Day 43 - Newtown Creek

As we nosed into the mouth and rounded the knob of land that is north Brooklyn, the Manhattan skyline drifted over the industryscape that lines both sides of the creek. I felt, for a moment, like I could be in the Meadowlands. Or Bayonne.

But it was New York. Old Newtown, in fact, on the creek that bears the erstwhile western Queens placename.

On September 16th, the Newtown Creek Alliance held a second boat tour of the creek (I missed the first one). While I've spent a good deal of time working and poking along both edges of the creek, I'd never been on it. So Megan and I headed over to the East 23rd St. marina, down the gangway past moored yachts and aboard M.V. Half Moon, the worn but reliable dinner cruise boat that NCA seems to get to use for a lot of its on-water programs.

The pictures below catalog a good deal of what we saw on this dynamic waterway. It has a very rich history in several respects. Part is economic. By 1910 the value of commerce along this 3.5 mile tidal estuary eclipsed that of the mighty, muddy 2,320 mile Mississippi River. It still abuts three of New York City's most productive industrial areas: Long Island City, East Williamsburg, and Maspeth, though its share of water-dependent uses has dwindled. It is, unfortunately, the receiver of millions of gallons of storm-water runoff each year during heavy rains. And because much of New York City's sewer system combines storm- and sanitary sewer pipes into one system, heavy rain often mean that tons of raw sewage wash into the creek. Then, of course, there is the huge plume of oil caused by years of leaking tanks at the former ExxonMobil site in Greenpoint which continues to send oil percolating up from the shallow water table to the skim of the creek.

The NCA's mission is to "revitalize, restore and reveal" Newtown Creek. The tour, if repeated, is a lovely way to spend and afternoon--malodorous though the upper reaches of it may be. Cotton puff clouds and a crisp late-summer breeze help to ease the smells a bit.

Day 38 - Worksman Bikes

I wish I had more pictures to share the experience visually with you, but I spent an hour or so this morning with Wayne Sossin of Worksman Business Cycles in Ozone Park, Queens.

I was interviewing Wayne to learn more about his 110 year old business building "business cycles". These are not Lance Armstrong's cycles, though if you want a bike that will live strong for a generation or two, these are the ones to buy. Worksman markets most of their products for industrial or work-related uses: moving small payloads around factory floors, letting mobile maintenance crews at a plant zip around as needed, delivering pizza or groceries to apartments in the neighborhood. They have also branched into similar lines of work, including heavier-duty recreation bikes that provide a sturdiness for older folks or special-needs riders.

Wayne quipped, “You’re not going to ride a century on a Worksman cycle, but if you need to get from here to there and need to have reliability that when you run into a curb there’s nothing at all is going to happen to your wheel, but the curb might break, that’s what we’re all about.”

Nothing like naming your business to clearly identify yourself, right?

Dumb luck, actually. Or an enterprising immigrant who recognized the power of changing one's name for the right business opportunity.

Morris Worksman was a Russian immigrant who came to New York and set up a sundries business in lower Manhattan near the turn of the 20th century. He saw an application for using the newly popular bicycle to help move goods around factories and, importantly, to make deliveries instead of the typical horse-and-cart. It was an apparent success. Fast-forward three decades and Worksman had its next big source of demand: mobile vending.

In the 1930s, an Ohio-based confectionery who had recently invented a sweet treat that froze sweetened cream on wooden sticks had just sold its invention--Good Humor ice cream bars--to a New York investor who subsequently expanded and franchised Good Humor routes across the country. In the suburbs, Good Humor Men may have rode around and sold their sweet wares out of their signature trucks. But in NYC and other urban areas, Good Humor Men often used bicycles—Morris Worksman’s bicycles. The basic need hasn't changed much: the need for a sturdy, dependable machine to carry a lot of weight easily and efficiently.

Seems a little anachronistic these days, no? Or, at least, not a growth industry.

Maybe not. But Wayne points to the fact that he has had sales that have held steady over the past several years while several other US-based bicycle manufacturers have either closed or moved their production off-shore. In fact, according to the National Bike Dealers Association, over 99% of bicycles sold in the US in 2006 were imported.

To grow his business he is working with several universities to use his bikes and trikes to set up bike-sharing programs like ones written about recently in Paris and Berlin and openly discussed in some circles in New York City by the New York Bike Share Project.

The other thing Wayne is doing--and almost all savvy New York City manufacturers know they have to do this--is to reduce his biggest costs. Wayne's lucky. He bought the building he's in now a number of years ago. While it required a large capital outlay (which he was lucky to be able to pull together--not all manufacturers can) it has insulated him from the market's recent overheating. He also has some of his fabrication completed overseas before receiving them here to do the bulk of the building and customizing work for customers. And he's working the the New York Industrial Retention Network to figure out how to use his factory building's large rooftop to generate some of the electricity he uses from solar energy to further reduce his ongoing costs. This and similar programs are offered by NYIRN through RenewableNY.

It's not easy doing business in New York, but Wayne says he couldn't imagine doing it anywhere else.

“Being born in NYC holds a special place in my heart," Wayne says. "Being able to have a business here where we employ a decent number of NY residents is a wonderful feeling and I’m committed to make sure that that continues. It would be really easy for us to pack it in in NYC and move to a more modern place where costs are lower. But the beautiful thing about being here is that there is a certain magic of the NYC resident."

Describing his 60 or so employees from a half-dozen countries, Wayne continues, "They’re resilient and hard working. There is a great pool of labor in NYC which I think is often overlooked. You can see the ethnicities based on what they’re eating for lunch. We definitely have some interesting aromas here around 12:30.”

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. :-)