Day 220 - Queens Roller Derby

To promote (and raise money for) the first-annual Tour de Queens in June, the Transportation Alternatives Queens Committee (of which I am an at-large member) hosted a fundraiser tonight at The Creek & Cave in Long Island City.

There were the usual drink specials and auction items. But the highlight was probably the bike racing competitions we held--inside the bar.

Thanks to Dave Perry of Bike Works NYC, we were able to use several of his Barelli competition rollers to let supporters of the Tour de Queens race against the clock--and each other. We even held a face-off between representatives of the advocacy world and the Department of Transportation.

The event was a smashing success. Sadly, no one got video of me trying the rollers. I got the hang of it, but it's harder than it looks!

Day 214 - The NYC Civic Three-fer

I did it! On a visit to the Brooklyn Public Library today, I completed the civic trifecta and now possess a library card from each of New York City's three public library systems: Brooklyn, Queens and the New York Public Library serving The Bronx, Staten Island and Manhattan. Brooklyn's and Queens's systems predate the consolidation of New York City in 1898 and remained as separate institutions afterward.

I accomplished this fun feat at the BPL's paean to early 1950s modernism--their main branch on Eastern Parkway. This is one of several civic edifices in Brooklyn built around this time and in this style, celebrating the public good. (I'm thinking much of Cadman Plaza, especially the Brooklyn Heights branch of the library and the criminal courts building there.

I took some time to poke around and appreciate some more of its architecture, including finding what is possibly New York City's most pristine telephone booth!

Day 213 - Williamsburg's Ethnic Arc

My friend Shelby and I took a wonderful stroll through an arc of ever-changing Williamsburg today.

We started out at Pratt in Fort Greene and wended our way north through the Hasidic neighborhoods in South Williamsburg. Incredibly, I don't think I'd ever really been through this area before on foot--at least not the eastern sections in Broadway Triangle that appeared more like a shtetl than a Brooklyn neighborhood. It was an incredible sight: every sign in Hebrew or Yiddish and every single person I passed a member of the Hasidim. I don't know why I was so naive about this, but it was exhilarating to walk through.

North of Broadway, we stopped in at the Moore St. Market which is one of the dozen or so public markets created during the LaGuardia administration in the 1930s to round up and put all of the pushcart peddlers under one roof. The goal was primarily to make streets less congested. But corralling the vendors also made it easier for inspectors to check their scales and ensure that they weren't shorting customers. The market is the source of some community consternation lately. Vendors, mostly of religious and cultural knick-knacks and a handful of purveyors of produce of questionable quality, feel pressured by the City's Economic Development Corporation to move out. EDC, at the same time, is working to improve the breadth of offerings at the market. Always in this neighborhood, change is viewed suspiciously as gentrification--as catering to a younger, whiter, more affluent group of newcomers at the expense of current residents.

After some malta, we set out on a route that took us north through old Italian Williamsburg along Manhattan, Grand and Metropolitan Avenues. These are areas like I grew up in--at least in terms of the demography. I was actually surprised to see as much as is still left. I assumed they were all hipsters at this point!

Here are some shots of old store signs and the odd architectural or street scene curiosity.

Day 208 - Signs, Signs, Everywhere There's Signs...

Q: So, how many street signs would you say there are posted on NYC's streets?

A: about 1.3 million, give or take a few thousand. That’s about one street sign for every six men, women and children of New York City. I walked along a busy avenue where I live in Morningside Heights, recently, and carefully counted every one way, bus stop, street name, do not enter, no parking, no standing, school crossing, snow emergency route, merge right, no right turn, no left turn, one-hour parking, two-hour parking, truck route, no commercial traffic, and stop sign along a 25-block stretch and came up with—-are you ready for this?--501 signs. That’s about 20 signs on each block. And almost every one of them is designed and manufactured in Maspeth, Queens, at the New York City Department of Transportation’s sign shop.

It’s not much to see from the outside: a squat, 2-story cinderblock warehouse built sometime early in the last century in one of those mixed neighborhoods where rows of old wood frame houses edge up to light industry, facing off just across a narrow street. But as one gets closer, there’s little question that this is where New York City’s street signs get made. Outside over the front door is a highway sized sign—in the familiar color of highway sign green—welcoming visitors. Perhaps not surprisingly, there were 5 other signs giving the address, admonishing employees against being loud, throwing cigarette butts on the ground or parking in front of the driveway.

Nick Robinson is the main supervisor and 25-year veteran of the sign shop, overseeing a crew who design, manufacture and install signs all around the city. He walked us into the warehouse where house-sized panels of aluminum are stored, ready to be made into signs.

"We use two thicknesses of aluminum," Nick explained. "One is 80/1000 of an inch thick. The other is 125/1000. The 80 is for most of the smaller signs you see on the street and the 125 is for the larger highway signs that you see overhead."

Large four-foot by twelve-foot sheets of aluminum move into the machine shop where workers at old fashioned metal presses that make a helluva "boom" sound with each pass of their blades cut them down to the size and shape of the signs you see on poles and lamp posts all over the city.

“Most of our bread and butter are parking regulations," Nick said. "Basically they’re 18x12, 18x18. There are some other oddball sizes, but that’s the bulk of what we make.”

Not every sign is made here. They contract out to many similar signs, like one way and stop signs. Even still, the Department of Transportation produces about 70,000 signs at the shop each year. Most are replacements, like when a delivery truck backs up into a pole and sheers off a “no commercial traffic” sign. If it’s one of the more frequently used signs out of the 10,000 different ones they have in their library, the sign will be printed with ink through a silk-screen template, not unlike the way many t-shirts get printed with designs.

But if it’s a special request, say like when the city installed special purple “thru-streets” signs in midtown to attempt to speed cross-town traffic a few years ago, then they’re made with weather-resistant vinyl labels instead of paint. The sign is designed on a computer. Then a special plotter will “print” not with ink, but by perforating letters and graphics onto a sign-sized label which is then affixed to a sign blank.

Lisa Hall is, in the parlance of civil service, a traffic device maintainer. She describes the printer. "It’s similar to an inkjet, except it uses a blade to cut out the vinyl, and we remove the excess from the background which leaves the graphic.” She was working on a specialized No Parking sign when I visited. “The first thing I do is I’ve applied transfer tape," Lisa explained. "I’m going to trim it to size to help me apply it easier. And on a clean, dry surface, I’ll take the transfer tape, remove the slip sheet." Then she squeegees the final image into place.

Alexander Soultanis makes a different kind of sign for the city.

“I’m on my 21st year," Alex told me. "I came here as an old school sign painter—the hand painting of signs. Everything’s now computer graphics and moved away from paint. When I first came here, they really didn’t do any hand painting at that point. Mayor Koch used to order hand-painted banners for us. That kinda started into other things, including street painting.”

Back in the 1980s, DOT began painting streets for special events. Alex had one night to paint a 5-lane G-clef in front of Radio City when the city was trying to lure the Grammies back.

“It was 56’ tall," Alex recalled. "I marked the street into a grid of 2-foot by 2-foot boxes that I used to transfer the design over from graph paper. It’s not easy getting all that painting done and having it dry in time for traffic the next morning.”

That 1.3 million sign figure, by the way, doesn’t include Alex’s G-clef!

Day 208 - The Brooklyn Navy Yard, Then & Now

I was treated to a tour of my friend Deb Johnson's new workspace in Building 280 at the venerable and still exceedingly relevant Brooklyn Navy Yard. Deb is a professor of industrial design that the Pratt Institute where she also started the affiliated Pratt Design Incubator. She's taking a break from teaching to head up Pratt's various sustainability initiatives.

And in her spare time (ha!) she's also getting a personal project rolling: the Brooklyn Design Co-op. A section of the 5th floor in Building 280 houses a shared work space that she is currently filling with like-minded designers focused on creating sustainable solutions to myriad world challenges.

Cool in its own right, of course. But on this crisp winter day, I was utterly smitten with the views--both from her building's roof and of the industrial relics surrounding her, including Building 128, whose days are numbered. The hulking steel behemoth, built in 1899, used to be where huge steam boilers were assembled. Now, falling apart, it's slated for demolition and redevelopment to provide affordable space for modern light industrial uses.

I'm looking forward to learning some more about the history of these buildings. So is BNY. So much so that they hired an archivist recently and launched the BNY Historical Center. Enjoy some decent pics of amazing views!

Day 196 - WoodJackElmCor Jaunt

A few weeks ago I met a friend in Flushing for archery lessons. The #7 train was in the midst of some pretty serious construction east of Woodside. Anyone wanting to go past there had to get off and catch the LIRR along the Port Washington branch to get to Flushing. I hadn't done that in probably 10 years.

The landscape that the Port Wash cuts through is not the glitzy, exalted "International Express" that the #7 is along Roosevelt Avenue. Instead, it's the common man's route to Flushing. At first glance, it is block after block of hardscrabble wood framed row houses backing up to the tracks, cars shoehorned into frontyards where a postage stamp of lawn might otherwise grow up through. This is occasionally interrupted by a nondescript brick industrial building. Not the stuff of urban adventures. Or is it?

I happened to catch a couple of sights as we whizzed by at 60 mph... a Thai temple, balconies overloaded with bicycles, halal butchers next to massage parlors... all stuck among this strip of industrial residential landscape that gets no attention. So I took the train back (and forth) through this stretch today to see it again. And when I still wasn't convinced I had seen it
closely enough, I got of the LIRR and walked back (and forth, again) the 5.3 miles. Below are some of the fun things I saw. (To see larger versions, go directly to the Picasa page.)

Day 180 - End of the line?

Here we are. Day 180.

This will surprise, and likely chagrin, the more nerdy among you, but just today I rode the last of the subway system that I had not been on: the Franklin Avenue Shuttle. It seemed an appropriate way to celebrate Day 180, the putative end of this line I’ve been traveling for six months.

I've been taking stock of my gerund-rich time. Traipsing, tramping, rambling, writing, interviewing, broadcasting, cooking, cadging, googling, surveying, burnishing, divining, dallying, contemplating, resting, and becoming restless. I’ve spent time in every borough, in dozens of parks, in a score of library branches and in more cafes than I care to count. I have learned to roast coffee beans in East New York; treadled a letterpress in Gowanus; muffled my ears against the deafening chatter of a half-ton of Jordon almonds tumbling around the insides of a dozen century-old copper drums spun by pulleys and leather belts in Hunts Point; watched biscuits of vinyl pressed into records in Sunset Park; wandered a vineyard in Floral Park; and am preparing to leave Staten Island to spend a night in New York Harbor, on a pilot boat, as my grandfather did all of his adult life half a century ago.

I’ve wandered around sugar farms in Cajun Louisiana shucking cane stalks with a pocket knife to suck their juice right in the field; camped in Death Valley; and spent days lazing on a patio along the Santa Fe railroad in Arizona watching train after train after train lumber by over the high desert. Each seemed a little more like heaven than the last.

I’ve been generally unrushed. So, for instance, in waiting for the subway I have been able to let one train pass by in favor of the possibility that the next might be made up of older cars. Why is this important? Because on the newfangled trains it isn’t as easy to look out the front window and enjoy the tracks whizzing by beneath me; or to espy switches or branches off of the main line that I hadn't noticed before; or just to reminisce about high school days when I'd fight my way into the first car, no matter how crowded, and shoehorn myself in front of the window. What makes for a more comfortable, capacious cab for the train operator is depriving a new generation of nascent subway buffs this important experience to appreciate the infrastructure many of their ancestors may have helped to create. I have wanted to indulge in it at every opportunity I can before they all go away.

I have discovered that the so-called creative class really is an important part of our economy, at least if I’m typical. I am convinced that, alone, I am contributing at least 0.5% of the Gross City Product in terms of cafe expenditures. By my accounting, I've plunked down $350 in the past few months just on things that paid for my reading and writing time in cafes.

I have rediscovered public libraries, and in a big way. I hadn't checked a book out of the public library since I borrowed The Lord of the Rings from the Huguenot Park branch during the summer between 8th & 9th grades. But in the interest of economy, I now routinely reserve items from the NYPL that are delivered to my local branch when they're available. It's brilliant and I've turned others onto it. And when I’m out and about—and when I’m tired of stopping in at cafes—I have used libraries throughout the city as satellite workspaces. I've spent time in a library in every borough in the past six months. NYPL is the paragon, of course. But Queens is still my favorite system: so unprepossessing and utterly useful to its mostly immigrant clientele. It is so, well, Queens. No bells. No whistles. Strictly utilitarian. Filled with patrons as varied as the borough it serves—every one that I’ve been to. I love it.

I've been surprised at how important parks have factored into my wanderings, without my intending them to. I hesitate to say that I discovered how essential they are; I was, after all, a Parkie for a year, and I support the relevant parks advocacy groups and causes. But I think back now in wonder at how many hours I meandered through Pelham Bay Park, Soundview Park, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park; along the boardwalk and on the beach at Coney Island and the Richmond Terrace Esplanade; in J. Hood Wright Park near the GW Bridge; in Alley Pond Park way out east; in Highland Park around the old Ridgewood Reservoir; at LaGuardia Landing Lights Park so close to the undersides of landing 737s that one can make out the rivets in the fuselage; and around Bethesda Fountain where I just paced back and forth for much of one glorious and ponderous afternoon. Sunset Park was a particular treat. I made my first visit to it on one of my summer bike trips and couldn't believe I hadn't been there before. By any measure, it was thronged, but especially for a weekday afternoon: soccer playing adults, scooter-skipping kids, skewer-selling vendors, and languid, chatty old men and women with wizened faces sitting shoulder to shoulder on every bench lining every walkway up and down the ridge from the flagpole to the bottom of the hill.

And, of course, I got published as a journalist. Technically. I had many goals and intentions for my time off—most of which have not been realized. I intended to become proficient at Spanish, to finally start harmonica lessons, to systematically make my way through Harold McGee's classic "On Food and Cooking," to cook at least 4 nights a week, and to try my hand journalism. I've dabbled in all, but the one thing I can say I really succeeded in was getting published. It was a gallant attempt with a modest result, but it was one of the most gratifying things I've done outside of pubic service.

After spending the first 60 or so days casting about rather aimlessly (though, in retrospect, appreciating the salubrious effects of catatonia), and finally getting up enough guts to pitch stories and interview strangers, and to overcome my biggest challenge—procrastination—I have finally hit a stride. I am working through story ideas, getting things down on paper, and making connections. In short, I feel like I'm finally getting warmed up. I have more to say and more I want to do in this regard, and I’m not quite ready to give it up. Not just yet.

Which brings me to Day 181 and beyond. I wish I had more concrete ideas about what the next chunk of time will bring. I need to begin making a living again. This has been a decadence that I have relished but which is not sustainable. I have begun exploring options, including consulting gigs that let me use my knowledge of government and my skills at navigating bureaucracy while allowing me to maintain some flexibility to pitch and pursue stories. I’m grateful to friends and colleagues who have made connections for me in this regard lately, and I look forward to hearing more.

In the meantime, check back when you can. The name of the blog won’t change; the sentiment is still the same. And I’m as tickled now as I was in August. Probably more so.

Day 176 - World's Biggest Road Map

For the 1964-1965 World's Fair, modernist marvel Philip Johnson was asked to design a pavilion to celebrate the host state: New York. You all know it, I'm sure, even if you don't realize it. Many of you have probably seen the most notable component--the flying saucer lollipop-looking contraptions--while driving by Flushing Meadows Corona Park on the Grand Central Parkway. The rest of you probably know it from Men in Black.

Less known today, since it's mostly gone, is the adjacent Tent of Tomorrow whose colored panels (think '60s) were suspended over the artistic piece-de-resistance of the pavilion: the world's biggest road map. The map is a terrazzo reproduction of the 1964 Texaco Roadmap for New York State and one of the most fabulous pieces of pop art you are likely to see--whether you're a map geek or not.

Most of the World's Fair structures were constructed just for the fair and did not last much beyond its two seasons. The NYS Pavilion as a whole has been in limbo since then. It was too grand and ostentatious to dismantle. And yet it was too operationally challenging to be used effectively after the fair. It hung on for a bit as a restaurant and viewing platform, as it was during the fair, but it could not hold its own financially. The futuristic heaven-pointing monument that the City--or, more correctly, the World's Fair Corporation--was willing to subsidize during the world-renowned event of the fair itself, was harder to justify for a city slipping into fiscal purgatory.

The towers remain (or, at least, have persisted); their external elevator now frozen in place partway up the side and their internal stairwell rusted out from four decades of rainwater pooling upon their treads. The spectral plexiglass panels of the Tent of Tomorrow fell in many, many yesterdays ago; the criss-crossing guy wires hold nothing in place today. And the gorgeous terrazzo map of the Empire State has been rent apart by mosses and ailanthus, succeeding in creating a rift in the Mohawk River valley in 40 years that the Earth's tectonic movement couldn't do in 40 million years. There have been several attempts--most half-hearted, a few zealous--to create a justification and a funding stream to stabilize and possibly renovate the pavilion. The most recent one I remember involved creating a space museum that would be sited there. Each has been done in by a combination of municipal malaise and the daunting
sums of money needed to make it happen.

Recognizing at least part of this vanishihing landscape, the NYC Parks Department, along with the University of Pennsylvania's historic preservation program, recently began documenting and conserving parts of the Roadmap. With an eye toward telling a new generation of aficionados about the map, the Queens Museum of Art just opened an exhibit this weekend that explains and celebrates some of this work. Dave Jacoby and I attended. I was pleased to see such a variety of folks there and interested in this relic. All hopefully will be motivated to help develop a broader constituency for it.

Day 176 - Bulls Eye!

Way back on Day 63 after visiting the Queen County Farm Museum to make wine, I was biking back through Auburndale, just east of downtown Flushing, along a road paralleling the LIRR. There were a couple of warehouses abutting the residential neighborhood--vestiges of the railroad's industrial linkages in the past. One had a banner hanging outside saying, simply enough, ARCHERY.

?!?

So I pulled over and peered in through the glass doors. Sure enough, along the far wall was a line of colored targets. And standing between me and each was an archer holding up bows--no two of which looked alike.

Taped up to the door were a few news articles from the local rags profiling the Queens Archery Range & Pro Shop and its owner, Al the bow doc. One mentioned that a basic lesson and an hour's time on the range was $17.

How neat! For less than $20, I was going to do something that never would have occurred to me to seek out and which I never would have even been presented with had I not been biking down this particular road. I loved it for the serendipity as much as for actually getting to use a bow and arrow.

This past weekend I returned and brought my friend Lorna who, growing content with the challenges of raising her daughter has, of late, been musing about taking up hunting.

?!?

Reasonable enough. And who's going to argue with a determined woman with a bow?

Drop-ins are welcomed at Queens Archery, but you might want to call ahead to make sure there aren't any tournaments going on. Brush up now on your cupidity in time for Valentine's Day.

Day 172 - Foggin & Trix's Topographical Adventure

When an old friend from high school got in touch to tell me she was living in Teaneck, it only seemed right to arrange to get together (for the first time in 18 years!) uptown, near the GW Bridge. Besides, I've been fascinated of late with the dramatic topography of upper Manhattan--and the step streets that define some of the thoroughfares there as a result...