsylvania rail system, has put some new cars — Silverliner V is the name — into service on some regional rail lines.  There’s more leg room than in the older cars, which means that there’s room for me, and Basil, in the space of my seat alone:

As I have short, small, legs, your mileage may vary.

Cars are generally in good shape on the line I ride most often, which is far from the city.  The new cars offer some improvements, though, specifically the automated station announcements, and the LED screens which show which station the train is next.  (Oddly, though, when the train is slowing, and in each station, the only thing the LED screen shows is the mightily unhelpful “SEPTA”.  That would be easy and cheap to remedy; the wonder is that anyone thought it was a good idea in the first place.)  SEPTA conductors, while often pleasant, are not known for their clarity of speech, or willingness to announce each station audibly.

There’s plenty of room for compact Basil, even in the standard seating areas.  There’s a different configuration on the Silverliner V, one I saw on a previous trip, with seating along the side of the car, rather than perpendicular to it.  That’s an even better place for a folding bicycle, especially if the train is full.  I don’t know if that’s on all Silverliner Vs — I may have missed that section of the car on this particular trip.

There’s been much speculation that the new cars will draw new riders.  I don’t know about that, but I wish SEPTA would reverse a change made a while ago, when they stopped using route numbers for the various train lines.  Now, new users can’t simply be told “take the R4 — (for Regional Rail, route 4) — but they must know the terminal points of whatever line they need, no matter how irrelevant to their own trip.  That was a move of supreme idiocy, and likely to make using the line much more difficult for both tourists, and inexperienced SEPTA riders alike.

The new cars, though, look like an improvement, for reals.