Hollis

A lovely neighborhood - went to check out the Jam Master Jay mural at 205th and Hollis Avenue and the Hip-Hop Museum at Hollis Famous Burgers at 203rd and Hollis. It was a hot day, people were barbequing every block, but no improptu invites - oh well. Hollis Famous Burgers claims Hollis is the most famous neighborhood in New York. What? South Bronx baby!

I was scoping out the joint as a potential dinner stop for my Going Places, Doing Stuff tour, which it ended up being. The museum part's a little sparce (read the Times article), but $4.50 gets you quite the fat cheeseburger. There's definitely something unorthodox about it, but it's good.

Neighborhoods: Hollis, Jamaica, Queens Village. Tracts Walked: Q400, Q402, Q404, Q500, Q502.01, Q502.02, Q504, Q506, Q508, Q510, Q512, Q516, Q518, Q520, Q522, Q524, Q532

What's the opposite of this project?

While Going Places and Doing Stuff with Matt Green and Jason Eppink last Saturday, I came across 13 people doing what is, perhaps, the exact opposite of my project. Instead of trying to see 2217 census tracts once, they were attempting to see one census tract 2217 times - and then another 3432 times for good measure.

The Self-Trancendence 3100 takes place in Queens Census Tract 452 - a sleepy, suburban area near St. John's University that's dominated by the Thomas A Edison technical high school and surrounding yards. The race involves running 3100 miles over almost 2 months around a single city block, bordered by Grand Central Parkway, 164th Place, 85th Avenue, and 168th Street - a total of 5649 laps. There is little that I personally would find more mind-numbing, although one person we talked to who had completed the race swore it wasn't boring. Doing one lap, plus hanging out in the park and walking around the corner for lunch was perfect for me, and quite enough to knock Q452 off the list.

We went on to climb abandoned gas cannisters, skip around a playground with this guy, and break several world records. Big thanks to Matt, Jason, Flux, and the Rude Mechanical Orchestra for putting together a great day.

Neighborhoods: Jamaica, Jamaica Hills. Tracts Walked: Q452

Feelin' Groovy

For us non-automotive types, it was quite an adventure crossing the 59th Street Bridge’s bike and pedestrian path a few summers ago. Bridge maintenance, pretty much all day and night, had meant navigating a maze of workers, equipment, and debris; getting doored by contractors' trucks; and between 10:00 PM and 5:00 AM many nights, throwing our bikes in the back of a school bus for a half-hour drive over the bridge with a couple of stoned Rasta guys. But there was a small silver lining – for at least one late night that July.

The 59th Street Bridge is unique among the great bridges over the East River. It’s not a suspension bridge. That means none of the elegant cables and wires of the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, or Triboro Bridges. The 59th Street is a huge jungle gym of steel beams and girders, passing from Midtown Manhattan, across Roosevelt Island, to Long Island City in Queens. The longest bridge across the East River, it’s a majestic, rusty, century-old dame with more than a few tricks up her sleeve. Before an old window got repaired, I’d already figured out a way to cut 15 minutes off of my walk home from the East Side to Long Island City by using a combination of an abandoned staircase and a tree growing off of Vernon Boulevard.

I’d commuted over the bike and pedestrian path of the bridge countless times, and always wondered what the view would be like from the top. Friends and I periodically chatted about climbing it, but we could never figure out a sufficiently risk-free way to get up. There just didn’t seem to be any ways to climb it without getting seen.

Why risk arrest, possibly jail, and definitely inconveniencing thousands of commuters just to be able to go a few hundred more feet to somewhere you can see everyday anyway? Not only “because it’s there,” George Leigh Mallory’s great rational for climbing Mt. Everest, but because it’s there and you’re being told you can’t climb it. There’s something about exclusivity, about not being allowed to go somewhere interesting, about being told “no, that’s not for you,” that can drive a person mad. As I continued my commutes, I started to become palpably jealous of the workers I saw on top every once in a while. I wondered if the best thing to do wasn’t maybe to just grab a hardhat, get a friend to drop us off on the outer roadway, and head up the exterior ladder some random weekday afternoon.

But it doesn’t come to disguising ourselves as bridge workers. One moonlit night, it turns out we’re in luck. After months of dreaming about her towers, the old broad suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, lets us in on another one of her hidden nooks and crannies and we’re off. The feeling is unreal - it’s like you’ve been after a girl whom you’re sure you haven’t got a chance with, and then one day she lets you know she’s just been playing hard to get all along.

The climb to the top is almost like a video game, or maybe a military obstacle course – an athletic, nerve-wracking, mentally challenging puzzle of climbing up ladders, crawling through girders, squeezing through holes, balancing on steel beams. One wrong step, at points, and they’d be scraping us off the roadway some two hundred feet below. But the advantage is that the course is 90% hidden from view. As we hit the top, we noticed traffic was still running smoothly across the bridge – a sure sign we’d made it up without being seen. As we’re up there, I realize we’re also benefiting from another commuter inconvenience: had we tried this sometime earlier, we’d almost assuredly have been seen by the then-out-of-commission Roosevelt Island Tram that passes right next to the bridge tower. Like many adventures, timing and patience were key ingredients, and those who try to find their way up today will encounter locks and obstacles where for a very short time there were none.

As with many long, drawn-out romantic pursuits, the culmination doesn’t really live up to its expectations. For one thing, the view actually isn’t that great. The bridge is only about the height of a 30-story building, and the lights of Midtown are almost completely obscured by the uninspired residential skyscrapers of the East Side. It’s so windy on top of the metal towers that crown the walkway that I can’t pause for more than a second at the pinnacle before having to climb down. And the shaking of the bridge in the heavy winds, combined with the obvious inability to use flash photography, means that we only have somewhat fuzzy, dimly lit shots to commemorate our conquest.

But despite the mild anticlimax, I’ll never think of the bridge the same way again. Now when traversing its paths, mundane thoughts of interrupted commutes and the necessities of infrastructure maintenance give way, if only for a moment, to a remembrance of that amazing sense of wonderment that only a city like New York can provide.

Down the East River

Easily the least utilized (but non-abandoned) bridge over the East River is the Ward's Island Pedestrian Bridge. Summer days the bridge is usually down - its accessible position. Throughout the entire Winter, and nights from April to October, the center span is up and the bridge is closed to pedestrians and bikers. Ward's Island has some homeless camps near the bridge (not to mention a psychiatric hospital), and the place is completely deserted at night, but I still have not heard any coherent rationale for not just keeping the bridge down 24-7. Even in the down position it's low enough that almost all boats can fit under, and there's four other ways to walk on and off the island 24-7. One more example of "inaccessibility" being a lazy shortcut for "security."

The second-least-used bridge over the East River is the Roosevelt Island Bridge. I used to live on the Queens side of the Roosevelt Island Bridge. Having it be so close was bad motivation to go climb it - I finally got around to it about a week before I moved, but there's no way to actually get on top of the bridge. The lift room at the top (thankfully, without a pigeon colony like the Broadway Bridge) was as far as I got. One more down, but I can't say it felt terribly significant. You can get just as high up by heading to the top of the parking garage next door.

The Ward's Island Pedestrian Bridge, the Triboro, the George Washington, and the Park Avenue Metro North bridge are the four bridges around Manhattan I've never managed to get on top of. The G.W will let student groups or people with connections up to the top once every blue moon, and I'm pretty confident that sometime in my life I'll be able to tag along. The Park Avenue bridge has recently gotten a lot of new security, and I may have blown my chance at that one, we'll see. The Ward's Island bridge would be pretty cool - we went there one night trying to find a way up, which turned out to involve having to break into the lift rooms. If it had been the Brooklyn Bridge... well, sometimes you do what you gotta do. But criminal trespass for the Ward's Island Pedestrian Bridge is definitely not worth it.

The Triboro I'd certainly like to climb also - I've never been on top of a bridge that narrow for starters - but I can't really say I have a terrible itch for it. It certainly wasn't frustrating to walk across, like the 59th Street bridge was before I managed to get up that.