Day 274 - Fairview Cemetery

I took a friend to Staten Island to show off Joe & Pat's--my favorite pizza in New York City. (This tends to change from time to time, but having grown up less than a block away, I find myself continually returning here. We can discuss separately, if you'd like.)

After scarfing down most of a pie, ordering it a slice at a time, I was left with needing to give a nickel tour of the old neighborhood. We wandered west along Victory Blvd. a few blocks from the pizzeria and stumbled, quite unexpectedly, on a cemetery I never really knew existed, tucked back behind a stand of trees and climbing a gentle incline. Fairview Cemetery, with a modest sized grounds, has apparently been accepting interments since 1876 and doesn't seem to be in danger of filling up anytime soon. (Though new plots are creeping closer to the front gate on Victory Blvd.) It does have a very eclectic collection of monuments and headstones which I thought worth sharing here. Look at each one closely--some are really intriguing.

I, of course, mean no disrespect in sharing these images.

Day 33 - The Bayonne Bridge, Finally

So, occasionally, the effort to do new New York City things requires detours into, well, New Jersey.

I took the opportunity to visit a friend and her new 9-week-old in Hoboken today and used it to do a good pre-ride in anticipation of the NYC Century at the next weekend. I'd been to Hoboken before, but taking a bike there allowed for a few other firsts. I got to bike over the north path of the GWB. Typically the south path is the one bikers use as it's a pretty easy ride with no stairs and a single, gently graded ramp on the Manhattan side. The north path is, on the hand, a tangle of steep stairwells, cages and underpaths woven among vehicular ramps at either end, evoking a outsize game of chutes and ladders. They are dark in places (even during the day) with tight corners where folks who choose to linger on the path can secret themselves. Though I will say it's worthwhile to make it onto the span in between these seedy ends to get a gorgeous view of Inwood Hill and northward up the Hudson River canyon.


From the GW down to Hoboken is a pretty easy ride (I hit 30mph dropping down from the palisade at the bridge to the shore!) mostly along River Road through towns whose names I've always heard on traffic reports and had vague notions of where they were on a map somewhere west of me--Palisades Park, Guttenberg, Weehawken--but had never spent any time in. Particularly fun was biking underneath The Helix--the corkscrew of an approach that winds its way down from the Jersey palisade to the mouth of the tunnel and is how most people enter it from the Jersey side. It's such an impersonal behemoth when you drive up or down it that it's hard to imagine a community with people and houses down below, but they're there.

South of Hoboken I wended my way south and west through Jersey City toward Bayonne, into a steady headwind for 15 miles. I'll have to do the research, but my sense is that Bayonne is as old school a working class enclave as perhaps still exists in the New York City region. Homes, cheek-by-jowl in the best spirit of many spots in Queens, were all immaculate, if modest. It's impossible to be anywhere on the peninsula that doesn't overlook the lurking creatures of the port in Newark Bay and be reminded of how much is shipped into the region and handled by folks like those sitting on stoops up an down the streets here. Kids returning from school have only to look westward down the streets to see silhouetted reminders.



This place, among others nearby, was a primary beneficiary of the port trade that decamped from New York's Hudson and East River piers for more inexpensive and less encumbered space. A brisk business in the barging of rail cars across the Hudson River left gantries just north of here in Greenville. After the 1940s, though, there was less--and a lessening--need for the bulk commodities that rail shipping favors to enter--or leave--New York City. Robert Fitch's The Assassination of New York, recently updated, tells one version of these events. Sad for us. But bully for the working schnooks here.

Further on down the peninsula, the parabola of the Bayonne Bridge came into view. It was really the whole reason for this trip by bike: it's the only bridge in New York City that allows bikes and pedestrians over it that I hadn't yet traversed. The whole ride here I had been assuming--with no particular reason or evidence--that the bike path would be on the eastern face of the bridge. For several miles of tough biking into the wind I had imagined cresting the bridge, hopping of my bike for a few minutes, and sitting cross-legged to eat the rest of the sandwich I hadn't finished at lunch. And in the way that tough bike rides have a way of focusing one's mind on particular goals or scenes in one's mind, if only one was to make it, I had assumed that this would happen in the shade of the bridge with the sun setting at my back while I gazed eastward along the Kill Van Kull toward the Bay.

Except the pathway is on the other side.

I can't explain the strangest, if slight, sense of disappointment this created. It is a gorgeous, sun-glinted view from up there nonetheless. In fact, it was probably a far more dramatic view. The path launches up and curves around toward the handsome steel arch that is in its diamond jubilee year. Beneath the bridge's pier on the Bayonne side are a small sprawl of tidal mudflats with frogs and crickets chirping away in the late afternoon. The zenith offers faraway views of Staten Island's other three bridges as well as Lower Manhattan. Lumbering below in the Kill Van Kull was a sleepily groaning tugboat. I wanted to see a container ship pass beneath on its way to Newark Bay; I'm told the largest among them can't make it under the Bayonne's still-impressive 150 foot clearance at mid-span. And most of the rest have to fold down their antenna just to squeak under--at low tide.

Down the other side, the Bayonne Bridge lands in the Port Richmond neighborhood on Staten Island. The houses are similarly modest here and of a similar age as those in Bayonne. But unlike on the other side of the water, the bridge lands right in the middle of a neighborhood. From the bike path, I could see what some folks were preparing for dinner.



As a Staten Islander, I have always admired this bridge. As a kid, it was probably because there was hardly any reason to go over it and that made me curious about it. The Verrazano, Outerbridge and Goethals all took our family to places of greater import, I guess. (A lot of other people must feel that way, too. Respectively, their average daily vehicle counts are: 194,000, 84,000, and 76,500. The Bayonne? 23,400.) But as I've gotten older, I've fallen in love with its soaring, parsimonious steel arch. There is a deco, streamlined feel to it. And it reminds me of my most favorite bridge in New York: the stately, slightly older but equally anachronistic Hell Gate.

Of all the bridges I'm not supposed to cross but want to, that one's at the top of the list. :-)

Day 22 - This Place Used To Be A Dump!

Literally.

The Fresh Kills Landfill operated for more than 50 years, much to the chagrin of every single Staten Islander except, perhaps, for DSNY guys who worked there and also lived on the Island. For much of that time, it received every shred of household garbage disposed by New York's 7 or 8 million residents. It was originally devised in the late 1940s as a place to dump fill from a variety of Moses-era projects on the Island and slated for closure in fewer than 5 years. But over time, our society's disposable approach to the world required more space to stick the increasing residue of a consumer economy--of 7 or 8 million people. Over time Fresh Kills grew to over 2000 acres--more than 3 square miles--of stinking trash piled high on the former tidal mud flats of Staten Island's western shore. Some spots are now more than 10 stories high.

I grew up about 10 blocks away. It didn't always stink, but it did quite often. People in the neighborhood would joke that we were just used to it always smelling. Folks who didn't live nearby asked if the stench was unbearable in the summer. In fact, I remember fall and winter as being the smelliest times. Maybe the heavy, humid air did a better job at tamping down the odors than the crisp, fresh breezes in cooler weather. And it seemed to only ever smell at night. Stories, many apocryphal I'm sure, circulated as to why this was. My favorite, told by the elders on the block with a conviction that recalled their stories about being in wars, was that the tractors turned the garbage over at night when the sea gulls that infested the landfill would be less likely to swoop in and carry away chicken carcasses or apple cores or dirty diapers. I've seen the gulls at the dump. Nightfall would not have stopped them from a meal.

Another story shared, perhaps a bit more plausible since it was relayed (or maybe just repeated) by our teachers at school, was that Fresh Kills was one of only two human-made structures visible from space; the other being the Great Wall. What is undeniable is that by the end of its life, Fresh Kills was receiving 12,000 tons of waste a day. That 24,000,000 pounds of shit in one form or another. Every day of the week.

In 1999 The Dump, as it was uniformly called, was finally closed to the cheers and psychic relief of everyone on Staten Island. In September 2001 a portion was pressed into service again, temporarily, to take in a good deal of the debris from the World Trade Center. Here the solemn, macabre task of sifting through fine dust and debris for a variety of objects of human significance--papers, ID cards, family photos that used to be propped up on desktops, wedding bands which were not pulverized by the pancaking floors, and, yes, bone fragments--was conducted around the clock by a specially trained group of forensic investigators. Much of what was too fine to be identified, but which almost undoubtedly contained traces of mementos of the lives of more than 3000 people, remains in on a hallowed hilltop poking up from this ignoble expanse.

Over the past 5 or 6 years, several City agencies have been working on a plan to transfer this site--three times the size of Central Park--from the Department of Sanitation to the Parks Department, and to develop it over the next 20 years into recreation and and reclaimed natural areas. Now if that's not turning the term "reclamation" on its head (mud flats and the like are typically "reclaimed" from nature by filling them in and building subdivisions or Home Depots on them, praise God), then you've me. The NYC Urban Park Rangers are giving tours of The Dump from time to time. So this weekend, my girlfriend and I hopped on our bikes and joined an intrepid and sometimes quizzical dozen other folks to see how the last few years of inactivity at Fresh Kills have begun to transform the natural landscape. The results follow below. It was a hazy day, but it made the bucolic wetlands feel of the place even more apparent. Nevermind the subdivisions and Home Depots in the distance.

You'll also see a few other pictures from our bike trip which included a trip to the German-style beer hall Kilmeyer's near where Joseph Mitchell wrote about the freed slave community of Sandy Ground in the Charleston section of Staten Island. And then there are the bricks from the Kreischer Brick Works (scroll down about 1/4 of the way) which was about one-quarter mile away from Kilmeyer's and, at one point, responsible for quite a bit of the fireproof brick construction in NYC. The sidewalks are still paved with them out there. Enjoy!