All City New York

Crack The Surface

2012-02-03T21:59:00.001-05:00

The latest installment of Crack The Surface from SilentUK (part one is here), featuring the first known crossover of Urban Exploration and New Orleans Booty Bounce at the 17:45 mark.

Check the guy stylishly sporting the latest Middlesbrough FC away jersey too.

Subway Story on WNYC

2012-01-04T02:04:00.001-05:00

I got to be a guest for WNYC’s feature yesterday on abandoned and never-built subway stations. It was a lot of fun, and you can check out the story here. The reporter, Jim O'Grady, expounds some more on the never-built ideas for provisions here.

The ideas for subway expansions that never came to be could fill a book. In getting that down to a short article, some nuance and perspective can get left out. From my viewpoint as a subway enthusiast (or foamer, if you prefer), working on this story was an interesting challenge, and resulted in some very comprehensive conversations with the reporter. I learned a lot about just how differently enthusiasts and laypeople view the system.

WNYC also has a good interactive map (this seems to work better in Chrome) showing some (not all) of these proposed extensions. Another good, mostly accurate, Google Map put together by Ego Trip Express is here.

There was no single “master plan” for a subway extension that never happened. Instead, there were several different proposals, ranging from comprehensive systems to single lines; and from designed, engineered, and partially built, to no more than an idea on paper. It’s tough to just overlay these on the system as it exists today to show a "what-if" system, because if some of these imaginary provisions had been built, the rest of the system as it exists today would be different.

For instance: WNYC's map shows an extension of the F line across 76th street into Queens, in addition to its current route across 63rd street. If the 76th street line had been built, the current F line across 63rd street, which serves the same purpose, just 13 blocks south, would almost certainly never have been built – the 76th street line should be looked at as a replacement, not an addition. The provision we visited for the story, under the Nevins street IRT, was built for a possible IRT extension under Lafayette Avenue. If this was built as planned in the 1900s, how would that have affected the Crosstown IND (G-train) which was built under Lafayette Avenue decades later? These are only a couple examples of how, even today, the New York City subway system has to be looked at as process, not a snapshot, and as a continual evolution over time.

Foamers will notice other minor errors and arguable claims, most notably about the train underneath the Waldorf. All I can say is that if you're the press, and you get one story from the governing agency's official press liaison, and a differing one from an amateur enthusiast, you will 100 times out of 100 report the former.

For a few great resources on the subway system, check out nycsubway.org, Joe Brennan's abandoned stations site, Joe's Subway Korner and, of course, our friends at subchat.

As for visiting these yourself: I certainly understand the appeal, and am about the last person in any position to tell anyone not to do what they want to do. But I will mention that, by the MTA’s own count, there have been at least 150 cases of worker deaths in the subway system since 1946. Those are the professionals. This is not a hobby that should be approached with any degree of casualness.

Dyker Heights Lights

2011-12-01T00:20:00.001-05:00

This was originally posted three years ago, but I've had a couple of requests for it again. I haven't been to Dyker Heights yet this season, but the houses that have the huge displays stay pretty consistent year-to-year. As such, I imagine this map is still pretty accurate. I'll update it if I notice anything different next time I'm there.

You don't have to go to Dyker Heights to see crazy Christmas displays – pretty much any neighborhood with the magic combination of detached houses and Italians will do the trick. Houses at Westervelt and Pelham Parkway in the Bronx, Beach 144th and Neponsit in the Rockaways, East 93rd street and Flatlands in Canarsie, and 81st street at Colonial in Bay Ridge all easily rival the big displays of Dyker Heights.

But Dyker Heights has quantity along with quality. I've included a handy-dandy map of the highlights below. The map is for the heart of the area - surrounded by 15th Avenue, 86th street, the Gowanus Expressway, and 79th street - but you'll find lights well beyond these borders.

Now, keep in mind that pretty much every block in this area has at least one house that would take the cake on whatever street you live on. With that being said, red blocks are streets that are especially worth a stroll down, while blue blocks are can't-miss. Green points mark exceptional displays, and bathrooms (Nathan's and Bklyn Pizza) are indicated by the familiar symbol. The area's about equidistant from the R at 77th street or 86th street on the west, or the D at 79th street or 18th Avenue on the east.

View Larger Map

As you walk around, the displays start to seem a bit repetitive. You notice the same sparkling reindeers, inflated ferris wheels, and Christmas Countdown clocks. For the really big boys (and some of the smaller guys) I'm pretty sure the lights remain a labor of love, but for others the yard signs proclaiming designs by B&R Decorators and V&J Lighting show that the Dyker Heights lights are mostly about the social pressure of keeping up with the customs of the neighborhood.

No, no pictures – go see them for yourself. If you can't take the schlep, check out Gothamist or Flickr.

Tracts Walked: B140, B144, B146, B148, B150 (every street in tract), B186, B184, B170

Thanks & Press

2011-11-23T23:03:00.003-05:00

Thanks to everyone who came out this Sunday - I had a lot of fun.

A few articles about the Panel:

Wall Street Journal (Paywall. Google the headline and clickthrough if you want to read all of it).
WNET (Channel 13/MetroFocus)
Brooklyn Papers (by star North Brooklyn reporter Juliet Linderman)

Panel this Sunday

2011-11-18T00:08:00.001-05:00

I'm really excited to be part of a seriously great panel put together by Nate Kensinger this Sunday with Kevin Walsh of Forgotten-NY, Nick Carr of ScoutingNY, and Cindy VandenBosch of Urban OysterTours. The topic is "Block by Block: New York Street Historians."

I probably should mention I don't consider myself a historian - street or otherwise - but I think all-in-all there'll be some pretty good discussions about seeing interesting stuff around town.

The panel is at Union Docs - 322 Union Street in Williamsburg. Panel begins at 7:30. $9 suggested donation, of which I get zero dollars.

Riverdale

2011-11-07T19:21:00.003-05:00

There are many neighborhoods in New York where I'm reminded of my Grandparents - huge swaths of Southern Brooklyn, half of Queens Boulevard, a few scattered blocks of the east Bronx even. There should be. My grandparents are part of one of largest, and most culturally influential groups ever to hit New York - part of the great wave of immigrants and their children from the shtetels of Eastern Europe. Even today, almost 100 years after it ended, that culture has remained. The people who make it up may not be so numerous anymore, but it still has a while before it fades completely from the neighborhoods it once dominated

There are fewer neighborhoods where I'm reminded of my parents - middle-class liberal boomer Jews. You'd think that would be a big demographic in New York, one which has left a sizable imprint on the city as a whole. And it has - but it's an imprint that's not really rooted in specific geography, one where the residents have transmitted a character that's stuck to the streets. Most neighborhoods where you would think it might be encountered have either remained with that feeling of my grandparents' world, or been transformed into a kind of generic yuppiness. One of the few places (small parts of Flatbush being the only others that comes to mind right away) I've found it has been in Riverdale.

I never thought I'd like Riverdale - because the combination of its name, middle-class residents and relative suburbaness, it was always put out there in the public consciousness as kind of a souless and uninteresting contrast to the rest of the Bronx - a simplistic and inaccurate narrative for both sides of the divide, but one which I fell for.

It turns out I do like Riverdale, very much. Part of it is because it reminds me of a world I know and love, part of it is because it's one of those neighborhoods that feels like it retained its same basic character for the last 30 years as the city has changed dramatically around it -one of the few neighborhoods in New York where you don't feel like you're just seeing a snapshot of a state of flux. But most of it is because walking around it is interesting. It's one of the only neighborhoods where you can turn a corner and not really know what's next: a cliff, a high rise, a mansion, the Hudson River. Greater Riverdale - essentially the Bronx west of Broadway - looks small on a map but feels vast when you walk it. The topography is a big component of this - the area houses both the highest and lowest points in the Bronx. The lack of any real street grid is another part. But it's the variety of use that really does it. There are streets that would be at home in Scarsdale, and others that would fit right into Washington Heights. There are parks of the woodland variety and ballfield variety, two colleges in its borders, sleek highways and horribly maintained winding asphalt. The Bronx itself is like this - it's the borough that's most patchwork, where you're most likely to find a wood-frame house, 1970s concrete tower, pre-war art deco building, and recent Fedder-crap condo all inhabiting the same block.

But throughout all this physical diversity, a certain character to the neighborhood remains. A character where I'd be not the least but surprised to turn the corner and see my mother or father walking the dog or shlepping home a bag of groceries.

Neighborhods: Riverdale, Fieldston, Spuyten Duyvil
Tracts Walked: Bx285, Bx287, Bx289, Bx293, Bx295, Bx297, Bx301, Bx307, Bx317, Bx319, Bx323, Bx329, Bx333, Bx339, Bx341, Bx343, Bx345, Bx351

The Other Way of Climbing

2011-10-02T02:25:00.002-04:00

I've climbed a lot of different kinds of bridges: arch bridges, lift bridges, cantilevered spans, transporter structures, and of course a few suspension bridges. And that's just the big guys: I've been up countless smaller truss structures, some static, some movable swing or bascule spans. I once even monkeyed up the small metal gate over Carroll Street Bridge just to say I'd climbed a retractile bridge. But with the exception of an abandoned rail lift bridge in Cleveland and a cable-stayed tower over the Dnieper in north Kiev, they'd all also been the same: nocturnal. I'd head there at about 3:00 AM, wait until nobody was looking, and pray. And those two that I did during the day still involved the praying, and the stress that comes with wondering what'll happen if you're caught.

But this summer, I managed to summit a bridge a much different way. Through the Young Transportation Professionals of NYC, I got to, completely legitimately, head to the top of the George Washington Bridge on a beautiful summer day.

Panorama from the top of the GW Bridge. New Jersey tower.

We started with a few warmups - first a short introduction and overview where we got our day pass badges. Then the bridge operations headquarters, where they showed off the surveillance system and new fire truck. Finally the anchor room, where we made our way all the way down to where the giant metal ropes that make up the suspension cables for the tower unwrap and then split into their individuals wires before they're anchored into cement. The anchorage and the saddle room (the room near the top of the tower where the suspension cables peak) were the only places where the Port Authority asked us not to take pictures.

Surveillance

coming out of the anchorage

Then it was time to head to the top. We took a two-minute ride in the elevator, a half-dozen people at a time. That got us to first mezzanine about 3/4 of the way up. Then we had our choice of a second elevator or the stairs to the second mezzanine, before heading through the saddle room, up a ladder, and out a hatch onto the top.

View from the stairs

Out the hatch

On the top

The reason the rope is in the picture above is because the top of the tower is where they do the bridge painter exam. They put a safety net underneath the girder, and prospective painters have to walk back and forth across the beam. Sit down, grab onto the rope, or freak out in any way and you're out. Back in 2004 I had applied for this exam on the promise that the physical test involved climbing a bridge. I was rejected for lack of painting experience.

Our tour was far from the only one of the summer - in fact the Port Authority lets people up there pretty often. They even have a viewfinder.

This is the only bridge I know of with a regular, if informal, policy of providing access. It's a shame that there aren't more like it. Our public works are just that - public. Constructed with our tax dollars, operated with our (considerable) tolls. Public access to public works should be a baseline, not a cause for celebration. And definitely not a cause for felony arrests.

Below is a short video of our tour, starting in the elevator.

On top of the George Washington Bridge from Moses Gates on Vimeo.

Big thanks to the Port Authority for letting us up, and for the Young Transportation Professionals for arranging it. Young Transportation Professionals is a great group whose New York chapter has put together some amazing tours to places like the off-limits parts of Grand Central Terminal, the #7 subway extension being dug, and the under-construction One World Trade Center this summer. Join them - it's only 20 bucks.

Jamaica Bay

2011-09-26T18:14:00.000-04:00

Three years ago I took a rowboat with Marie Lorenz out to North Brother Island, the most desolate census tract in New York. Last month we took the same, albeit slightly more beat up, rowboat out to the second most desolate census tract in New York - Jamaica Bay. Check out the pics and commentary here.

The Jamaica Bay islands are actually split between Brooklyn and Queens - as a result they're divided into three different tracts: the populated part of the islands (which is Broad Channel, Queens), the unpopulated parts of the Queens side (which are home to Cross Bay Boulevard and the Jamaica Wildlife Center), and the Brooklyn side. The Brooklyn side has no residents, no industry, and no land connection, save for a tiny sliver of the island that hosts Cross Bay Boulevard. I'm calling it the second most desolate tract because, unlike North Brother, it's legal to visit most (but not all) of the islands, and we also actually ran into a guy walking his dog on one. When we asked how often he saw people out here, his answer was "hmmm... the last time was probably about a year ago."

Altogether we visited one Brooklyn island, one Queens island, and one split between the two boroughs (mostly in Queens, with a small sliver in Brooklyn). We also made two stops on the Rockaway Peninsula: once right past the CrossBay Bridge, where we grabbed a beer at a bayfront bar and lunch at Rockaway Taco (this was a weekday, so thankfully minus the lines); and once at the end of the trip on the tip of Far Rockaway, where we ditched the boat and hoofed it back to the A-train. If we had just gone a slight bit further, we would have landed in Nassau, making it a three-county boat trip. Oh well - next time.

The most interesting thing about Jamaica Bay is how shallow it is. We literally walked through the bay from one island to another.

Neighborhoods: Jamaica Bay, Far Rockaway, Rockaway Park, Seaside
Tracts Walked: B703.03, Q1702.02, Q942.02, Q1008

Middlesbrough

2011-09-19T21:02:00.002-04:00

Short writeup (with photos and video even) about my favorite city in England over on the travel blog. And climbing bridges there of course.

Numeric Extremes Walk - Part II

2011-09-15T15:21:00.001-04:00

39,038. This is as high as you can go in Five Boroughs. And we’re going to walk there. From 1.

Meet this Sunday, September 18th, at 9:45 AM at the Southeast corner of 1st Avenue and East 1st street in Manhattan - which, at 1, is the lowest product of two intersecting streets in the five boroughs.

20 miles later we’ll hit the corner of 262nd Place and 149th Road in Rosedale, Queens. Multiply those together and you get 39,038, the highest product of any two intersecting numbered streets in NYC.

A warning - this walk is doubling as me knocking off another 24 tough-to-reach Queens tracts. I've arrainged the route so it's not adding any distance to the walk, but this will be your answer for all "why are we turning here" type questions.

After our destination, we’ll have a about a mile walk to the LIRR, which will cost you $3.75 to get back into town.

For those of you for whom 20 miles is a bit much, we'll be hugging the subway through about mile 5, and then staying reasonably near it through about mile 11. It's 2011 - bring a five-borough atlas or a smart phone if you're planning on ditching early and need to figure out how to get to the train. No time to give directions - we're walking here!

Frames of Reference, cont.

2011-08-17T18:24:00.001-04:00

Following up from the last post, I want to address some of Alec Baldwin’s specific claims regarding the Upper West Side. It turns out, by the letter of the law, he’s generally not really that far off. For instance, his claim that "The Upper West Side, particularly above 86th Street, has a lot of public housing,” is pretty accurate. The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) houses about 7,500 people between 86th street and 106th street on the West Side. This is about 1/12th of the slightly less than 90,000 people total who live in the corresponding area. To provide some perspective, NYCHA houses about 500,000 of the slightly more than 8 million New Yorkers, or about 1/16th of the population. (NYCHA has an interactive map of developments here).

But his main contention involves the class composition of the Upper West Side. To his credit, he’s not trying to claim that he himself is middle-class, or his building is middle-class, just that “the Upper West Side is the most middle class part of Manhattan where I have lived.”

Now, given that Baldwin later goes on to state he’s lived between Central Park and the Hudson River for the last 25 years, I don’t really know what he’d be comparing it to, so instead let’s take his other claim, that “in terms of what I see, day to day, in Soho, TriBeCa, Upper East, Chelsea, the West or East Village, Flat Iron, the UWS is more middle class than any of those areas.” As I mentioned in the previous post, I’m going to give Baldwin the benefit of the doubt and extrapolate this to mean Manhattan including and below the Upper East and Upper West Sides.

There are six Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMAs) that make up this geography: 3805 (Upper East Side and Roosevelt Island), 3806 (Upper West Side), 3807 (West Side and Midtown between 14th and 59th) 3808 (East Side between 14th and 59th), 3809 (East Village, Lower East Side, part of Chinatown) and 3810 (The rest of Manhattan below 14th). And the Upper West Side, in terms of income, is smack dab in the middle of these – two PUMAs (3809 and 3807) have lower median incomes, two (3805 and 3810) have higher, and one (3807) is not different in a statistically significant way. Average per capita income and median family income are much the same, except that in each case there’s one PUMA that’s higher and two that aren’t different in a statistically significantly way. So I suppose, in the data set Baldwin’s using, the Upper West Side could be considered middle-class. After all, the median family income for the area is just $169,815 as opposed to the hoity-toity Upper East Side’s $180,289.

The Median Income for “212” – the island of Manhattan – is $79,522. For the United States it’s $62,363. For the Five Boroughs of New York it’s $55,562.

So is the Upper West Side the most middle class of the Manhattan neighborhoods Baldwin is referring to? Sure, insofar as it’s also the most suburban, and most Mormon, and most Senegalese of these neighborhoods.

At the heart of this whole thing though, is that it really seems like Baldwin somehow wants props for not living in Scarsdale or Greenwich or the Upper East Side, or maybe the 7th arrondissement, even though he could afford to - instead opting for the "middle-class" Upper West Side. OK. But he should realize that even if the Upper West Side were middle-class, this is still the equivalent of buying a Rolls-Royce to drive to work and then noting he's chosen to take the "middle-class" way to the office because hey, he could have flown there in a helicopter.

All income numbers are from five-year (2005-2009) American Community Survey Data.

Frames of Reference

2011-08-12T20:50:00.006-04:00

Over on the Huffington Post, Alec Baldwin attempts to make the argument that where he lives (The El Dorado, located between 90th and 91st on Central Park West) is in a middle-class neighborhood. In doing so he uses a lot of phrases like "appears to have" and "seems to me" and not of lot of actual evidence (to his credit, Baldwin does admit to not being "an expert in the field of the economic and social demographics of NYC").

I'll be examining some of his specific claims up close in the next post. But for now, I want to address his frame of reference. Two quotes are telling:

"While I have lived in the area from CPW to Riverside Drive and 96th Street to 72nd Street, the Upper West Side appears to have a more visible diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, diversity of income, and age than any other part of 212."

"...in terms of what I see, day to day, in Soho, TriBeCa, Upper East, Chelsea, the West or East Village, Flat Iron, the UWS is more middle class than any of those areas."

First off, what Baldwin "sees from day-to-day" is the much different from "212." I will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume a broader definition of what he means when he says "any of those areas:" namely Manhattan south of and including the Upper East and Upper West Sides. 1,040,938 people live in this area, which is two-thirds of the 1,577,385 people eligible for a 212 area code. I encourage you to visit the other third and see for yourself if it has more "visible diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, income, and age."

Second, and more importantly, if Alec Baldwin was considering a run for Manhattan Borough President, I would say his take on the "212" might be worth half a Huffington Post column. But Baldwin is not considering this office - according to the NY Times "Mr. Baldwin seemed focused on the mayor’s office but allowed the possibility that he would consider other positions. He is clearly aiming high, however, dismissing the idea of serving as a local judge or in the House of Representatives." Being the Mayor involves being elected by the 8,175,133 people who live in the 5 boroughs of New York City.

Would you vote for someone for mayor whose frame of New York City was limited to the Bronx north of the Cross Bronx Expressway (population 1,010,751)? Or the swath of Brooklyn from Bed-Stuy down to Canarsie (1,078,524)? Or Queens east of Flushing Meadows Park and the Van Wyck Expressway (929,404)? Could you imagine how the media would treat someone who said "...in terms of what I see, day to day, in Douglaston, Hollis, College Point, Flushing, Jamaica or Jamaica Estates, Rosedale, Bayside is more middle class than any of those areas?"

Or to put it another way, how about someone whose frame of New York City was limited to Non-Hispanic Asian and Pacific Islanders (1,030,914)? Or people who drive to work (1,049,396)? Or women over 55 (1,084,349)? Or kids in Brooklyn and the Bronx (1,021,836)? Or people making less than $25,000 (1,054,140 - wait a minute, I probably would vote for this person).

Baldwin is considering enrolling in a master’s program in politics and government. I think this is a great idea. I'd like to also suggest a parallel educational path for the next two years. Go get to know the places where the people whom you're asking to vote for you live.

All data is from the 2010 Census, except journey-to-work and income date, which is from the 2000 Census.

Walking from Heathrow

2011-08-11T11:28:00.002-04:00

Last month I flew to London, landed at Heathrow, and started walking. 19 miles and 8 hours later I reached the center of town. You can read about the walk over on Polis.

Afterward I met a bunch of weirdos and spent the night in a storm drain under Hyde Park, where I finished second in the first-ever Bazalgette pull-up challenge (photo by Luca Carenzo).

But that's another story for another time.

Tract 1237

2011-08-07T00:18:00.011-04:00

Following up from my last post, out of the 16,000 new white residents that have arrived in Bed-Stuy in last decade, which this NY Times article references, 4,569 (28.5%) - of them are concentrated in just one census tract: Brooklyn Tract 1237. 1237 is bounded by Taffe Place, Nostrand Avenue, Flushing Avenue, and Myrtle Avenue.

View Bed-Stuy and Tract 1237 in a larger map

Take a walk through this area. You will find a lot of new apartment buildings with scores of small balconies jutting out awkwardly. You will find a lot of signage written in a strange, but somewhat recognizable alphabet. You will find a lot of guys dressed in black suits, a lot women dressed in long skirts, and a lot of children running on the sidewalk. You will not find very many people like the Jazz musician Arthur Kell, or Lawyer and Coffehouse owner Tremaine Wright, or anyone else the Times references in the article.

The Times quotes four white residents who have moved to the city in the last decade, one black resident who they imply, but don't outright state, is a lifelong resident, three academics (one of whom is also a resident of the neighborhood who is black, although it doesn't say when he moved there), a local real estate agent, the Community Board chair, and the neighborhood Assemblyperson.

There are no quotes from longtime white residents, or new black arrivals, or any other type of resident. There is no mention of the quarter of the people in the neighborhood who are neither black nor white. While this could perhaps be forgiven, given that the article is specifically about the growth of the white population and the decline of the black population, there is not even a passing mention of the role the Hassidic Community played in this, much less an attempt to interview any about the changes in the neighborhood. When you only talk to certain people, it's not a surprise when you construct a certain narrative.

What's Really the Story?

2011-08-05T20:04:00.007-04:00

Two NY Times articles:

Under 18 population in NYC is becoming more white

Bed-Stuy is becoming more white

As I've written here before, I appreciate Sam Roberts and the NY Times' demographic coverage, which is much more intensive and in depth than you find in most other large papers. That being said they very, very often report with a strange set of blinders on.

First of all, the Times completely misses a gigantic factor in both these stories, which is the growth of the Hassidic population Brooklyn (and in Northern Bed-Stuy between Myrtle and Flushing as it specifically relates to the Bed-Stuy story), in favor of their general gentrification narrative.

But more importantly, the Times seems to think the story of the city is that of young, white people with disposable income and their varying migration patters, and the impact of these migration patters on the rest of the city (the flaws of which I wrote about here). While this is certainly A story, it is not THE story. It is not even a large story.

Check out the map showing white population change in the last decade. The areas where there is high growth of the white poplation are small and very specific parts of the city, limited to about half of Manhattan, a quarter of Brooklyn, the south shore of Staten Island, and a few other isolated census tracts. And many of these have nothing to do with the Hipster/Yuppie gentrification pattern - they're growth in the Hassidic, other religious Jewish, Eastern European, Central Asian or other populations that are pretty far from the MacLaren stroller-pushing couple or fixie-riding hipster that the Times seems to think are so important.

I would love the next story about Demographic change in the city to be about the growth of the South Asian community in Ozone Park and East New York, or the Korean population in Bayside, or the diversification of the North Shore of Staten Island or Jamaica Estates or Bensonhurst. Or just something other than this same old story.

Sometimes you have to look at the NY Times more like one of New York's ethnic newspapers - their ethnicity being, essentially, "Yuppie." Once you look at it like this, the biases in these types of stories become understandable and less frustrating. Still, if you're going to call yourself the "New York" Times, you should try to focus on the citizens of "New York," about 3/4 of whom live well beyond the geographic and social confines that the Times' demographic reporting has been limited to so far.

3/4

2011-07-26T14:30:00.001-04:00

A recent walk in Forest Hills Gardens took me over the three-quarter mark. 1668 out of 2217. Forest Hills Gardens is a really pleasant walk - heading by the West Side Tennis Club, which hosted the US Open until 1977. The main stadium has been abandoned for a while (and is the subject of preservation fights). It would be a great candidate for inclusion in the Open House New York weekend.

3/4 seems like a lot, but the reality is I've already collected all the low-hanging fruit. The hardest part of this project isn't walking the tracts - it's getting to the tracts. Most of the ones I have left are in Eastern Queens and Staten Island - areas that will take me an hour+ to get to on bicycle or public transportation.

Still, I'm confident I'll be done with the other three boroughs this summer or early fall. And then maybe I should move to Hollis next year.

Neighborhoods: Forest Hills, Forest Hills Gardens
Tracts Walked: Q717, Q709, Q711, Q713.02, Q725, Q727, Q729, Q731, Q733, Q735, Q757, Q769.01, Q769.02, Q771.

The Mysterious Case of the Ghost Zip Code

2011-07-07T02:53:00.004-04:00

In doing our walk from the lowest zip code in New York (10001 in Midtown) to the highest (11697 in the Rockaways), we came up against a problem – one member of the group had heard of an even lower Zip Code: 00083, which is Central Park. I had never heard of Central Park having its own Zip Code, and decided to look into if this a little deeper. Evidence is mostly negative. To note:

1) Looking up all Zip Codes for "New York, NY" on the United States Postal Service Zip Code Lookup doesn't return 00083.

2) Downloading the GIS shapefile for NY State Zip Codes clearly shows no separate Zip Code for Central Park, instead dividing it up amongst several different Upper East and Upper West Side Zip codes.

3) The NYC Parks Department Headquarters, which is actually within Park boundaries, does not use the 00083 zip code, instead having Zip Code 10065. Likewise, the NYPD Central Park Precinct uses 10024. Others places, like the Central Park Boathouse and Central Park Zoo don’t list zip codes at all.

4) Entering “00083” on Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Mapquest, or Weather.com yields nothing.

5) Googling “New York, NY 00083” yields 290 results, most of which are property listings through Real Estate Websites on Central Park West or South, which are obviously not correct. To contrast, Googling "New York, NY, 10001" yields about 28 million results.

The only mitigating evidence I can find in favor is that if you enter "00083" on OasisNYC it directs to Central Park (I don't know what base files Oasis is using for Zip Code data). To a lesser extent, there are also a few websites (myplayground.com, openwifinyc.com, citi-date.com) that list places in Central Park as having a "00083" zip code.

On the surface, it looks like there's nothing official about 00083 at all, but that it somehow has gained a toehold in the general public consciousness. If anyone wants to look into how Central Park got an Urban Legend Zip Code, it’d be an interesting story.

Men About Town

2011-07-01T14:33:00.006-04:00

http://www.sarahyager.com/nonfiction-at-yale/men-about-town/

Just found this piece featuring Shane Perez, Steve Duncan and me, which was written by Sarah Yager last year. I really like the article, and think it explains the motivations behind what we do quite well.

The last paragraph is great, and does a great job of capturing the feeling of being on top of a bridge. I especially like the sentence - "We stood far above New York, both removed from and intensely connected to it."

This paradoxical combination of connection and removal leads to an amazing feeling, and one that's very hard to find. It's this feeling that is at the heart of being on top of a bridge in New York City. It's this feeling that I'm chasing. It's this feeling that I miss.

Oops (Part II)

2011-06-15T18:22:00.003-04:00

Two caught climbing the Williamsburg Bridge

Again - good thing I'm retired.

First, for would be copycats - please take note that there is a specific law making this a Class A Misdemeanor punishable by up to a $1000 fine or a year in jail. That's not to say it's what you'll end up getting charged with, but it can be a potentially bigger deal than the simple criminal tresspass or reckless endangerment charge you might get for other benign tresspassing activities. And that's assuming there's not a terror alert on, in which case who knows what'll end up happening to you.

To me, the press response from the NYPD is most noteworthy because, as far as I know, this is the first time the Police Commissioner has described anyone as an "urban explorer." I can't really tell if this is a good thing or a bad thing yet, but it's interesting that the term "urban explorer" has entered the conciousness of mainstream society to this degree.

Anyway, it's not exactly a secret people climb this bridge from time to time. In fact those of us who keep track of these sort of things had noticed the DOT becoming slightly annoyed at this over the last little while. But like most minor illegal activities, the amount of times people have been caught doing this (twice in the last decade that have made the papers, maybe a few more that haven't) is miniscule compared to the amount of times people haven't been caught doing this.

But really there's no reason for all the stress - both on the part of people who want to climb the bridge, and the part of the NYPD and DOT who have to police it. The city should simply open up the top of the Williamsburg Bridge for tours. It's easily the easiest major bridge without an elevator to climb physically in New York City, as you just need to ascend a staircase and then climb a very short ladder to the maintenance room at the top (getting out onto the actual roof is somewhat trickier).

Doing a quick calculation I can tell you that the Sydney Harbour Bridge Climb grosses at least 50 million dollars (US) a year. Maybe a Williamsburg Bridge climb wouldn't be quite as popular (although a Brooklyn Bridge climb certainly would), but a demonstrated demand is certainly there. Forget about being an "urban explorer." As a New York City taxpayer, I have to ask: why the city isn't jumping at the chance to tap this revenue stream?

Numeric Extremes Walk, Part I

2011-06-14T10:59:00.003-04:00

This Sunday, June 19th, I’ll be leading a walk from the lowest zip code in the New York, 10001 in Midtown, to the highest, 11697 in the Rockaways. In doing so we’ll also walk the length of Flatbush Avenue, the second longest street in Brooklyn. We’ll end at the beach in Ft. Tilden Park, so bring your bathing suit. 15 miles. We should be done around 6, where the options will be eating, drinking, swimming, going home, exploring Ft. Tilden park (there's some cool stuff in there), or joining me in walking Queens Tract 916.01 through Breezy Point to the tip of the Rockaway Penisula.

Meet at 11:45 at the tip of Herald Square (the intersection of 34th, Broadway, and 6th Avenue).

I'll be doing at least one other "Numeric Extremes Walk" this summer, maybe more if I can think of them.

Meadowmere

2011-05-31T01:37:00.001-04:00

Leading a recent walk through Queens, we passed through Meadowmere, a tiny area of four streets nestled at the end of a long finger of land belonging to Queens which snakes around the East side of JFK airport. Take a quaint wooden footbridge over Hook Creek and you're in Meadowmere Park, Nassau County.

I told the group that this was the "most remote neighborhood in New York." But upon being challenged, I couldn't really substantiate the claim. It's not the furthest neighborhood from Columbus Circle, where New York's mile 0 is (that would be Tottenville). It's not the neighborhood furthest from any other in the five boroughs (that would be City Island). It's not the neighborhood furthest from public transportation (that would be Breezy Point, although it wasn't between 2008 and 2010 when it had Ferry service). It's not even the neighborhood with the worst city infrastructure - unlike this area, it finally got sewers and drainage a few years ago - although each household had to pay $5000-$10,000 for the privilege.

It is the neighborhood furthest from any other in the five boroughs that isn't an island. But that seems like a pretty big caveat. Still, the feeling of remoteness is greater than in any other area I've been to. If you find yourself there, grab dinner or drinks at the Bayhouse Restaurant (actually in nearby Warnerville), displaying it's proud "A" rating from the New York City Board of Health and Mental Hygiene, which proves it is indeed still in the five boroughs. If you've got a boat, you can kick it under the Crossbay Bridge and up the head of Jamaica Bay, and tie if up right on their patio.

Neighborhoods: Meadowmere
Tracts Walked: Q664

Book

2011-05-29T02:40:00.004-04:00

I have a deal with Tarcher (an imprint of Penguin), to write a book which will be out Fall of 2012. It's a travel memoir, mostly about me and this guy's urban exploration adventures around the world, but will have lots of other observations on cities and generally funny and interesting stories. A few of these, which will probably find their way into the book in greatly expanded form, can already be found by digging around this site but most can't. I have no good title yet - if you come up with something brilliant please let me know.

I have a good story to tell, and am pretty excited to be able to do it. But to use a baseball analogy, when it comes to the international urban adventure game I've always kind of thought of myself as a decent hitting backup utility infielder - just one that's lucky enough to play on the 1927 Yankees. I've been along on a great ride, and will give myself credit for managing a home run or two along the way, but really - you should check out some of the All Stars.

So anyway, in addition to actually writing the thing, my job now (or so I've been told) is to build a "platform." This is industry shorthand for "try to be as famous and popular as possible by the time the book comes out." Since we are currently living in the age of social media fascination, this means everyone is focused on twitter followers, facebook likes, and website hits. These three things are now taken almost as a sort of currency. Someday pretty soon someone is going to make a ton of money by offering a pay-service setting up fake Twitter accounts to follow you. Seriously - get 10,000 Twitter followers and apparently the world is yours.

As such, you'll notice there's now a Twitter feed on the righthand side of the blog. So follow me on Twitter! I truly, and sincerely, apologize to everyone for the preceding sentence.

It was suggested to me to do live Twitter updates from Urban Exploration sites. This will not be happening with anything too extralegal for obvious reasons. Still, I will try to make the feed as interesting as possible.

Second, be my friend on Facebook! I can't quite bring myself to do the "like me!" thing as opposed to a regular facebook page though. You'll just have to get my updates on local politics and obscure European soccer teams also (Viva Rayo! Congratulations on promotion to La Liga! Vallecas siempre!)

Third, I'll be blogging more here (RSS link on the right), mostly just about places and topics of interest to me. Sometimes that's getting to hidden or off-limits places by a variety of means, both in New York and wherever else I happen to be, but a lot of times it'll be about demographics or other urban planning topics. As an aside, you might have noticed that the "Stories" tab has been changed to "Explorations and Adventures." I figured that as this site is linked from a lot of Urban Exploration sites, I should probably make it easier for the people who come here to find that part of the site instead of a post about what the 2010 census says about the changes in Ozone Park or something.

One more housekeeping thing - if you are currently wondering "hey, am I going to be in this book?" and haven't heard from me, the answer is almost certainly "I'm not sure yet." If it looks like you will be, I'll be in touch.

Huge thanks to my agent Alyssa Reuben of Paradigm and my editor Sara Carder of Tarcher for believing in a first-time author with somewhat less than 10,000 Twitter followers.

Walk this Sunday

2011-05-26T10:51:00.001-04:00

If you're the walking type, come join me for a (pre) Memorial Day walk through Eastern Queens walk THIS SUNDAY, May 29th. It'll be 17 miles from Flushing to Far Rockaway. In honor of Memorial Day, we'll be passing a Veterans memorial from every war from the Civil through the Vietnam.

We'll also be visiting Meadowmere - the most remote neighborhood in New York City - and grabbing a burger at Hollis Famous, home of the Hip-Hop museum. And I, personally, will be getting in 22 Census Tracts I haven't been to yet.

Meet at 11:45 at the Northeast corner of Main Street and Roosevelt (by the Duane Reade). #7 Train to Main Street (end of the line).

If you live in the New York Area and are into long walks in general, join the "Hey, I'm Walking Here" Facebook Group.

Undercount

2011-05-25T01:42:00.001-04:00

Finally, a good article on the undercount that has some attempt at serious investigative journalism, instead of making up ridiculous headlines based on the probably misquoted conjectures of a City Councilwoman (may I suggest this shirt for Diana Reyna?).

It would be interesting to see if the undercount is more of a New York phenomenon - in which New York-centric things like illegal subdivisions would probably be the culprit - or if the undercount is consistent among cities with high immigration (and especially looking at similar immigration patterns as New York), which would point to immigrants becoming even more reluctant respond to the census in the wake of increased immigration enforcement since 2001.

The Times article itself also focuses on a third culprit though - mistaking occupied apartments for vacant ones. This one is kind of strange, and apart from the "possible processing glitch" explanation that Census provides (we'll see if that's it when the review is conducted next month) the only culprit I can come up with immediately would be simple laziness on the part of the Census' field staff.

Oh well

2011-05-15T18:40:00.007-04:00

My dream house was sold at auction today. It was Penthouse A in the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower - suggested retail price 3.75 million. This is the apartment with the abandoned observation decks that I wrote about here and here. My little fantasy was always to buy it and open the decks back up to the public. Unfortunately I did not win the lottery in time to throw a bid in there.

I hope whoever did buy it knows he or she got a small piece of history and one of the most interesting spaces in New York City, not just another overpriced downtown Brooklyn condo with a nice view.

UPDATE: Congrats to Olivia Tandon. From the Times article:

“I was very swayed by the terraces,” she said, which used to be private observation decks for the bank president and bear plaques retelling the history of the battle of Brooklyn. They were an important feature for her daughter, Olivia Tandon, a public school teacher for whom she is buying the apartment as an upgrade from a smaller apartment Ms. Tandon owns in the building.

This makes me happy. I hope she takes her students.

So it goes

2011-05-13T14:14:00.009-04:00

Claudio looks like he's going. From the NY Times:

Mr. Caponigro said the landlord, Hong Kai Lin Realty, told him that he could stay only if he agreed to a rent of $1,650, almost triple what he is now paying.

The 15-by-15-foot space, the landlord told him, might be turned into a takeout Chinese restaurant. Yat T. Man, a lawyer for the landlord, said his client was a “mom-and-pop landlord, not a Donald Trump,” and could not afford to keep Mr. Caponigro so far below the market rate.

Another victim of a flipped building and huge commercial rent increase. It's nobody's fault - this is New York City. Our strength and weakness has always been that our driving force is the chance to turn one dollar into two.

This barbershop has gotten a lot of press over the years - some for the old-schoolness of it, some for the supposed mob connections, some, as always, for the celebrities who've frequented it (J-Lo once filmed a video there). By far the best article on Claudio and the neighborhood is here.

I've been a faithful customer of Claudio's for a while now. And what I want people to know about him is that he is a great, great barber. He does all the little things. He'll trim your eyebrows, apply some combination of about 8 different tonics with names like "Eau de Portugal" at various times during the cut, and when he's done he'll have you looking like an extra on Mad Man. And the straight razor shave? I'd trust him to do it blindfolded with a razor dipped in arsenic.

Claudio is not a hustler. He charges 10 bucks for a haircut and 5 for a shave. Despite the press, the place is not really busy - usually one or two people are in there, and often there's no wait at all. One time when I was in the seat, and there was one other person waiting, someone came in and asked innocently "how long's it going to be?" "There's a barbershop around the corner" was Claudio's dismissive reply. You want a good haircut, no problem. You're more concerned about time, there's plenty of other options. I don't think the fact that he gave away 10 bucks even crossed his mind.

But like it or not, money eventually catches up with everyone in this town, even at 81 years of age. There might be place in New York City for someone who just wants to do their job well on their own terms, and make a modest but comfortable living doing it. But it's a place that ultimately exists on borrowed time. So it goes.

Claudio's is on 116th street and First Avenue. Drop by for cut this month, he'd be glad to see you.

Neighborhood: East Harlem
Tract Walked: M188

Oops

2011-05-09T10:15:00.006-04:00

Bit of a bad week to be a freelance urban transit enthusiast:

First this - http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23946092-terror-alert-at-77-tube-station-blamed-on-four-urban-explorers.do

Now this - http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/tunnel_punk_terror_scares_clfEzPGLRb3uHPN3pMj5HI

Good thing I'm retired.

First, for the layperson, a good explanation of the ridiculousness of the Post story is on the LTV blog.

Second, for others so inclined to do this stuff, what's to be taken from this is a very simple lesson. Do not ever get comfortable. It's illegal. It can be legitimately dangerous. People do "see something and say something," especially when things like Royal Weddings are taking place in two days or terrorist masterminds have just been killed. In almost every instance I know of when people have gotten hurt or arrested, there have been two main culprits - bad luck, and a sense of complacency. Just because something went smooth and easy once, doesn't mean it's going to go smooth and easy a second time. Just because you got a couple of people somewhere without a hitch, doesn't mean you can get 30 people there and throw a party.

I am, of course, about the last person who would say "don't do this stuff." Everyone makes their own choices and calculates their own risk-reward ratio. But there is no point in upping the "risk" part with no corresponding increase in the "reward" part. Drag racing at 120 miles an hour might be dumb, sure, but it can also be fun and exhilarating. But doing it without buckling your seatbelt is just dumb.

And, of course, in case you don't know what to do when you've been arrested, this is required watching - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik

The Census story you won't hear

2011-04-27T15:18:00.003-04:00

Most Census stories will be about how New York has changed – after all, headlines like "proportion of New Yorkers who are white declines by 1%" or “population of Queens stays the same!” aren't really much of a story. We look for the neighborhoods and demographic indicators that have changed, find the interesting stories, and write about those.

But the real interesting story – and something you won’t read about - is that from a demographic perspective, there is a very good argument that this is the single most stagnant decade in the history of New York City - at least dating back to 1790 when the decennial census was first conducted.

To start with, absolute population increase or decrease is the single greatest driver of change in the urban environment. At its core, a city is a physical structure designed to support human beings in their lives. As such, the number of human beings is 95% of what determines the physical structure of the city. From 2000 – 2010 the population of New York City grew (officially) by 2.1%.

From 1790 until 1930, there was not a single decade that New York did not go without at least a 15% increase in population – and often more like a 50% increase. Think of the change in the city over the eighty years from 1850 – 1930, when the population increased tenfold, and the change over the eighty years from 1930 –2010, a period in which the population has stayed more or less steady at between about 7 and 8 million people. If you took someone from today and put them in the New York City of 1930, they could catch a game at Yankee stadium, and then ride the IRT down to Grand Central Terminal, before walking across the 59th Street Bridge to Queens. If you took someone from the New York City of 1930 and put them in the New York City of 1850, they’d meander through a farm before swimming across the Harlem River, walking a couple hours down a dirt country road and then waiting for a ferry to take them to John Jacob Astor’s country estate.

So the period we’re looking at is the period from 1930 – 2010. Out of these 8 decades, we can dismiss two that also had significant population changes: 1970 – 1980 (population decline of 10.4%) and 1990 – 2000 (population increase of 9.4%). This leaves our rivals for “most stagnant decade” as the periods from 1930 – 1970 and 1980 – 1990.

Now, in addition to overall population, we have to look at where this population was concentrated. Population shifts create areas of growth and decline, which means areas of development and abandonment. Manhattan has changed incredibly since the 1890s even though the overall population is roughly the same as it is now. This is because in the Manhattan of the 1890s almost all of the population and industry was concentrated in the southernmost quarter of the Island. That area has decongested, while the rest of the borough has experienced exponential growth.

In 2010, New York City has almost exactly the same distribution of population as it had in 2000. Each borough retained roughly the same proportion of the overall population - the largest change was Queens, which went from having 27.8% of the population to having 27.3%. The largest population growth was in Staten Island, which grew by 5.6%. In absolute terms, the largest growth was in the Bronx, which grew by about 52,000 people (but is still about 86,000 people short of its peak population in 1970).

Contrast this to the period from 1950 – 1960, a period of only a slight (1.4%) overall population decline, but which had a huge population shift from Manhattan, which declined by 261,000, to Queens, which increased by 258,000 people. Or the period from 1930-1940, period of relatively modest (7.4%) overall growth, but heavy growth in the Bronx and Brooklyn, which each increased by about 10%, and explosive growth in Queens, which saw a 20.2% population increase.

So this leaves us four decades: the 1940s, the 1960s, the 1980s, and the 2000s. We’ll take a closer look at these next post.

The Struggle for P.S. 84

2011-04-13T20:10:00.001-04:00

I've often written here about the tendency of the press - and New Yorkers in general - to greatly overestimate the impact of "gentrification" on the demographics of New York. But one neighborhood where this isn't the case (and one that I'm intimately familiar with) is South Williamsburg. Check out Capital New York's ace reporter Greg Hanlon's article on its impact on the local school. And it mentions Census Tracts!

3 Census stories to view with a critical eye

2011-04-04T12:48:00.011-04:00

In case you haven't heard, the 2010 Census data for NYC has been released, and DCP is letting you satisfy your census jones here . As always, big props to Joe Salvo and the true pros at the DCP Population Division for a super-quick turnaround. Perusing the data, I'm getting a good idea of stories that are going to come out of this. The big one is the undercount of course, which has dominated the initial reaction. Here are three others that are likely to come (or that have come already), how they'll be spun, and what you should know about them that might not be told.

"The black population has declined for the first time since the Civil War."

The spin: This will probably be presented in a gentrification narrative: white people moving into Harlem and parts of Brooklyn, displacing older black residents, or might be presented with a "black people are moving back to the south" angle.

What you need to know. The African-American population - by which I mean black people generally with roots in the Southern States of the US who came to New York during the great migration - has been declining in New York for 30 years. The reason the black population has grown slightly during this time is because of the influx of Afro-Caribbean immigrants, and (to a much lesser extent), African immigrants. The reason for the overall population decline in the black community has a lot to do with the decrease in immigration (and undercount) in the Afro-Caribbean community and the increasing suburbanization of the community.

"The white population of Brooklyn has increased for the first time since WWII."

The spin: Again, this will probably be presented as a gentrification narrative: educated, working-age white people from Manhattan or other areas of the United States moving to Brooklyn.

What you need to know: While this population has certainly increased, most of the increase is due to the Hassidic community. Not only do they have much higher birthrates than average, they also do not follow the normal pattern of leaving for the suburbs. This is easy to see - the greatest increase in the white population is in Borough Park and the Census Tracts around Flushing Avenue, both of which are heavily Hassidic areas. In addition, the growth in the under-18 population (6.8%) is much higher than the growth in the over-18 population (3.9%). That points to less MFAs in Prospect Heights and more Yeshiva students in Williamsburg. Immigration in southern Brooklyn from the former Soviet Union is also a factor, but less this decade than in previous decades.

"The Asian population tops a million for the first time."

The spin: In percentage terms, the Asian population has had by far the largest increase (over 30%) of any race or ethnic group in the last decade. This will probably be presented as a "milestone" with stories about the history of Asians in New York, or Asian cultural influence in the city, most likely focusing on the Chinese population.

What you need to know: While the growth of the Asian population is a significant point of interest, the real story is in the changing nature of the Asian population. In 2000, almost half (45.9%) of Asians in New York were Chinese (including Taiwanese), with Asian Indians (21.7%), Koreans (11%) and Filipinos (7%) the only other groups with more than 50,000 residents*. For 2010 the detailed Asian subgroup category hasn't been released yet, but when it is watch for a huge increase in the South Asian population, most significantly Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans, and a decline (in percentage if not absolute terms) of the Chinese and Korean populations.

But these three things are all subtopics of the story of the Census. There's one big story that I'm almost sure will go unreported - but that's for the next post.

*edit: I should probably also point out that many, and perhaps even a majority of the people in the "Asian Indian" category are Guyanese or Trinidadians of Indian decent.

Data Source: You can download the race and ethnicity data for New York City (as well as for other American cities) for the period of 1790 - 1990 here. Spreadsheets are by State, with historic race and ethnicity data for the individual cities contains within. You can download race and ethnicity data for New York City from 1990 - 2010 from the NYC Department of City Planning website here.

Parisian Catacombs

2011-03-25T15:05:00.003-04:00

Just got back from a lovely weekend in the Catacombs of Paris. A lot of people have asked me about visiting them, so I figured I should write up a quick FAQ for people who want to go check them out. It's over on the travel blog here.

Is City Hall Worth $18.91?

2011-03-18T12:46:00.000-04:00

New York is a new city, relatively speaking. In cities like Rome, Naples, and Paris the underground world is enormous - centuries (if not millennia) old quarries, ossuaries, and aqueducts catacomb huge sections of the underground. Archaeologists and underground societies spend years documenting these abandoned worlds, and are constantly discovering new offshoots and networks.

The underground world in the cities of the western hemisphere is mostly very different. There are a few unused nooks and crannies underneath New York, but for the most part anything underground is going to be part of the currently-in-use infrastructure of the city. Somewhere in between these two worlds lie the abandoned and never-used stations of the New York City subway system.

The most famous of these is the gorgeous City Hall station, built in 1904 and abandoned a little over 41 years later. This is also the easiest abandoned station to see - simply stay on the #6 train after the last stop downtown, and the train will loop through the station. If you actually want to set foot in the station, they open it up sporadically (I got to go during the 100th anniversary of the subway in October of 2004), and the transit museum gives tours a few times a year as well.

The other abandoned stations are different. Unless you're considering a career as a track worker, the easiest way to see those is simply to step off the edge of the platform and walk.

I could say I do or don't recommend the hobby of walking subway tracks, but it really would make no difference. It's like B.A.S.E. jumping, or apotemnophilia, or preaching on a street corner. Very few people feel the need to do it; those that don't aren't going to start, and those that do aren't going to swayed by someone pointing out why they shouldn't. Still, I will list some quick pros and cons.

Pros are in pretty short supply. In fact, unless you're the kind of person that's really into graffiti, graffiti history, urban infrastructure, and/or going places most people don't get to see, there really aren't any. The only one I can think of is the chance to experience a particular urban juxtaposition that I find really interesting - walking subway tracks and riding over them in a train are two almost opposite experiences in almost the exact same point in space. Riding is bright, crowded, noisy, and (relatively) clean. You're probably fairly relaxed. Walking is dark, solitary, quiet, and absolutely filthy. And you're probably very, very far from relaxed.

Now I do know people that have been walking subway tracks for decades and are as comfortable down there as they are in their own bedroom. Not me though. I've walked tracks on seven different subway systems on three continents, and I get the same slightly nauseated feeling of nervousness, the same adrenaline-fueled alertness, every time. I welcome it. In my book, subway tracks are no place to get comfortable.

Cons, as you might imagine, are much more prevalent. First and foremost, there is a very real danger of dying. It's not that large, but it's definitely there. People - sometimes experienced people, and sometimes even professionals - have touched the third rail or gotten hit by a train while walking tracks, both of which result in a very large dose of instant death. Other cons include the fact that you might get caught (generally not so bad unless you have graffiti paraphernalia on you), and the aforementioned dirt and darkness.

Still, these cons haven't kept me from visiting most of the abandoned stations and platforms that dot the tunnels of the New York City subway system. Generally these visits are fairly chill affairs - time the trains, make sure nobody's looking at you on the platform, and off you go. One time, however, was different.

It was a while ago, when I was fairly inexperienced and still didn't quite know what I was doing. Our goal was one of the abandoned IRT stations in Manhattan. It started out pretty well - a train passed and we were off. We stuck close to the wall, on the opposite side of the tracks from the third rail, walking at a brisk but controlled pace. But before we reached the platform another train passed coming the opposite way. There was nowhere easy to hide and we hit the abandoned station in a panic, sure we had been seen and reported.

I wanted to go back to the local station, which is where we came from, but as we were closer to the express station my companion thought it better to try to get out there. Big mistake. There was a reason we had used the local station instead of the express - express stations are really busy, and as we approached it seemed certain we’d be seen coming out of the tunnel. We ended up hiding in a little nook between the express tracks, about 100 feet from the station, contemplating our next move.

We didn't get to contemplate for long - flashlights were coming our way from the station. “Run!” my companion said. This was a lot different from the careful excursion coming in. The “brisk but controlled” pace went out the window. We booked it down the tracks, constantly hopping the third rail while having to dodge the other trains that came along.

We got back to the local station and jumped back up on the platform. One guy dressed in civilian clothes was staring right at us as we exited. We were sure he was an undercover cop. But we couldn't very well head back onto the tracks, so we did the only other thing we could - pretended like we belonged there, and walked confidently toward him.

Still, I was sweating bullets as we came up to the guy, ready to have him whip out a pair of handcuffs at any moment. But as we came closer we noticed he was dressed pretty shabbily, even for an undercover cop - it was obviously just a guy hoping to bed down for the night in an out-of-the-way corner on a not-so-busy platform. “Oh thank God man,” he said, as we passed him, “I was sure you guys were cops.” We gave him a quick smile and got the hell out of there.

Photos by Steve Duncan
More about the abandoned subway station of New York City can be found here

Why?

2011-02-28T16:21:00.004-05:00

Every once in a while I get the "why do you do this?" question which I usually answer with some semi-coherent rambling about the necessity for a city planner to have unmitigated experiences with the urban infrastructure, and the forgotten beauty that lies right beneath our everyday lives, and so on and so forth. Luckily, there are others out there who can answer this question with much more eloquence than I. Check one of them out - a colleague from across the pond - here.

Read the interview and you'll see that eventually he lets you in on a little secret. We all have our varying justifications for our nutty hobby, be they academic, artistic, or something else. But none of us would do this if it wasn't really, really fun.

Queens Tribune Article

2011-02-23T10:37:00.006-05:00

Short article about me by Nathan Tempey of the Queens Tribune. As an added bonus, included is this picture of me looking seriously bootylicious.

Damn.

The stroll itself was nice - walking all of the New York Connecting Rail Road (and other freight tracks) is a loose goal of mine, and I was happy to get in a mile or so of that. Other highlights included an Albanian Mosque in Glendale, a nice view from a rickety old bridge over the railroad tracks, which you can see in the article also. Drawbacks included a 25-degree drop in temperature from the day before, and learning the M-train at Fresh Pond Road was out of service.

Neighborhoods: East Williamsburg, Middle Village, Maspeth, Glendale
Tracts Walked: B483, B455, Q535, Q595, Q603, Q607, Q633.01, Q623, Q625, Q627

Are there really "not enough men to go around?"

2011-02-13T18:03:00.002-05:00

Reading this piece by Patricia Park in the Times on Friday was an echo of a familiar refrain often heard from women about dating in New York: that the problem is simply in the numbers - there's just “not enough men to go around.” Ms. Park seemingly confirms this axiom by noting that women who are single, divorced or widowed in Greater New York outnumber the same men by more than 700,000.

However, what Ms. Park doesn't note is that this discrepancy is entirely a function of the fact that, on average, women live longer than men. If you look only at the single, divorced and widowed aged 18 - 49, there are actually 96,105 more men than women. This shouldn't be a surprise - Greater New York is a heavily immigrant area, and immigrants demographically skew toward working-age males.

Now, given, this is heavily imperfect information - "never married, divorced, or widowed" hardly transfers directly into "wants a relationship with someone of a different gender," but it's what we've got to work with. And it’s enough to deduce that for women, that there “simply aren’t enough men to go around” only really holds true if you're over 50.

So what accounts for this perception that there are not enough available men in New York? The answer is simple - due to the diversity and size of New York, criteria that we tend to think of as incredibly baseline - age, health, geography, language - actually narrow the pool of potential partners considerably. For instance, it seems hardly necessary to say that you expect your partner to fluently speak the same language as you. But if you’re a monolingual English speaker you’ve just eliminated almost a quarter of the people in the five boroughs. In short, we’re not considering “singles” - we’re really considering singles in or near our particular social grouping. We hardly expect a Uzbeckistani widow from Rego Park to date the quarterback for the Spotswood, NJ High School football team. Yet both are singles in the Greater New York Area.

And some of these subsets do have heavy gender skews - mainly due to different countries sending different types of immigrants to New York. Maybe the subset of "attractive, smart and succesful" folks that Ms. Park cites has a gender skew also, although there's not really a way to measure it.

And, of course, the reason you can't measure this is because standards of "attractive, smart and succesful" are incredibly subjective and relative terms. And if you find that you can't get a date, well, maybe consider either trying to expand your social circle or reconsidering some of these criteria instead of claiming there's "not enough men to go around."

Two NSFW Links

2011-02-08T15:27:00.006-05:00

Today, check out Shane Perez' photo series "Industrial Nudes" on the Huffington Post.

And tomorrow, check out the UE Kingz You Tube channel for the new video. As always with UE Kingz: WATCH AT YOUR OWN RISK.

The Future of Ethnic Neighborhoods

2011-01-24T19:30:00.001-05:00

A pretty good article about recent Demographic trends from the NY Times. Again, it's important to note that this is not a snapshot of the city today, or even in 2010. This is survey data from 2005 - 2009, and has a sometimes very significant margin of error.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/23/nyregion/20110123-nyc-ethnic-neighborhoods-map.html?ref=nyregion

One passage in the article that is very important, and kind of gets glossed over, is the following: American Community Survey data released last month revealed a striking metamorphosis during the last decade. Traditional ethnic enclaves sprawled amoeba-like into adjacent communities.

This, in my opinion, is going to be the future of New York. We are very, very used to thinking of neighborhoods in ethnic terms - Bensonhurst is Italian, Bed-Stuy is African-American, Washington Heights is Dominican, and so on. We are also very used to thinking of ethnic change as neighborhood-based and total: Ozone Park was Italian, then became South Asian; Riverdale was Irish, then became Jewish; the Lower East Side was Jewish, then became Puerto Rican, then becamse hipster/yuppie. This process can be short (East New York turned over from Jewish to African-American in about 2 years), or long (the turnover of the West and South Village from Italian to Yuppie took almost half a century), but it always ends the same - one group moves in, displacing the other.

But the future may hold something different. Instead of smaller, more solid ethnic neighborhoods, I think we'll be seeing larger, less solid, ethnic neighborhoods overlapping each other. And instead of one group slowly or quickly replacing another, I think we'll see a few different groups achieve a balance throughout a neighborhood.

The hows and whys of this theory, in my opinion, are really interesting but need to be backed up with some migration data that I haven't dug into yet. We'll see if me or the Times gets to this first

Progress Update

2011-01-24T15:32:00.003-05:00

Updated maps for Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn are on the right - I didn't make any new progress in Manhattan or Staten Island over the fall.

I didn't quite reach my goals for 2010 which were to be 99% done with Brooklyn and the Bronx, and 50% done with Queens. I did scrape out Queens with a bitterly cold walk through 7 tracts in Jamaica one evening before catching the Airtrain to JFK. I came pretty close in Brooklyn, and one or two solid treks through Southeast Brooklyn plus a few odd tracts should wrap that up soon. But I was shameful in the Bronx, not even managing to cover 2/3 of the borough.

The reality is that with good planning and patience with public transportation, this project is actually not that much walking. If I really made this a priority I could probably finish up in 2 months. As it is though, I think fall of this year is a realistic ending point I'm going to shoot for.

Brooklyn Map - January 2011

2011-01-24T15:26:00.000-05:00

Queens Map - January 2011

2011-01-24T15:25:00.001-05:00

Bronx Map - January 2011

2011-01-24T15:22:00.001-05:00

Redesign

2011-01-08T12:42:00.003-05:00

I'm currently taking down my 1998-esque main site and transferring everything over to the two blogs (NYC blog and Travel blog). All the old pages will eventually end up here, although it might take a bit.

It's starting....

2010-12-15T14:27:00.005-05:00

Released yesterday was the 2005-2009 American Community Survey Data. Why is this important? Because this 5-year sample data allows us to access Census-Tract Level data for the first time since 2000. Instead of being limited to Public-Use-Microdata-Areas (PUMAS), which are more or less the size of a Community Board, and generally have over 100,000 residents, we can now access information for Census Tracts - areas as small as a few square city blocks, with populations of only a few thousand people.

The NY Times has already started with a series of maps focusing (somewhat predictably) on race and Hispanic ethnicity. What's a bit strange about this is that 2010 Census Data - which includes race information - is due to be released starting in February. This will be much more up-to-date, with 100% data from 2010 as opposed to sample data (with a margain of error) from 2005-2009. In the meantime, there's a wealth of new information on income, housing, immigration, language, ancestry, and geographic mobility available for micro-demographic analysis that won't be in the 2010 Census release. Go check it out - I know I am. I hope the Times is also.

Guardian UK Article

2010-11-16T08:39:00.003-05:00

Short article about Steve Duncan and me in the Guardian UK yesterday:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/nov/14/exploring-with-recreational-trespassers

None of this Matters

2010-10-28T13:04:00.023-04:00

There's a bar you like. It’s in a bit of a strange neighborhood - obscure, not home to many people, not like anywhere else in town, but yet instantly recognizable as part of New York City.

The bar shouldn’t really be there. It’s not zoned right, for one thing. You’re pretty sure it doesn’t have a liquor license. But it’s out of the way, and it certainly doesn’t advertise itself, so it's left alone. The bar isn’t frequented very often – in fact, it could easily be taken for completely defunct - and when it is it’s almost always by the neighborhood denizens. You aren’t one of the old guys at the bar who’s been in the neighborhood for decades. You don’t even really drop by very much anymore. But your face is known. You’re comfortable there. It’s your place.

One day you hit the bar, but it’s not really your bar anymore. For starters there’s been quite a change in the décor. A different crowd starts visiting. It becomes much more than a quiet place to enjoy a smoke with your whiskey. It’s new, interesting, ambitious, a place that’s a destination for people who would never have otherwise thought to even take a walk through this neighborhood, much less stumble into a strange bar on the corner. It’s still not zoned right, with no liquor license, but now you’re not so sure it would be left alone. There’s a big difference between a few people quietly going about their business, and this.

It’s a bit of a shock for the neighborhood – a neighborhood that doesn’t experience a lot of attention, much less transformation. Relationships are formed, rekindled, strained, broken. Rumors go around, and around, and around until you start to feel like Jack Nicholson at the end of Chinatown. You wonder how long this can possibly continue unnoticed. One mistake by one person, and it will all be over.

But luckily, the architects of this transformation understand something important. Everything has a context. Everywhere – no matter how seemingly unused, forgotten, or out-of-the-way – means something to somebody in this town. Which means that, for better or worse, everyone who knows about the shabby bar in the strange neighborhood is, in some way, part of this also.

It's tricky. Like all neighborhoods in New York, and all cultures, this one has its particular unspoken traditions and sensibilities. There’s certain ways of coming and going, of talking – or not talking - of decorating the yards and painting the houses. People who are admired in other neighborhoods can elicit contempt in this one. Gestures that are meant respectfully, even reverentially, can be taken as the crassest breaches of etiquette. Some of these customs are silly, others are understandable, even vital. Many are simply leftover practices from an older era. Some people care about them, some don’t, some don’t even really know they exist. You certainly don’t know all the inns and outs, but you know enough.

But somehow it works. The newcomers continue, vision uncompromised, while the locals stay and add their touches if they feel the itch. The taciturn regular at the bar, the rowdy kids who come every Tuesday to play pool, even some old timers who haven't been around in decades all leave their mark. In the end, it's certainly not your shabby old bar anymore, but it's not foreign to the neighborhood. It's something totally new, yet somehow still fits perfectly into the context that came before it. And it's magnificent.

Then one day an article comes out about this transformation. And a website. And you wonder what will happen to your old haunt now. You have ideas, but you don’t really know. And it doesn’t much matter to you anyway. It doesn’t much matter to any of the locals. There’s another bar right around the corner. In fact, the neighborhood is filled with them.

Tracts Walked: Q1622

Conflux Panel

2010-10-19T12:54:00.003-04:00

Lots of fun at the Conflux Festival - a really great group of people coming together, some of whom I'd been wanting to meet for a while. I got to be on a panel with Steve Duncan, Julia Solis, and Miru Kim, which you can check out here - be warned it's 2 hours and the sound isn't so great.

City Line

2010-10-09T21:00:00.004-04:00

When the 2010 Census information comes out there's going to be a lot of interesting stories, one of which is the growth of the South Asian community in Ozone Park, which has been spilling over the border into Brooklyn lately. As I've written before, the land border between Brooklyn and Queens is growing increasingly irrelevant. A few blocks into East New York and you'll still see statues of Ganesha, red and yellow flags, and saris in the windows of the clothing shops on Liberty Avenue. In 2000, the neighborhood was about 15% Asian, and I'm sure that's at least doubled in the last decade.

There's a lot of linguistic, religious, ethnic diversity among the South Asian community in Ozone Park/Richmond Hill (although only some of which you can determine from the census), with small pockets of different communities. From what I can tell form the 2000 census and my walk, the community in City Line is mostly Hindu and Indo-Caribbean.

Neighborhoods: City Line, East New York
Tracts Walked: B1182.01, B1182.02, B1184, B1186, B1188, B1202

Panel this Sunday

2010-10-05T11:28:00.008-04:00

This Sunday from 12:00- 2:00 I'll be part of a "Long Table" panel with fellow international urban adventurers Steve Duncan, Julia Solis, and Miru Kim about how to have interesting travels around the world and usually not get arrested. Expect pretty pictures of tunnels, funny stories about Europeans, and heavy use of the word "catacomb." The panel is part of the Conflux Festival this weekend, where five dollars (three for students) gets you an all-day pass to not only hang out with us, but also attend the other panels and performances during the day featuring such cool folks as musician Mike Rugnetta and artist and international playboy Jason Eppink.

Conflux HQ (and the location of our panel) is NYU's Barney Building - 34 Stuyvesant Street in the East Village (below). Other events are taking place during the weekend throughout the East Village.

View Larger Map

Steve is also giving the keynote speech for the Conflux Festival Friday night, which will be a great presentation - get your tickets here.

Three State Walk - September 25th

2010-09-20T13:44:00.003-04:00

	Haven't you always wanted to walk in three states in one day? September 25th, in conjunction with the good folks from "Hey, I'm Walkin' Here" I'll be leading a walk that does just that. Starting at 177th and Ft. Washington (A train to Ft. Washington - exit near the front of the train), at 8:30 sharp,we'll walk over the GW Bridge to Ft. Lee, NJ, head back across and over to the Bronx, walk through the North Bronx to the historic Boston Post Road, and then follow the Boston Post Road all the way through Westchester to Connecticut. We'll have dinner, and then head back to NYC on Metro North, which will cost you $7.50. The total distance is 24 miles, and you can see the route here - it should take about 10 hours. http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=112808008162323007607.00048e96f299c205afa6c&t=h&z=11 I know the starting time is brutal, but I want to finish before dark. Amazingly, the A train has no major service changes this weekend, however the #1 train is suspended so if you were planning on taking that, switch your plans to the A.

Haven't you always wanted to walk in three states in one day? September 25th, in conjunction with the good folks from "Hey, I'm Walkin' Here" I'll be leading a walk that does just that.

Starting at 177th and Ft. Washington (A train to Ft. Washington - exit near the front of the train), at 8:30 sharp,we'll walk over the GW Bridge to Ft. Lee, NJ, head back across and over to the Bronx, walk through the North Bronx to the historic Boston Post Road, and then follow the Boston Post Road all the way through Westchester to Connecticut. We'll have dinner, and then head back to NYC on Metro North, which will cost you $7.50.

The total distance is 24 miles, and you can see the route here - it should take about 10 hours.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=112808008162323007607.00048e96f299c205afa6c&t=h&z=11

I know the starting time is brutal, but I want to finish before dark. Amazingly, the A train has no major service changes this weekend, however the #1 train is suspended so if you were planning on taking that, switch your plans to the A.

Kew Gardens

2010-09-15T10:53:00.005-04:00

Most walks through the boroughs of New York are fairly boring, but also fairly pleasant. This best describes yesterday's quick stroll through north Richmond Hill and Kew Gardens, an upper-middle class Queens neighborhood marked by tree lined streets, older single family homes, a synagogue or two, and chirping crickets at twilight - which seemed a bit out of place a block away from the elevated train. A quaint little commercial area on Lefferts Avenue, and the worst (non-$1.00) pizza I've ever had on Jamaica Blvd were the only two real encounters of note. One thing that should have tipped me off about the pizza place was that instead of having the cheese in the regular glass jar, they just stuck out a green plastic container of Kraft Parmesan.

Now, I'm sure if I were looking or had researched the area a bit beforehand I would have found a quirky thing or two, but that kind of defeats my goal of getting an overall general knowledge of the entire city. Calm and static areas are as much a part of New York as Bleecker Street on a Friday night. Heading out to an otherwise nondescript area for the sole purpose of seeing the one interesting thing there isn't a bad thing, but it's another project for another day.

For people visiting the area, try to get off of Queens Boulevard, which is like hiking through the Grand Canyon and thinking you've seen Arizona.

Neighborhoods: Kew Gardens, Richmond Hill
Tracts Walked: Q128, Q130, Q132, Q135, Q136, Q140, Q142.01, Q773, Q775

Highland Park

2010-09-13T20:57:00.010-04:00

A recent walk through East Brooklyn saw me pass the 2/3 mark of Census Tracts walked. The specific one that took me over the mark was Brookyn Tract 1142.01 - which along with its sister (Tract 1142.02) make up a lovely hillside area nestled up in an out-of-the-way corner of the Borough between Jamaica Avenue, Highland Park, and the Jackie Robinson Expressway. Hillside neighborhoods are in short supply in Brooklyn, but while the almost San Francisco-like steepness initially piqued my interest it also turned out to be a great walk in general, full of old homes of various architectural styles, unexpected views, and of course kids taking advantage of the inclined streets on various wheeled devices. Much of East New York, and East Brooklyn in general, tends to get painted with the same brush in the media. People who can name a dozen distinct neighborhoods and their characteristics in West Brooklyn don't know any two blocks are different from Utica Avenue to the City Line. This area - along with many others - serves as a reminder that East Brooklyn contains the same diversity of architecture, geography, and community as the other parts of the borough.

With most areas, I'm content to walk through them, take in the area, and check the tracts off the map. When it comes to revisiting - well, I'll see them if I see them. I've always had the goal of having a broad knowledge of the city, not a deep knowledge - I'm happier to know 10 neighborhoods a little bit rather than one neighborhood well. While there's certainly many neighborhoods that I do know well, it's generally more by circumstance than design.

Once in a while though, a tract or two will capture my imagination, and I'll put it on my list to revisit. I'll definitely be returning to that neighborhood up the hill.

For an in-depth look at Highland Park, see Brian Berger's guest page on the neighborhood at Forgotten-NY

Neighborhoods: Highland Park, Cypress Hills, East New York
Tracts Walked: B1142.01, B1142.02

Progress Update

2010-08-23T20:14:00.006-04:00

New Maps on the right. I've done 268 tracts so far this year - most in Brooklyn and Queens - or about 12% of the city. I still have quite a ways to go if I'm going to finish Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Manhattan and do half of Queens by the end of walking season (otherwise known as Daylight Savings Time).

I've actually decided to aim for being 99% done with Brooklyn and the Bronx as I might not get to the few tracts, such as Riker's Island and the Ft. Hamilton Military Base, that I can't just waltz into, or the few others, like the Dyker Beach Golf Course or the Brooklyn Navy Yard, that are probably going to take half a day and some advance planning.

The 3 I've got left in upper Manhattan are just a matter of a ride on the 2/3 and 20 minutes of walking. I've got 43 tracts to go before I'm done with half of Queens, and that should only take me a day or two. The 118 in Brooklyn before I'm 99% done is a bit trickier, as there's no real large chunks of 20+ contiguous tracts I've got left - everything is now a few tracts here, a few tracts there, which means I'm going to need to do a lot of small trips. Still, since I live pretty much in the middle of the borough, it won't be too hard to do these smaller trips over nights and evenings. It's really the Bronx, with it's 158 tracts left before I'm 99% done, that is going to be tough to finish by the first weekend in November.

Staten Island still gets no love - I haven't done any more walking there this season, and am probably going to procrastinate on it until I'm done with the rest of the City.

Riverside Park Tunnel - 2010

2010-08-16T17:47:00.008-04:00

As I've mentioned previously, I'll head into the Amtrak Tunnel underneath Riverside Park once or twice a year, just to see what's changed. And this year things have indeed changed, and unfortunately not for the better.

Third of May Mural, 2009.

Photo from http://citynoise.org/article/8210

Third of May Mural, 2010.

Photo by Logan Hicks

Sometime in the last year or two a hole has eroded in the top of the tunnel directly over the mural, leading to the water damage you can see accumulating. I'd imagine the entire middle portion is washed away by now. Sad, but not too sad - an 18-year run (in a medium where 18 days is sometimes considered a long time), a mention in Wikipedia and a former bestselling book, and status as perhaps the most famous piece of unsanctioned art in New York City isn't too bad for what was originally conceived of as an ephemeral piece in an abandoned train tunnel.

The second change is that there are a lot less people living in the tunnel. Rumor (which is really all there is to go on) is that there was an accident not too long ago where one of the residents got hit by a train, leading to Amtrak doing a no-nonsense sweep of the people living in the tunnel.

Still, less residents doesn't mean less people. As I've also mentioned before, this is probably the most trafficked "off-limits" place in New York City. I've gone twice so far this year - and I'm far from the only one. The total count of people I've run into down there over my last two trips (one in January, one in April) is - I kid you not - 22. That's not even counting the people I went with or the people who live there.

First time I went this year was during the winter - probably the coldest day of the year. Immediately upon entry we encounter 6 teenagers, with their own group they call Urban Odysseys. Their attitude is pretty endearing - it reminds me of being young and following rumor and mystery for adventure.

Halfway down the tunnel the kids head into the upper area where people live and start taking pictures without announcing themselves. Brooklyn (a lady who's been there forever) yells at them and they book it out of there. I apologize and smooth things over. Brooklyn introduces herself, tells the kids just to announce themselves next time, and proudly states that she's been in "mad documentaries" (which she has - you can see her both in "Dark Days" and the more recent "Tunnel Dwellers of New York"). I find it hilarious that the most famous person I've run into so far in 2010 lives in a train tunnel.

Three-Quarters of the way down we see flashlights, which turns out to be a couple of other guys who pass by without saying anything. Then coming out we run into 4 graffiti kids hanging out on the lawn over the entrance. They tell me they went in the tunnel but thought we were VS (Vandal Squad) and bailed. If there was VS in there - man, they must have done something bad to get stuck hanging out in a train tunnel during the coldest day of the year.

The second time in April we ran into 4 people about halfway down. After a short conversation, I realized that I had actually run into one of the people I was talking with in this very same tunnel about a year ago. Continuing on, we passed another couple of people, and then exiting we walked by a group of four. At first I thought them rude when they ignored our greetings, until I realized that they were very obviously foreign tourists who didn't speak English. Not really that surprising - after all this in a town where Europeans still come, sneak in the subway tunnels, and graffiti whole subway trains. A few curious urbanists from abroad is pretty standard.

Neighborhoods: Upper West Side, Morningside Heights, West Harlem.
Tracts Walked: M315

Tremont Ave

2010-08-15T11:05:00.006-04:00

The Bronx generally doesn't get a lot of love among the lots of the folks that like to walk around town, which is a shame - the borough more than holds its own in terms of history, architecture, and just general interesting stuff to see.

Four others and I walked the 7-mile length of Tremont Ave this Saturday, the longest street in the Bronx. It's actually slightly debatable as to whether or not it's actually the longest street. Bruckner Blvd (which runs underneath the length of the Bruckner Expressway) is a bit longer, although it's split into two parts, with a half-mile gap over Westchester Creek that's only transversed by the Expressway. In addition, if you separate West Tremont from East Tremont (which are one contiguous street, similar to say, East 14th and West 14th in Manhattan), East Tremont (by far the longer) also loses its "Longest Street" status to Boston Road.

Regardless of the technicalities it's still a great walk, and offers a wonderful overview of the borough. I highly recommend it as a starting point for anyone who wants to get to know the Bronx. Starting at Roberto Clemente Park by the water, is goes for one block before turning into one the West Bronx's ubiquitous staircases. After it spits you back out up on Sedgewick Avenue, it winds through the hills of University Heights, before being deposited into a bustling commercial thoroughfare through the heart of the Hispanic Bronx. It gradually becomes more industrial and much less bustling, skirts the northern edge of Parkchester, and heads down into Throggs neck where it becomes a nice remnant of an older New York, one that was mostly populated by the children of the immigrant groups of the previous great wave, whose local business lined streets like Tremont Avenue. The last few blocks are residential, and it ends at the local wedding hall, Marina del Ray.

Tremont Avenue actually only passes through 3 Census Tracts - BX53.02 where it starts, BX198 near Westchester Square, and BX132 in Throggs Neck, forming the border of tracts the rest of the way. The others listed below are the tracts we went through to get from the #4 train to the beginning of the street, and from the end of the street to the #6 train (as are the last three neighborhoods listed).

Neighborhoods: South Bronx, East Bronx, Morris Heights, University Heights, Mt. Hope, Tremont, East Tremont, West Farms, Parkchester, Castle Hill, Westchester Village, Schuylerville, Throggs Neck, Country Club, Spencer Estates, Pelham Bay.

Tracts Walked: BX217.01, BX215.02, BX215.01, BX205, BX53.02, BX198, BX132, BX118, BX130, BX158, BX162, BX160, BX274, BX276

Longest Streets Walk - Bronx, August 14th

2010-08-11T12:30:00.005-04:00

High Bridge to Pelham Bay, including all of Tremont Avenue, longest street in the Bronx. 14 Miles. Meet at NOON, 176th Street and Jerome Avenue (#4 to 176th street). #4 is running local in Manhattan/Bronx, so allow yourself a little extra time to get there.

Gay Bars and Mosques - Yawn

2010-08-10T17:53:00.002-04:00

http://www.dailygut.com/?i=4696

Now I'm sure Greg Gutfeld is currently congratulating himself on being real clever; coming up with what he supposes is a way to beat those crazy Muslims at their whole tolerency "hey we have first amendment rights too" game by proposing a gay bar (supposedly catering to Muslims, however that would work) nearby the Cordoba Initiative's community center downtown - you know the "9/11 Mosque."

While this whole thing obviously reeks of "let's drive traffic to my site" just in case he's actually serious and thinks that anyone here will care, I invite him to head down to the Corner of Washington Place and 6th Avenue, where he'll find the NYU Islamic Center located in the basement of St. Joseph's Catholic Church (another religion not really known for "looking kindly on homosexuality"). I then invite him to walk one block down Washington Place to Christopher Street and grab a drink at the Stonewall Inn.

Some people just do not get this town.

Neighborhoods: Greenwich Village

Tracts Walked: M71

Laurelton

2010-08-04T22:22:00.007-04:00

I've been on a bit of a Queens kick lately, and when there's someone with a car who wants to walk Census Tracts with me, I'm taking the opportunity to go somewhere I can't get to easily by subway or bike. These two things led me out to the Laurelton and Cambria Heights neighborhoods in the Southeastern corner of Queens.

I really don't much to say. Far Eastern Queens, in most ways, is more Nassau than Astoria (or even Flushing), and the only way you know you've crossed the border into Valley Stream is that the street signs have a different font. The only person I've ever known that's lived in this neighborhood did so precisely because it was as close to Long Island as he could get and still be within the city limits, which was legally required by his City Government job. Houses are lovely, single-family, and mostly suburban-style detached; the foreclosure crisis of Southeast Queens seems to not have made it this far over.

After a bit we walk by Montefiore Cemetery (Rabbi Schneerson's place of burial). I was expecting some local Chabad infrastructure around the cemetery - maybe a tzotzke store, maybe a kosher restaurant, maybe even a small hotel - but all there is is a small, nondescript Chabad House. Despite the rain, and being halfway down the block, I actually get an "excuse me - you are Jewish?" from a guy leaving the building. The guy's Yiddish was better than his English - very strange for a young Chabadnick, who in this day and age almost all grow up learning the the local vernacular language as a first, or at least co-first, language.

Further north we come to Linden Blvd, which looks, well, pretty much like the rest of Linden Blvd looks throughout it's 6 miles in Brooklyn and 5 .5 miles in Queens. We stop to eat at a Haitian restaurant called Port-a-Prince. The place is somewhat schizophrenic - the interior is immaculate and looks like it could be any fancy French place in Manhattan, yet they give us plastic forks to eat with. Everyone in the place is speaking exclusively French Creole - to the point where I find myself ordering the "Poulet" and hoping for the best.

I'm rewarded. Not only is the food pretty good, in terms of "calories-per-dollar" this has got to be one of the greatest deals in the 5 boroughs - a giant heaping plate of rice, beans, salad and chicken fit for a meal for two, all for $6. I guess they save on the cutlery.

Neighborhoods: Laurelton, Cambria Heights
Tracts Walked: Q604, Q606, Q612, Q614, Q616.01, Q616.02, Q618, Q620, Q632, Q638, Q646, Q650

2010-07-30T10:31:00.002-04:00

Hey Folks - Tickets on sale for our Going Places, Doing Stuff trip "Wild Tilly's Circus Story," tomorrow at 6:00.

http://www.fluxfactory.org/going-places-doing-stuff-iii/

This year I'm doing a joint excursion with Matt Levy, Josh Bernstein, and Moira Williams. The trip is Saturday, August 7th. It's starting early, and ending late, late, late - don't sign up if you have anywhere to be before Sunday morning.

Want to know roughly what you're in for? 2008 trip. 2009 trip. There's two clues to this year's trip in the title. A prize for whoever figures it out (no spoilers in the comments please).

4 Upcoming Walks

2010-07-22T13:00:00.003-04:00

I've been meaning to do these since, April, but have been delaying them. In conjunction with the good folks at "Hey, I'm Walking Here," I'll be leading 4 walk this summer - three down the longest streets in their respective boroughs, and a final three-state walk from Ft. Lee NJ to Greenwich, CT.

The first one is this Saturday from Greenpoint to Coney Island, including all of Bedford Avenue, the longest street in the Bronx. Meet at 11:00 AM at the corner of Manhattan and Bedford in Greenpoint (G to Nassau). We'll end up at the Coney Island Sandcastle Contest.

The others are tentatively scheduled for August 14th (Tremont Ave, Bronx), September 4th (either Northern Blvd Queens, or Hylan Blvd. in Staten Island) and Sept. 25th (Three-State Walk). The last two especially are subject to change.

Slideshow this Thursday - July 15th

2010-07-09T17:48:00.001-04:00

This Thursday I'll be doing a slideshow on the Parisian underground with my friend Steve at the Flux Factory. 39-31 29th Street, Long Island City, NY 11101. 8:00 PM. Free and open to all.

Though it's known as the "City of Light," there are 170 miles of absolute darkness that exist under Paris – a network of limestone quarries dotted with WWII bunkers, ossuaries, unofficial art galleries, and other assorted surprises colloquially known as “The Catacombs.” It is home to a subculture of people of all ages, interests, and nationalities who make a hobby of exploring and utilizing these and other hidden spaces throughout the city – the “Cataphiles.”

Moses Gates and Steve Duncan will be covering the history, culture, and structures of this underground world in a slideshow presentation, as well as explaining how you, too, can become a Cataphile.

Queens Map - August 2010

2010-07-01T19:49:00.001-04:00

Manhattan Map - August 2010

2010-07-01T19:46:00.000-04:00

Brooklyn Map - August 2010

2010-07-01T19:42:00.001-04:00

Bronx Map - August 2010

2010-07-01T19:38:00.000-04:00

Canarsie

2010-06-06T01:08:00.004-04:00

Summer's here, and it's walking season again. My goal is to complete Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, and do half of Queens before the season's over, which will probably be sometime in November.

One of the first neighborhoods up on my list was Canarsie. Canarsie for me had always meant "typical Brooklyn" - you know, as in "hey - it's Joey Bagadonuts from Canarsie." Canarsie produced people with thick accents who drank beer in cans, and had 12-foot long cars that they faithfully washed once a week.

Canarsie is still typical Brooklyn - while the neighborhood has little to no remants of its Jewish and Italian population (Young Israel of Canarsie sits dilapidated on 108th street), having almost completely turned over to a West Indian population during the last two decades, its feel remains much the same. Ethnic groups come and go, neighborhoods stay. The middle-middle class feel is something that seems seeped into its sidewalks. Houses are brick and non-descript. A BLT at the deli costs $2.00. Couples hang out at Canarsie Pier, which still has a "no commuter parking" sign, despite it being decades since the last commuter boat ran from the pier. It's Canarsie: middle-of-nowhere, Brooklyn.

Neighborhoods: Canarsie
Tracts Walked: 954, 958, 962, 964, 968, 1098, 956, 966, 990, 992, 994, 996, 998, 1004, 1006, 1008, 1010, 1024, 1026, 1028, 1034, 1018, 1020, 1022, 1012, 1014, 1016, 984, 986, 988

The City According to NY Magazine

2010-04-14T12:21:00.006-04:00

Hey New Yorkers - you recognize this, don't you?

No, this isn't a strange Rorschach blot. This is New York City. At least, this is what New York City looks like according to NY Magazine. Or, to put it another way:

As you probably know, Nate Silver's "Best Places to live in NYC" piece has come out in NY Magazine. Now, I am a big Nate Silver fan, mostly because he brings a much-needed dose of data-driven reality and intellectual honesty into an area - namely political writing - where very often people just make shit up and expect to be believed.

And going through the methodology for the NYC neighborhoods article, I'm more and more impressed with how Silver conducted this study - not only did he go way above and beyond the call of duty in gathering and analyzing data, he also made this great tool that lets you weigh the different criteria according to your own definition of what you want in a neighborhood. Got your panties in a bunch because Silver counts schools for 6% and you don't have any kids? Easy - adjust the weighting to make schools count for nothing, and you've got the rankings that matter to you. You can never satisfy everyone, and there's tons of debate you can have over the minutae of the methodology and results - I, for one, am on record as saying the neighborhood that ended up first is a giant social ponzi scheme. But with something like this it's easy to hate and pick out faults, but really, really tough to actually create. All in all, this is a wonderful quantitative analysis - of half of New York City.

So my problem is not with Nate Silver, my problem is what NY Magazine gave him to work with. And what he had to work with was this:

5 neighborhoods in Staten Island, representing about an eighth of the population.

7 neighborhoods in the Bronx, representing about a quarter of the population.

8 neighborhoods in Queens - including all the neighborhoods west of the BQE -representing about a third of the population.

18 neighborhoods in Brooklyn - including all of the area north and west of Prospect Park - representing about half the population.

22 neighborhoods in Manhattan consisting of the entire borough (with the exception of Marble Hill, if you want to get nitpicky).

All in all, a little under half the population of the city is represented in the 60 neighborhoods that are surveyed. As for the the neighborhoods chosen - need you ask? It's everywhere the NY Magazine readership might already consider living (all the usual yuppie and trending-yuppie neighborhoods of Manhattan, Brownstone Brooklyn, and West Queens), with a few bones thrown seemingly at random to the other parts of the city (Belle Harbor? Westerleigh? Co-op City?). In short, the "best neighborhoods" are determined by considering a self-selected sampling of neighborhoods. The best proof of this? The neighborhood everyone seems to be up in arms about getting left off is Forest Hills - the one yuppie area that wasn't included.

Silver addresses this by saying "-- The choice of neighborhoods, and the geographic boundaries assigned to them, were determined by New York magazine staff. I thought they did a very comprehensive job, on balance. It's not trivial to include additional neighborhoods because a lot of this involves counting things -- whether laundromats, toxic waste dumps, or murders -- by hand. The 60 neighborhoods within our scope are not necessarily the 60 best neighborhoods. Yes, we'll get Forest Hills included if we do this next year."

This is ridiculous. Under half the city is nowhere near a "very comprehensive job." No newspaper, magazine, or any other reputable publisher would dream of putting out an article where they analyze the 19 states East of the Mississippi River and North of the 36th Parallel, plus Montana, Florida, Alabama, Oregon and New Mexico, and then list the top 20, call the article "The Best States to Live in America," and respond to criticism of this by claiming they did a "very comprehensive job, on balance," and complaining that doing the other 25 states would be too much work. But yet, that is exactly what this article does - just substitute "New York City" for "America" and "Neighborhoods" for "States."

I don't necessarily even have a problem if NY mag wants to discount everything outside of Manhattan and Brownstone Brooklyn. But it is not "the 50 best neighborhoods to live in New York." It's "the 50 best neighborhoods to live in yuppie New York." I would have actually liked this a lot better than throwing in a few neighborhoods outside this area for what seems to be the sole purpose of showing they're considering more than Manhattan, Brownstone Brooklyn, and Western Queens. When I was in college at my very white Midwestern state school, one year they noticed the cover of a University publication happened to only feature white faces. So did they look for another scene on campus to shoot that was more diverse? No. Did they try and recruit more minorities? No. Did they even just say "hey, I guess this is who we are, so we'll just go with it." No. They used the same picture - but just photoshopped in a few random, darker faces. This is the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the neighborhood selection for the article.

Really this is about me, and many other residents and lovers of the city, being fed up with half the city being completely ignored. If you like Brownstone Brooklyn better than the East Bronx, hey, I don't have a problem with that - so do I. But I at least give both of them a chance. I don't pretend the East Bronx doesn't exist, and don't pretend that it's somehow not part of New York City. And if you only have the resources to survey half the city, why is it always taken for granted that everywhere in Manhattan, Brownstone Brooklyn, and Western Queens must automatically be included, while a few of the rest of the neighborhoods of the city maybe get squeezed in if there's room? Why not distribute them equally throughout the 5 boroughs? Or, better yet, why not first eliminate the neighborhoods where 90% of New Yorkers won't be able to even afford in the first place, instead of starting with them?

There's a lot of publications in this city that focus on one or two particular areas, or ethnic groups, or cultures. But Caribbean Life doesn't call itself "New York Life." The Jewish Press doesn't call itself the "New York Press." The Queens Tribune doesn't call itself the "New York Tribune." Only one culture - the upscale yuppie culture - has the chutzpah to focus on one part of the city and call itself "New York Magazine."

Inspiration

2010-03-30T12:00:00.037-04:00

From Page 1 of the January 23rd, 1903 edition of the New York Times
WALKED UP BRIDGE CABLE

-----------------------------------------------

Young Man's Dizzy Climb to the Top of Manhattan Tower

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Policeman Goes in Unwilling Pursuit, Anticipating a Battle in the Air, but Is Disappointed in His Fears.

A tall, broad-shouldered young man, well dressed in a business suit, a light-colored raglan coat, and a light fedora hat, separated himself from the crowd of pedestrians on the Brooklyn Bridge last evening and sprang up on a big supporting cable where it passes up beside the foot passage from the anchorage on the Manhattan side. Without further ado, he started nimbly upward, bound for the dizzy height where the cable joins the top of the tower... Policeman Hogan of the Bridge Squad, on post at the point where the climber began his daring venture, saw the start, but was too late to intercept him... "What'll I do?" inquired Hogan helplessly. "Go after him," ordered Brophy." "Sure," echoed Farrell. "It's on your post."

Hogan, with the same degree of eagerness displayed by a man about to be hanged, gingerly tested the cable with one foot, as if doubtful of its sustaining power. "Go on," yelled a man in the crowd. "Let's see you do the Steve Brodie act." Hogan shivered perceptibly, and cast a reproachful glance in the direction of the voice. But he started. As he did so he slipped, and clutched a stay cable hurriedly, while he muttered something which provoked a solemn-faced bystander to say reprovingly: "Man, would you swear in the face of death!" Hogan waited to hear no more. Upward he started, while Brophy and Farrell shouted reassuringly that if they were wanted they could be found back at the trolley loop. In the meantime the man in the raglan coat had progressed steadily. He was nearing the top, and to the throng on the bridge he looked like a manikin walking on a clothes line. Soon the diminished figure could be seen standing on the recess of the tower quietly surveying the city and harbor at its feet. Far below could be seen the policeman, laboriously making the sweeping ascent...

When Hogan got within speaking distance of the youth, he had the agreeable surprise of his life. "Hello old man," said the stranger genially. "I'm glad there are two persons of good sense in this city. Do you come up here often?" "I could live up here" warmly assented Hogan as a great weight began to lift off his heart. "It's all I can do to keep from coming up, when I ought to be at work." ...Finally, the young man agreed to retrace his steps down the cable, and he started first with Hogan close - but not too close - behind. ... the bridge platform was reached, and Brophy and Farrell were there to congratulate Hogan. "You done nobly," they averred, and then recommended that he take the stranger to the Oak Street Station. On hearing that the stranger began to fight, and fought well all the way to the station...

He said he was Harry Leonard, 24 years old, but would give no address. His reason for climbing, he said, was to see if the tower was safe, and to inspect a little flag there.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A tip of the hat to Harry Leonard, 24, of parts unknown. And to Policeman Hogan, of the Bridge Squad. And to John Law, Dave Frieder, Alain Robert, Sam Schwartz, Kez, Gary Gorman, Dr. Bojidar Yanev, SaneSmith, Ben Cipriano, Dan Cameron Rodill, Renaldo Clarke, Alan Feuer, Arthur Leipzig, Sam Rohn, Ivan Greene, Santas Melmoth and Dennis, Morry Alter, Peter B. Kaplan, Timmy O'Neill, Phillipe Petit, Vic Argo, Art Jones, Jordan Lage, and Ben Wolf, SJW III and of course the rest of the B MW crew. And to anyone else who has managed - by whatever means and for whatever purpose - to find their own answer to the question that everyone who has ever walked across our stone sentinel has asked themselves: "Wow - I wonder what it would look like from up there?"

photo - qx

Nooks and Crannies

2010-02-20T19:26:00.019-05:00

There's a lot of ways to cross the Manhattan Bridge. You can walk it, bike it, drive it - even ride over it on the back of a subway if you want, although that's certainly not recommend as a regular means of transverse.

At about the 24 second mark you can see one of the nooks and crannies of the bridge - a short abandoned tunnel that used to connect the north tracks to the uptown Broadway Express line before the completion of the Chrystie Street Connection in 1967. Out of all the bridges, the Manhattan is the one that seems to have the most of these nooks and crannies to explore. A constructed, but never used Second Avenue Subway station below its Manhattan approach. A narrow passage that lets you squeeze inside the globes that crown its Brooklyn-side tower. Perhaps the most interesting is a small nook inside the entrance colonade that houses a time capsule to be opened in 2009. And there's a few others that have either been closed off, or like the formally unused North Walkway, since opened up to the public.

Unused Second Avenue Subway tunnel - photo by Danielle Plamondon

Getting cozy inside one of the globes
Time Capsule Nook - South part of the Manhattan entrance colonade

North walkway - 2003
And out of all the bridges I've climbed, it's the most ephemeral to be on top of. There's none of the stone solidity of the Brooklyn, or the web-like heavy iron of the Hell Gate. Even being on top of the hollow sheet metal of the Williamsburg or see-through platform of the Queensboro feels stable by comparison. The top of the bridge is perhaps five and a half feet wide - narrow enough that you can lie down on the top lengthwise and touch either end with each hand. There isn't even a guardrail, unless you count the tension wires that run across the top of each tower.

The first time I climbed the Manhattan was with an Aussie friend of mine, who captured the essence of the escapade (as well as some great photos) in one of one of my favorite essays. To anyone who truly wants to understand why we do this stuff: this is required reading.

Manhattan Progress - February 2008 through January 2010

2010-01-24T23:24:00.005-05:00

I really, really, wanted to have 100% of Manhattan knocked off by the time I updated the maps again. But I've still got 14 nagging tracts - a stretch of Central Harlem, a Mitchell-Lama by the Hudson River, a few patches of Washington Heights, and the area just above Stuy-Town. I could knock them all off in a day if I wanted to, but I just haven't yet.

Manhattan Completed - February 2008

Manhattan Completed - January 2010

Staten Island Progress - February 2008 through January 2010

2010-01-19T18:33:00.004-05:00

I haven't really even started on Staten Island, and I'm kind of dreading it. Not so much the walking part, but the getting there part.

I got in all of three tracts over the past two years, and only for stuff I found interesting. At some point I'm just going to have to take a few weekends, wake up early, and knock out the 105 tracts I've got left.

Staten Island Completed - February 2008

Staten Island Completed - January 2010

Queens Progress - February 2008 through January 2010

2010-01-14T18:57:00.007-05:00

I didn't do too bad in Queens, almost tripling my tracts walked from 12% to 33% and filling in most of far western Queens, plus some good chunks of Hollis, Middle Village, Ozone Park, and Flushing. Still, I've got a lot left to do, especially out East. 2010 is going to be my Queens walking year.

Queens Completed - February 2008

Queens Completed - January 2010

The Most Desolate Place in New York

2010-01-13T15:55:00.011-05:00

Out of the 2217 Census Tracts that make up the five boroughs of New York City, 24 have a population of zero. Ten are parks (8 part of the NYC Parks department, one part of National Parks System, and one affiliated with the Smithsonian) that have access to the public and regular visitation. Five are active cemeteries that can also be counted on to have regular visitors. Four are working environments – the Oak Point rail yards in the Bronx, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and two tracts that make up the Kings County Hospital Complex. One is LaGuardia Airport.

That leaves four Census Tracts one could reasonably call “desolate” – no permanent residents, no regular workers, and next to no visitors. One is really a ghost tract – Queens Tract 1622, which consists entirely of the Atlantic Ocean south of the Rockaways. It doesn’t even show up on the NYC Planning Department’s Census Fact Finder, but the Federal Census Bureau still lists it. Perhaps it was created to enumerate the population of Hog Island way back before it was destroyed about a hundred years ago, but I don’t even know if Census Tracts existed then. Regardless, since I can’t walk it I’m not counting it.

Two others consist of the series of marsh islands in Jamaica Bay. One of these tracts - Queens Tract 1072.02 - is easily accessed by the road between Broad Channel and the Joe Addabbo Bridge to Howard Beach, and houses the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge offices. The other - Brooklyn Tract 702.03 - is tougher, but there’s a small slice of the tract that’s on the same island. It takes a bit of trampsing through marshland, but you can get there on foot.

That leaves one Census Tract with no population, no workers, no land connection, and which is officially off-limits to visitors to boot. This is Bronx Census Tract 5: North and South Brother Islands, located at the western edge of Long Island Sound between Riker’s Island and the coast of the Bronx. I think it's fair to call this the most desolate tract in New York City.

A couple of summers ago I took a boat with Marie Lorenz out to North Brother. It was a very enjoyable few hours of exploration and relaxation, but the main purpose for me was simply to knock off what is probably the toughest Census Tract to get to in New York City.

Still, it's not exactly the South Pole - between scientists, students, reporters, and your occasional curious urbanist, the islands probably see at least a few dozen visitors a year.

Neighborhoods: South Bronx, North Brother Island. Tracts Walked: BX5

Bronx Progress - February 2008 through January 2010

2010-01-12T22:58:00.004-05:00

I am, quite honestly, embarrassed at my lack of progress in the Bronx. 7 tracts in 2 years is pretty pathetic. Staten Island I can justify (no subway, large tracts), but I really should have gotten around the Bronx more.

2006 was really my Bronx year - I'd wanted to walk 100 tracts for a school project, evenly spread throughout the borough, which is why my Bronx map is so much more scattered than the other boroughs. I probably walked through at least a few dozen tracts more as just a side of effect of getting to the ones I was counting, but this was before I was really keeping serious track of where I'd walked, and if they weren't part of the project then I didn't note them.

Still, my Bronx progress had quality if not quantity. I managed a few interesting walks - and also to get to one of the most elusive census tracts in New York - North Brother Island.

Bronx Completed - February 2008

Bronx Completed - January 2010

Brooklyn Progress - February 2008 through January 2010

2010-01-11T18:32:00.010-05:00

Over the past two years of this project I by far made the most progress in Brooklyn, going from 29% to 65% complete. Most of this has been easy pickings in either the Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, and Flatbush areas within walking distance from my apartment or the East Williamsburg/Bushwick area where I used to work, although I knocked off a substantial amount of Southwest Brooklyn as well. Most of East, and especially Southeast Brooklyn remains on the backburner.

The side by side comparison of Feb 2008 and now is below. I've also changed the format of the new maps to be a little easier to make out.

Brooklyn completed - February 2008

Broooklyn completed - January 2010

Ohhh...We're halfway there!

2010-01-09T23:53:00.000-05:00

I always meant to update the maps a few times a year or so, but until I can do a Census Tract overlay on Google Maps or something, it's probably not going to happen. But I've made a lot more progress than the maps (which are 2 years old now) indicate. A fairly nondescript walk in Southern Brooklyn a few months ago gave me 1,109 - or 50.1%. I'll be putting up the new, updated maps by borough in the next few weeks.

Anyway, in honor of the halfway mark I give you Bon Jovi live in Tokyo.

"Greater Harlem"

2010-01-08T17:22:00.009-05:00

A recent article came out in the NY Times with the headline "No Longer Majority Black, Harlem is in Transition." I have some problems with the general point and tone of the article, but better social commentators than I have detailed most of them (by the way, a much, much better and more straightforward article about the changing demographics of Harlem by Queens College Sociology Professor and Demographer Andrew Beveridge can be found here). As a demographic analyst though I would like to point out some facts that the Times was sloppy about at best, and disingenuous about at worst.

First though, I want to explain why the Times uses the boundaries of "Harlem" that they do - which they make no effort to explain themselves. As it turns out, they count a huge chunk of upper Manhattan, including Morningside Heights and East Harlem. There have been a few different people who have said things like "how can they say Harlem goes down to W. 106th street? How can they count Morningside Heights as part of Harlem?" or otherwise raised the regular old "what are the official boundaries of Harlem?" discussion (for the record - there are no "official" boundaries of any neighborhood in New York).

The answer is kind of boring. The reason the NY Times defines "Greater Harlem" as "river to river, and from East 96th Street and West 106th Street to West 155th Street," is because that exact area is what corresponds to the Census Bureau's Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMAs) NY03802 (West Harlem), NY03803 (Central Harlem), and NY03804 (East Harlem) - which is what the Times uses as their source for the demographic data. PUMA 03803 actually also takes in the Polo Ground houses north of 155th street as well, which the Times neglects to mention.

Don't ask me why the Census Bureau divides up the PUMAs that way. They usually roughly follow the Community Boards, but not always exactly. In this case, the slight difference is that Community Board 9 (West Harlem) starts at W. 110th street instead of W. 106th.

Now, as to why they used those three PUMAs to define Harlem? I suspect because that's the area that gave them the headline they wanted. "About 70% Black Now, Harlem is in Transition" - which is what they would have gotten if they had used just PUMA 03803 (Central Harlem), doesn't quite have the same ring to it. Even if you combine West and Central Harlem, or Central and East Harlem, the area is still majority black.

But back to the stats: a subtle thing I realized after looking through the numbers from the 2008 American Community Survey, was that whenever the Times says "black" - as in "in 2008, according to the census, the 77,000 blacks in central Harlem amounted to 62 percent of the population" they actually aren't using the numbers for the black population at all - they're using the numbers for the non-Hispanic, non-multiracial black population. So if you're a black Puerto Rican, or if mom's African-American and your dad's Dominican, or Irish, or Chinese, you aren't counted as "black" in the Times article. And this Hispanic and multiracial black population is fairly significant - about 10,000 people in Central Harlem, or about 8% of the population.

Now, this isn't necessarily the wrong number to use. The article specifically focuses on the rise and fall of the Southern, Great Migration-era African-American population in Harlem, and the article makes an effort to discount African and Caribbean blacks from the totals as well - although it does show a serious ignorance of Harlem's history which has long had both an Anglophone and Hispanic Caribbean black population. But what makes it a disingenuous statistic are two things:

1) The article specifically says "non-Hispanic white," when talking about the white population and doesn't say "non-Hispanic black" when talking about the black population.

2) Hispanics have only been separately enumerated since 1980, and multiracial individuals since 2000. So all of the numbers the Times uses when referencing the black population up to and including its peak in 1970 were counting black Hispanics, and all of the numbers afterward were not. All the numbers up to 1990 were counting multiracial individuals who primarily identified as black, and all the numbers afterward were not. This artificially exaggerates the decline in the black population.

This is just one concrete example of the larger issue - the Times' purposeful picking and choosing of statistics in order advance the narrative that the decline in black population is more significant than it is. You have to wait until halfway through the article before they tell you that in the "Greater Harlem" area they're talking about, blacks never made up even as much as 2/3 of the population (and that includes multiracial and Hispanic blacks). Not that this would be a terribly significant piece of news, except when coupled with the realization that the article is completely designed to overemphasize the decline of the proportion of Harlem's black population.

In fact "Greater Harlem" was barely majority black (about 52%) way back in 1990 - which is probably under 50% if you coun't people who would have identified as multiracial if they could. But of course "As Black Percentage of Population Declines by 11% at Most Over 18 Years, Harlem is in Transition," sounds really awkward.

Happy Birthday

2009-12-31T23:59:00.003-05:00

On the last day of the tenure of Mayor George B. McClellan, Jr., the Manhattan Bridge opened for the first time. Despite some neglect throughout the decades, on her centennial she's still looking fabulous - and certainly has no shortage of proper suitors to help her celebrate. There's Historians, Engineers, Politicians - all responsible beaus of legitimacy and good standing.

Still, if some old flames with improper intentions happened to steal a kiss or two in the early hours of her 100th birthday, just know that while their love may not be as honorable, it is nonetheless just as real.

Happy Birthday my dear. 100 years old, and you're still a heartbreaker.

Christmas in Middle Village

2009-12-26T17:03:00.004-05:00

Went to go see the Christmas Lights that were referenced in this article the other day. The author of the article seems quite proud of the fact that "no guidebook mentions these," comparing them to the (relatively) heavily touristed Dyker Heights lights. Well, there's a reason no guidebook mentions them, and it's because they aren't really that noteworthy. It's a lovely block with lovely Christmas decorations. You'll find something similar in almost every neighborhood of the boroughs during this time of year. Much cooler was the gigantic 10-foot-tall snowman we found across 69th street.

I actually enjoyed the article (as well as this one about the Christmas display at the Garabedian's house on Pelham Park North in the Bronx), especially the profiles of the families on the block. But it's certainly not some kind of hidden find, and it's especially misleading to imply it's a display anywhere close to on par with Dyker Heights.

There's certainly something to be said for writing about what you find on a nice Christmas walk through 12 census tracts in Southwest Queens. But such walks are really meant for blogs like this, not the New York Times.

Neighborhoods: Middle Village, Maspeth, Rego Park. Tracts Walked: Q657.02, Q659, Q651, Q655, Q657, Q669, Q671.01, Q671.02, Q679, Q505, Q695, Q687

Lessons on Abandoned Observation Decks - part 2

2009-12-20T14:22:00.003-05:00

The history lesson from the South Deck continues on the North Deck with the other 8 signs (and a much better view which you can see here). Numbers 9,11,12,13,and 16 illustrate the loss of the Battle of Brooklyn and retreat of Washington's Army to Manhattan. 14 gives a short description of the skirmishing in Manhattan after the retreat, and 15 is an overview of the Prison Martyrs Monument in Ft. Greene Park. 10 is missing, and has been since at least 2005 when I was first up there.

Format is the same as the south deck - the first photo is the overhead view of the deck showing the placement of the signs. The location of the numbers on the map after that correspond to the relevant sign - red for the Colonists, black for the British, and the arrows are the troop movements. If you're wondering where 14 is, it's on East 33rd describes the British landing in Kips Bay in Manhattan. The signs with the text written out follow (for some reason the formatting works best in Internet Explorer). You can click on the signs for a larger picture.

Each sign consists of text, an illustration, and an image of the area you're seeing. When you're up there, these images provide some interesting glimpses back into history - you can contrast the city as it existed in 1976 when the signs were installed, with what you see before you today. The most obvious of these occur on signs 12 and 13 where the twin towers stand tall in the skyline.

View Williamsburgh Savings Bank Signs - North Deck in a larger map

9. WASHINGTON OBSERVES STIRLING'S HEROIC STAND.
"On August 27th General Washington observed the fighting at Gowanus from the "cork-screw" fort at Cobble Hill, one of the series of fortifications comprising the American "inner line." Overcome with emotion he exclaimed 'Good God! What brave fellows I must this day lose!'"

11. AMERICANS RETREAT TO THEIR INNER LINE.
"Following the Battle of Gowanus, the Americans retreated to their inner line, a series of fortifications stretching from Wallabout Bay on the North to Gowanus Creek in the South. The "inner line" had been started under the supervision of Lord Stirling earlier in 1776 when it became clear that the British would try to take New York."

12. WASHINGTON CALLS A COUNCIL OF WAR.
"On the evening of August 29th Washington summoned American leaders to the home of Phillip Livingston for a "council of war to decide what should be done. The American outer line had fallen, many troops had been lost in the Battle at Gowanus, the Americans now had 10,000 raw soldiers to face 20,000 well trained British and Hessians, and a total of 1200 guns under Admiral Howe was standing ready to cut off Washington's only route of escape. At the council of war it was decided to withdraw from Long Island immediately."

13. WASHINGTON'S NIGHT RETREAT SAVES THE AMERICAN ARMY.
"All through the foggy night of August 29th, Washington's units silently withdrew from positions along their inner line. Quietly they made their way to the East River where waiting boats and barges ferried them across to New York. If they had known of it, the British could have destroyed Washington's army during this silent retreat. Instead, soon after dawn the next morning the Americans were gone. Washington's brilliant retreat from the western tip of Long Island enabled the American army to fight on - and five years later to prevail."

14. SEQUEL: THE BRITISH ESTABLISH HEADQUARTERS IN NEW YORK.
Meanwhile, the American forces regrouped in New York to defend Manhattan briefly. On September 15th, 1776 they skirmished with the British who landed at Kips Bay and nearly captured Washington. At the battle of Harlem Heights on September 16th Washington temporarily drove the British back, but by November all of Manhattan was in British hands. During the rest of the Revolution the British had their principle headquarters in New York.

15. AMERICA'S GREATEST MASS GRAVE.
The Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in Ft. Greene Park stands over the remains of 11,500 Americans who died of sickness and starvation on British Prison ships anchored in Wallabout Bay during the seven years New York was British headquarters. the monument stands on the site of Ft. Putnam, a primary fortification on the Americans' inner line during the Revolution. During the war of 1812 the Fort was rebuilt and renamed Ft. Greene.

16. THE VULNERABILITY OF AMERICAN POSITIONS.
Here on August 28th and 29th the British mounted cannon and built a small fort 800 yards from Fort Putnam near the corner of Vanderbilt and Lafayette avenue. The existence of this fort and the potential threat from it was a major factor in Washington's decision to call a Council of War the afternoon of August 29th.

Signs 9, 13, 15, and 16 were shot by me. Signs 11, 12, and 14 were shot by Steve Duncan. The photo of the deck from above was shot by Mike Epstein.

Nerd Nite - Dec 17th

2009-12-15T15:42:00.002-05:00

I'll be doing a short (20 minute) presentation on fun NYC Demographics for Nerd Nite this 8:00 PM Thursday entitled "Census, or Non-sensus" at Galapagos, 16 Main street in DUMBO, Brooklyn. As an added bonus you'll get to hear about WWII codebreaking and Wolverine as masculine fantasy before me. 10 bucks, more details here.

Lessons on Abandoned Observation Decks - part 1

2009-12-11T19:36:00.006-05:00

The first time I got up to the abandoned observation deck of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower was in 2005 when it was still all offices. The 26th floor with the deck was occupied, but luckily the 27th floor above was empty. Once we were up there, we noticed that the deck was actually two different decks - one terrace extended out from the South side of the building, and one from the North side. We went out a window and down a ladder onto the North deck. I was expecting some great views, and perhaps for security to come and escort us out. What I wasn't expecting was a history lesson on the Revolutionary War.

What we were on used to be a public observation deck, and for what I can only assume was the Bicentennial in 1976 16 signs were installed - 8 on each deck. Each sign describes some historical happening of the American Revolution, and points out the area where the event took place on the landscape of Brooklyn some 400-odd feet below. In 1977 the building was landmarked with the signs still up. A short time afterward the deck was abandoned. Since you can see the backs of the signs from the street, they're now considered part of the landmarked facade and can't be removed. So they stick around an abandoned observation deck, a lost little part of an older New York City, waiting to impart their lessons as a reward to the lonely few whose curiosity leads them to venture there. Look up the next time you're in the neighborhood - they're the tiny white rectangles on the gates of the uppermost terraces.

I've since returned many times with many people, and have gotten a full photographic collection of the signs. Each of the signs on the South deck (I'll cover the North deck in part 2) describes a specific action by either the British or Continental army during the early days of the Battle of Brooklyn - together, they illustrate a fairly standard pincer movement by the British. The amazing thing is that as you're reading the descriptions of the battle, you can see the entire terrain - from Staten Island, to Flatbush, to the Gowanus Canal - where it played out 233 years ago.

Below is a photo of the South observation deck from above - each number corresponds to the location of the related sign. To the left is Eastern Atlantic Avenue and Bed-Stuy. To the right is Western Atlantic Avenue, and the Gowanus area. Straight ahead is Flatbush Avenue, Prospect Park, and Southern Brooklyn.

The location of the numbers on the map correspond to the relevant sign. Black is for the British Army, Red is for the Continental Army, and the arrows describe the troop movements. The person is where the Observation Deck is located. For those of you not familiar with Google maps, you can scroll around to view the entire area.

View Williamsburgh Savings Bank Signs - South Deck in a larger map

Photos of the signs themselves are below, along with the text. You can click on the photos for a larger picture.

1. BRITISH FORCES ASSEMBLE ON STATEN ISLAND.
"In July, 1776 a fleet of British vessels landed troops on Staten Island. They were unopposed.By the middle of August a total of 32,000 British and Hessian troops - supported by more than 350 ships in the Harbor - had gathered on the island. It was the greatest assemblage of military and naval armament launched by England up to that time."

2. BRITISH LAND AT GRAVESEND.
"On August 22nd, 1776, 15,000 British and Hessians under the command of General William Howe landed unopposed on the beaches of Gravesend Bay. Another 5,000, mainly Hessians under General Von Heister landed on the 25th. As one observer said, 'the Disembaration...exhibited one of the finest & most picturesque Scenes that the imagination can fancy or the Eye behold.'"

3. BRITISH MOVE TO FLATBUSH.
"Soon after landing, a unit of 5,000 British and Hessians under Cornwallis moved to Flatbush to probe the American outer line of defense. The outer line consisted of a terminal moraine, or hill, running diagonally across Brooklyn. Through this hill ran four roads or lanes at low points called passes. American troops were deployed at or near these passes. The Flatbush pass, one mile north of the village church, was at the center of the American outer line."

4. MAIN COLUMN OF BRITISH FLANKS THROUGH FLATLANDS.
"By the evening of August 26 General Howe had moved 10,000 men - or one-half his total force - to Flatlands. From there, while the American troops were diverted by probes of his other units at Flatbush and in the Gowanus, he would launch a flanking attack around the unguarded east end of the American outer line."

5. HOWE'S TROOPS MAKE SECRET NIGHT MOVE THROUGH UNGUARDED PASS.
"On the night of August 26th, the main column of the British Army moved off cross-country from Flatlands leaving their campfires burning. Early in the morning, they captured a small American patrol but, still suspicious that there might be more Americans in the pass, they forced a local innkeeper, William Howard, to show then an alternate way through the hills above the pass."

6. AMERICANS DISCOVER BRITISH ENCIRCLEMENT TOO LATE.
"About 8:00 AM on the morning of August 27th an American scouting party under Colonial Miles came upon the rear end of the British flanking column moving west along the Jamaica Road. The Americans had been outflanked and would soon be in the gravest peril as the other two British units pressed forward to close the pincers."

7. GRANT PUSHES AGAINST AMERICANS IN THE GOWANUS.
"While Howe and Clinton were executing the flanking movement in the east, British General James Grant, with 5,000 troops was moving against the west end of the American line in Gowanus. About 3:00 AM in the morning of the 27th he was discovered on the slopes of the hill near present day 20th street. This was said to be the first formal field confrontation of the Americans with another army."

8. THE FIGHTING AT GOWANUS.
"About 9:00 AM on August 27th General Grant recived news of the success of Howe's flanking movement and began to strike hard against Stirling's men. Stirling, realizing the imminent convergence of the two enemy units from Flatbush and the east, sent most of his force of 1800 to safety across the Gowanus canal. Keeping some 250 Marylanders, he made a desperate stand near the Vachte Cortelyou house until two o'clock in the afternoon, when he and most of his men were captured."

All photos on this page were taken by Mike Epstein - he's a lot more great shots of the building and view here and here.

Part 2 is here

Don't stop until you get to the top

2009-12-06T22:16:00.015-05:00

Great pics and writeup here from Shane Perez of our recent rooftopping shenanigans on one of my favorite buildings in New York City.

There's something about standing on the very, very top of a structure - whether a building, bridge, monument, or disused World's Fair amusement ride - that I really love. It's so different, and so much more rewarding than simply getting to a high floor, or even out on a terrace. You feel almost like a bird - unobstructed in the open air, being able to take in everything for miles around just by turning 360 degrees. I had made it on to the 26th floor observation deck of this particular landmark a few years previous, but never felt quite at peace with the tower until that night.

photo by Shane Perez - www.shaneperez.com

More on theWilliamsburg(h) Savings Bank tower at Forgotten-NY, and more to come here as well.

NY State Gay Marriage Ban - by the numbers

2009-12-03T18:02:00.010-05:00

This post doesn't have much to do with Census Tracts or NYC geography - it concerns the Marriage Equality amendment recently rejected by the NY State Senate. I'm a strong supporter of Gay Marriage, and I wish it had passed. And if white people had been more supportive it would have.

Wow - that sounded a bit weird didn't it? Just what does that have to do with anything?

Well in California, apparently, it had everything to do with it. In case you don't remember, black voters in California voted for the gay marriage ban at a rate about 20 points higher than white voters (athought you also have to keep in mind that this is based on just one exit poll). This led to a furry of articles and blog posts - all with the general point that it was black voters who were responsible for scuttling gay marriage in California.

Now, maybe that happenes to be true and maybe it doesn't (in fact probably it doesn't). But the specifics of the demographic breakdown of the California vote isn't what mostly got talked about - what got talked about was "black homophobia." Not just in California, but across America. White people have no problem imagining that, say, white people from rural Alabama will be mostly against gay marriage, while white people from the Upper West Side of New York will be mostly for it, but somehow translate one vote in one state into an blanket overview of 50 million Americans. An unfortunate attitude does exist among a lot of white liberals that black homophobia is the rule, and white homophobia the exception.

Now, I don't know California very well, but I do know New York. And in New York this is most definitely not the case.

Know your history - you could be out and gay in Harlem back when being out and gay in Greenwich Village meant risking your life. The oldest gay bar in Brooklyn is in the heart of heavily African-American and Caribbean Crown Heights, and has been for over 50 years. This history continues today. Let's look at the numbers.

The marriage equality law was championed by an African-American governor, and brought to the floor of the Senate for the first time in history by an African American Senate President and an African-American Conference Leader. 90% of black members of the NY State Senate voted in favor, compared to 26% of white members (and that includes just 71% of white Democrats). Let me repeat it another way - black NY State Senators supported gay marriage more than three times as much as white Senators.

I also analyzed the vote in the Assembly (I'm using the May 2009 vote which is the most recent one I found a roll call for), which narrows the difference, but still leaves a big gap. 76% of total black elected state officials (I'm counting the Governor here also) who voted on the issue supported Marriage Equality. 73% of Hispanic state elected officials did also. Only 57% of white state elected officials did (the one Asian state elected official, Grace Meng, didn't vote). It should be noted that this vote - in both houses - was one of those rare "conscience" votes in Albany, meaning the leadership isn't pressuring you one way or another.

I haven't broken it down any further, but I think it's a reasonable assumption that the only group of legislative officials that supported gay marriage more than black legislators was out-gay legislators.

But somehow, I don't think you're going to hear this in the media. I don't think you're going to see any headlines like "White, Gay communities collide over Gay Marriage." I don't think you'll read any angry blog posts about how whites doomed marriage equality in New York. I don't think you'll hear the subtle narrative among the pro-gay marriage crowd of "you know, if white people just supported gay marriage more, maybe we wouldn't have such a problem getting it done."

Now, I happen to think everyone should support marriage equality as a fundamental human right and I hold individual legislators - regardless of race, ethnicity, or anything else - equally in contempt for not doing so. But I do hope the same people who were so eager to call out black homophobia as the reason why the vote in California failed are equally eager to call out white homophobia as the reason why the vote in New York failed. At the very least I think they owe the black community of New York a "thank you" for supporting marriage equality well above and beyond the norm.

State Senate Roll Call Vote (Dec, 2009)
State Assembly Roll Call Vote (May 2009)

Manhattan Map - January 2010

2009-12-01T20:12:00.001-05:00

Staten Island Map - January 2010

2009-12-01T20:07:00.001-05:00

Bronx Map - January 2010

2009-12-01T19:44:00.001-05:00

Queens Map - January 2010

2009-12-01T19:26:00.001-05:00

Brooklyn Map - January 2010

2009-12-01T18:24:00.000-05:00

4-corners ride wrapup

2009-10-02T14:04:00.008-04:00

Well, we had to overcome fatigue, rain, busted tires, and a death-defying ride down Todt Hill Road (a twisting, 2-lane, no shoulder descent down from the highest point in the 5 Boroughs) in the dark with all three of the drawbacks mentioned above. And it took almost it took almost 16 hours, and we didn't get back home until about 3:30 in the morning. But the entire 4-corners ride was successfully completed by three of us. I personally rode a stretch on each "Broadway" in every borough, plus one in Jersey. The route didn't have the Broadway in Brooklyn, but I did it on the ride form my house to the starting point.

As follows is the numerical wrap-up - I of course had to enumerate the amount of Census Tracts that were ridden. I don't count this for the walking project purpose of course, but it's fun to know. Because we rode on a lot of borders, and I didn't use my strict "borders don't count" that I do while walking, the numbers are somewhat approximate.

Next spring - 12 County ride. Watch for it.

Pictures are here, and you can see the complete route here.

By the numbers:

Mileage
Total course - 96.64 miles over 9 Counties and 189 Census Tracts (152 tracts in NYC).

Starting point - the geographic center of New York City - Stockholm street between Wycoff and St. Nicholas in Bushwick.

14.63 miles total to corner #1: Hillside Avenue and Cherry Street, Queens.
31.08 miles (45.71 miles total) to corner #2: Northwest corner of Mt. St. Vincent College, Bronx.
49.89 miles (95.6 miles total) to corner #3: Tottenville Beach off the end of Surf Avenue, Staten Island.
1.04 miles (96.64 miles total) to corner #4: Tottenville Beach off the end of Amboy Street, Staten Island.

.9 miles in Brooklyn (Kings County). 5 Tracts

31.65 miles in Queens (Queens County). 80 Tracts

.82 miles in New Hyde Park (Nassau County). 1 Tract

1.64 miles on Randall’s Island (New York County). 1 Tract

14.85 miles in the Bronx (Bronx County). 34 Tracts

.07 miles in Yonkers (Westchester County). 1 Tract

2.85 miles in Manhattan (New York County). 11 Tracts. 4.49 miles and 12 tracts total in New York County with Randall’s Island.

5.32 miles in Ft. Lee and Edgewater (Bergen County). 2 Tracts

19.52 miles in North Bergen, Guttenberg, West New York, Weehauken, Hoboken, Jersey City, and Bayonne (Hudson County ). 33 Tracts. 24.84 miles and 35 tracts total in Jersey.

19.02 miles in Staten Island (Richmond County). 21 Tracts

People
Started the course: 15 people
Total participants: 16 people (we picked up one at the start of the Bronx)

Made it to at least one corner - 16
Made it to at least two corners - 11
Made it to at least three corners - 4
Made it to all four corners - 3

One County Wonders - 16
Two County Titans - 16
Three County Thugs - 16
Four County Fighters - 15
Five County Flamethrowers - 11
Six County Slayers- 9
Seven County Superstars- 6
Eight County Aces- 6
Nine County Nerds- 5

More Southern Brooklyn

2009-10-02T11:04:00.006-04:00

With tentative plans to move to Queens in the not-too-distance future, I've been trying to fill in the walkable gaps around where I live now. The last one took me down through Flatbush, across Avenue L in Midwood through Bensonhurst to Bay Ridge. It was really just for walking, not for doing Census Tracts, but as it happened I picked a route that knocked off another 13 tracts I hadn't been to yet. We ended up at 86th and 4th in Bay Ridge at my favorite little Greek Place - Southeast Corner, check it out.

I'm going to miss hoofing around Southern Brookyn once I get to Queens - there's very few places in New York I feel as at home in as Flatbush - but I'm sure I'll find somewhere to comfortably amble on restless days.

Neighboorhoods: Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, , Brooklyn, Midwood, Flatbush, Ocean Parkway. Tracts Walked: B136, B182, B186, B198, B200, B202, B204, B206, B272, B274, B276, B430, B432, B452, B454, B536, BB760, B762, B764, B766

2 Weekend Events

2009-09-12T14:20:00.004-04:00

Saturday, September 19th I'll be doing this silly, but fun workshop at the Conflux Festival. As you moight guess, it involves Census Tracts. Check out the Conflux festival regardless. It seems to be less silly and fun, and more political and kind-of-serious this year - maybe it's the election year.

Saturday, September 26th I'll be leading a four-corner bike ride through New York City. Blurb follows:

Have you ever wanted to visit the Northern, Eastern, Southern, and Westernmost points in the five boroughs in one day by bicycle? If so, this ride's for you. On Saturday, September 26th, we'll be setting out to hit all four corners of NYC, by way of all five boroughs and two New Jersey counties.

We'll be riding approximately 100 miles, mostly on city streets, so if this is your first time on a bike in New York this ride might not be for you. At the same time, expect a less-than-blistering pace, a supportive group, and plenty of rest/refuel/see-interesting-stuff stops along the way.

We'll leave from the middle of Bushwick Park (now officially known as Maria Hernandez Park) in Brooklyn at 8:08 AM on the dot (not 8:11, not 8:32). Disregard the 8:05 starting time claimed by this invitation: Facebook thinks time exists only in five-minute increments.

Map of starting location:
http://tinyurl.com/nyc4corners

Drop a line if you can make either/or. Moe@allcitynewyork.com

Gut Instinct - Holy Moses!

2009-08-05T15:07:00.003-04:00

Check out the review of my "Going Places, Doing Stuff tour" by my fellow cheap-booze-and-racetracks aficionado Josh Bernstein in the New York Press

http://www.nypress.com/article-20170-gut-instinct-holy-moses.html

If you dug that, you can also check out a video review of last year's tour by WNYC.

The excursions are always a load of fun, and there are four left this year. Try to sign up here - they've probably filled up by now, but you never know.

If you want pictures, they're here, here, and here.

In-between

2009-08-01T14:59:00.009-04:00

I've always loved the areas that legally belong to one borough, but geographically to another. The most famous of these is Marble Hill - once part of Manhattan Island, the small neighborhood was cut off from it by the Harlem River Ship Canal in 1885, forming an island for the next 22 years until the creek separating it from the Bronx was filled in in 1917. Today it's got a 718 area code, but votes for Manhattan Borough President.

Another of these are the waterfront piers of Downtown Brooklyn and Red Hook. New York County has jurisdiction over the East River up to the bulkhead line of Brooklyn ("low water mark of the shore of Long Island" according to the New York consolidated law), leaving the piers technically governed by Manhattan.

A third I discovered after this walk through Ozone Park and Woodhaven. On the way to meet up with the Burn Some Dust crew for walk # 32 I headed across Conduit - a major road that cuts the street grid which can only be crossed about every 6 blocks or so - by way of Sutter Avenue to East New York. The difference was stark - neat rows of manicured lawns gave way to dilapidated houses and streets without drainage.

The thing was, I wasn't in East New York - I was still in Queens. The line between Brooklyn and Queens running from Howard Beach to East Williamsburg is the only major land border between two boroughs. While once fairly distinct demographically, the two boroughs have been sort of slowly bleeding into one another over this imaginary line during the last decade or two. Whereas in 1980, your average layperson would have been able to pinpoint where Bushwick becomes Ridgewood, or Cypress Hills becomes Woodhaven, today it's next to impossible if you don't know beforehand.

Where I happened to be, the demograhic and mental border between the two boroughs was definitely Conduit - if I'm a parent, I tell my kids not to cross Conduit Avenue. But the geographic and political border was a few blocks west, running down Ruby Street, and then across a few blocks to Sapphire. This led to a strange little area of no-man's land - Queens Census Tract 44:02.

The real interesting thing was that there was also a slight, but noticable difference between the Brooklyn and Queens sides of the line. On the Brooklyn side, stuff was a little better, and there was even a little bit of New Construction. The Queens side, however, looked like it had been completely neglected since about 1972. I can imagine what happened - Brooklyn thinks it's part of Queens, Queens thinks it's part of Brooklyn, and both boroughs completely neglect it. The result is definitely the absolute shoddiest area of town I've ever been to - if any location scouts out there are looking for a stereotypical 1970s, post-apocolyptic area to film in, head out to the triangle between Conduit, Linden, and Ruby.

Neighborhoods Walked: Lindenwood, East New York. Tracts Walked: Q44.02

Hollis

2009-07-29T22:35:00.005-04:00

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?

2009-07-19T16:46:00.004-04:00

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

2009-07-04T17:37:00.022-04:00

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

2009-07-03T16:01:00.014-04:00

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.

Little Korea

2009-05-24T23:34:00.014-04:00

First up in our analysis of the "Little Neighborhoods" is Little Korea. Little Korea is generally considered to be the stretch of restaurants, hotels, and other business that cater to the Korean community on 32nd street between 5th avenue and 6th avenue. Almost all the restaurants are open 24-7 (if you're a businessman who just flew in from Korea, lunchtime is 3:00 AM here), the Karaoke is always a blast, and there's a decent rooftop bar above the La Quinta Inn with a nice view of the Empire State.

Now, I can tell you with absolute certainty that the absolute largest number of Koreans that live on 32nd street between 5th and 6th is 21. Most data is only available at the Census Tracts level, which in Manhattan is generally an area of something like five North-South Blocks by two East-West blocks. However, questions asked of everyone on the short form - 100% data - go as far down as the individual block. This isn't a great geographic division - a "block" is one square block, not one street. For example, "Block 1005 of Census tract 76" is the south side of 32nd street, the west side of 5th Avenue, the north side of 31st street, and the East Side of Broadway, not 32nd street between 5th and 6th.

Still, we can amalgamate blocks 1003, 1004, 1005, and 1006 of Census Tract 76 to encompass the Little Korea strip, plus the north side of 31st, the south side of 33rd, the west side of 5th Avenue, all of Broadway, and and the east side of 6th Avenue between 31st and 33rd streets (outlined below - the Little Korea commercial strip is in Yellow).

What we find is that there are exactly 21 people who describe their race as "Asian," either alone or in conjunction with one or more other races. Now, even if all of these Asians were Korean, and all of them lived on 32nd street, that's still 6 less than the number of restaurants I counted. So I'm calling it now for "restaurants" in Little Korea.

To be fair, however, only 70 people total live in this area. So let's take a little bit broader look at the neighborhood. Even if you just stretch "Little Korea" across 5th Avenue to encompass 32nd street between Madison and 5th as well, adding another two blocks, it makes a difference.

Now the total population of Asians rises to 65 - more than the number of restaurants on the same stretch. Still, that's out of 296 people, for a grand total of a maximum 22% Korean. And that's assuming all Asians on 32nd street are Korean. While we don't have an exact count of Koreans until the census tract level, we can do some extrapolating. In Census Tracts 74 (which encompasses 32nd street between Madison and 5th) and 76 (which encompasses 32nd street between 5th and 6th) 23.7% of people who checked "Asian" also checked "Korean." Extrapolated down to the block level, it would mean only 15 Koreans on the stretch of 32nd street between Madison and 6th - way less than the number of restaurants.

However, what if we count the surrounding area as "Little Korea" as well? After all, 32nd street is a commercial street without a lot of residents in general. Since we have to go up to the Census Tract level to get data specifically for "Koreans," we can use Census tracts 74 and 76. That encompasses the area from 28th street to 35th street, between Madison and 6th, as you can see in the map below.
This is a very, very generous definition of Little Korea. Using this definition we get 365 Koreans out of 6205 people - or about 6%. That's higher than the percentage of Koreans in New York City as a whole, but much less than other tracts, such as Queens Tract 1161 in Flushing, which is almost 1/3 Korean. A still generous, but slightly more realistic definition would be Block Groups 1 of Tracts 74 and 76, which is 31st through 35th between Madison and 6th.

Here we have to do some extrapolating. There are 503 Asians in these block groups. Using the information we gathered before - that in these two Census Tracts 23.7% of Asians are Korean - we're left with 120 Koreans in this area. You could up that number somewhat based on the idea that the Korean community in these Census Tracts might be somewhat concentrated closer to 32nd street.

So what do we have? At most, a few hundred Koreans in the general vicinity of what is called "Little Korea," representing less than 10% of the population. Not completely insignificant, but certainly not anything to portray as a Korean Neighborhood, per se. It's even less than the 515 Korean residents that the tiny Little Korea in the Bronx had in 2000.

As you can see, doing this kind of micro-demographic analysis is an imperfect science for a lot of reasons. And we're not even getting into what kind of Koreans live in Little Korea - old or young, recent arrivals or third-generation citizens, rich or poor. Still, in a city that's as concentrated and changes from block to block as much as New York, it's an analysis you have to be able to do. How else are you going to support claims like "there's more Korean restaurants than Koreans in Little Korea?"

Next up - Little Brazil.

Neighborhoods: Little Korea. Tracts Walked: M76, M74

The Little Neighborhoods

2009-05-24T22:00:00.012-04:00

No, not the small neighborhoods - the ones that start with the word "Little." Over on my other blog I make the claim that "there are no Koreans in Little Korea, there are no Brazilians in Little Brazil, and there are definitely no Italians in Little Italy." I decided I should crunch the numbers for a claim like that, so we're going to check it out. Nate Silver would be proud. I'm also adding in Little Italy in the Bronx, Little India in the East Village, and a couple others that NYC & Co (the city's marketing arm) has invented for it's 9 in 09 campaign - Little Sri Lanka in Staten Island, and Woodlawn in the Bronx, which NYC & Co. insist is "Little Ireland."

Now, every New Yorker knows that while "Little This, That, or The Other" might not have people of that particular persuasion, is almost always has restaurants. So as part of this, one question I'm going to be answering for each neighborhood is "more restaurants, or more people?" My quick guesses:

Little Korea: more restaurants.
Little Italy: more restaurants.
Little Brazil: this is a tough one. More people. Both in single digits though.
Little Italy in the Bronx: more people.
Little Sri Lanka: more people.
Little India: more restaurants.
Woodlawn (Little Ireland): more people.

Now, the numbers will not be that accurate. These are all micro neighborhoods, meaning the largest (Woodlawn) is only 4 census tracts. We have to go all the way back to the 2000 census to get tract-level data, and we all know the city has changed a great deal since then. There are ways you can developed trending numbers based on the American Community Survey from 2007 and other sources, but not for such detailed data and small geographies. So keep in mind the question is not going to be "how many Italians are in Little Italy?" it's is going to be "how many Italians were in Little Italy in 2000?" And I'm going to be comparing this against the restaurants I count there in 2009, so the "more people or more restaurants" question won't be an entirely accurate comparison.

Second, there's the question of what constitutes someone who is "Korean" or "Italian" or "Brazilian." Is it someone who was born in the respective country? Someone who speaks the language? Someone who self-identifies as being of that particular ancestry? These are all questions asked on the census, and all questions that can be used to determine someone's ethnicity. Does a kid from Jersey whose great-grandparents were from Italy count as "Italian" if he's currently living in a Mulberry Street tenement with two of his NYU roommates? For purposes of this exercise, I'm going to be as liberal as possible in determining who is "Korean" or "Italian" or "Brazilian."

Third, we will have better data for some neighborhoods than others. This is because the Census gathers racial and certain ethnicity information on their short form that everyone gets, but gathers place-of-birth, language, and ancestry information from only the 1 in 6 households who get the longer form. The census bureau specifically counts "Korean" and "Asian Indian" as "races," but Italian, Irish, and Brazilian as ethnicities, so as a result we have 100% data for Koreans and Asian Indians, but only sample data for the others. Sri Lankan is interesting, because while the short form lists Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Asian Indian, Vietnamese, and Filipino as races under the "Asian and Pacific Islander" category, after that it goes to "Other Asian." So we have potential 100% data for Little Sri Lanka, but it has to be looked at pretty carefully.

We'll start with the easiest one, Little Korea, next post.

Ozone Park and Woodhaven

2009-05-03T16:20:00.004-04:00

Queens, as you may have heard, is the most diverse county in the United States. And there's a lot of interesting and vibrant areas that are a result of this diversity - generally concentrated in the Northwestern part of the Borough. It's always fun to go visit Jackson Heights or Astoria or Elmhurst and see what kind of stuff you run into. This vibrancy and energy is a far cry from 20 or 30 years ago, when the neighborhoods were much more monolithic.

There are, however, some other neighborhoods that are just as ethnically diverse but are far more boring. Just because people now hail from all over the globe doesn't mean the nondescript sidewalks and houses of Woodhaven and Ozone Park are that different from a generation ago. The faces are different, the neighborhood remains the same.

Boring doesn't mean bad - the area's certainly pleasant, just not really the type of place to go looking for anything of note. But I haven't walked the whole area - maybe I'm missing something right around the corner. Between the J-train and Forest park there's a lovely area of Victorians that remind me of similar areas in Flatbush. It's fairly high on my list of areas I'd like to live in if I ever decide the quasi-suburban life is for me.

Neighborhoods: Woodhaven, Ozone Park. Tracts Walked: Q8, Q10, Q12, Q14, Q16, Q18, Q32, Q34, Q36, Q38, Q40.01, 40.02, Q42, Q52, Q54, Q58

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3/4

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Numeric Extremes Walk, Part I

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Conflux Panel

City Line

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Brooklyn Map - August 2010

Bronx Map - August 2010

Canarsie

The City According to NY Magazine

Inspiration

Nooks and Crannies

Manhattan Progress - February 2008 through January 2010

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The Most Desolate Place in New York

Bronx Progress - February 2008 through January 2010

Brooklyn Progress - February 2008 through January 2010

Ohhh...We're halfway there!

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