Дэвид Бирн - Bicycle Diaries

A few days later I bike to East New York (a neighborhood in Brooklyn) to see one of my art chair pieces being powder coated. It is a technique used for painting industrial stuff like metal shelving and cabinets and aluminum siding, and it gives a very smooth finish—the idea being that this chair should look like it was mass-produced in a factory. The object goes into a chamber and then the air inside the chamber is filled with powdered paint that adheres evenly to the object, with no unsightly brushstrokes or drips.

Getting to this neighborhood I ride through the various Brooklyn ghettos—Dominican, West Indian, Hasidic, and black. By ghetto I don’t mean a poverty-stricken, desolate, or decaying area. I don’t necessarily mean that the area is black either. Some areas that might be considered ghettos are lively and flourishing. East New York, however, is pretty dicey. A friend was mugged here recently and forced to go into a bodega and buy a man some infant formula! At its worst the neighborhood looks like some of the very bleak places I’ve seen in the former Soviet bloc—derelict housing surrounded by crumbling industrial superstructures. (The elevated subway line looks like it hasn’t been painted in decades out here.) These signs of decay and ruin are interspersed with lots of churches, and huge temples relocated into former theaters. The official neglect is obvious and plain. We laugh at Borat, but we have our own Kazakhstan right here.

Having viewed enough stimulating squalor I decide to take the more conventionally scenic route home. I head toward the water, which is nearby, and ride along the bike path that follows the Belt Parkway along the Brooklyn waterfront. On my left are the swamps and marshes of Jamaica Bay. It’s not quite Nantucket, but it’s pretty damn nice—and it’s surprising that it’s inside the New York City limits. Today is a Saturday, and there are lots of people barbecuing. They have set up in the grassy areas at the side of the highway and even on the median strips. It would be almost lovely if the ugly highway weren’t so close.

I stop for scungilli (conch cooked in red sauce) at a place in Sheepshead Bay. There are picnic tables on the sidewalk and a window where one can order clams, oysters, and various kinds of seafood. This neighborhood is named after the tasty Sheepshead fish, so they say. It was once abundant, but now it’s gone from here. It was also known as sea bream.

I’m reminded that the other day I wanted to bike to Long Island City to catch an art show at PS1, but it was the day of the New York City Marathon and the Queensboro Bridge bike lane was closed (for handicapped runners they said, though it was completely empty). So I took the bike on the Roosevelt Island tram instead and rode down by the abandoned lunatic asylum on the south end of that island that sits in the middle of the East River. There was no one around. Spooky. From the tip of the island there’s a great view of the UN building and of a tiny rock island filled with cormorants—an odd thing to see in the middle of New York City.

Once I managed to get to Long Island City I stopped for a snack at a nice Hunters Point café and watched outside as the marathon cleanup crews picked up the piles of paper cups and tissues that had been handed out to the runners. The streets ran bright yellow with Gatorade—it looked like the marathon ers had all peed themselves after taking lots of vitamins. A few stragglers limped and walked by. I wondered to myself if I would be privileged to see the very last person in the race—a sight rarer and much harder to establish than whoever turns out to be first. I thought I saw him. It was a man in a multicolored head wrap who had a few days’ growth of beard, his marathon number was askew, and I thought he might have been smoking a cigarette as he made his way up the street, listing slightly toward the curb.

How We Doin’?

New York has a surprising number of lovely bike paths, as distinct from bike lanes. This stretch is in Upper Manhattan.

This route goes almost all the way to the top of the island, where there is a nice park on the very tip of Manhattan in the Inwood neighborhood. There’s also a great route along the Staten Island boardwalk that lines that borough’s Atlantic beaches. It runs for miles, from the Verrazano Bridge and Gateway Park south. There are no cars, and there are a couple of places to eat. The beaches are surprisingly clean and some are even secluded. (The secluded ones are not so clean; I guess one can’t have it all.)

In Brooklyn, besides the previously mentioned path along the wetlands near East New York (which can also be ridden out to the Rockaways), there is a path along the water from Bay Ridge that leads one under the Verrazano Bridge out to Coney Island. It does, unfortunately, have a highway on one side, but the view of the harbor on the other side makes up for it. And one is rewarded with a Latin band playing on the Coney Island boardwalk on summer weekends.

The Old Crazy New York II

My friend Paul is playing bass and singing at a Village bar/ pizza joint, so I stop by to say hello. Arturo’s is a weird combination of two throwbacks in one: It’s a jazz bar, where regulars sing standards and musicians often stop by after a recording session or a paying gig and sit in. It’s also a neighborhood pizza restaurant (the pizzas are quite good) that is friendly, noisy, and slightly chaotic.

The owner, whom I’ve never met, fills the walls with his paintings. There are some odd-looking portraits and some typical Greenwich Village scenes of charming tree-lined streets. The owner’s daughter Lisa is often there and says hello. I ask her what’s up with the funky airplane models hanging from the ceiling and she says her dad decided no more paintings; he’s going to do airplane models now.

Arturo’s is a neighborhood joint. There are a lot of regulars. It’s not the sort of place that would ever attract the attention of serious foodies or get mentioned in the new trendy guides to New York City. The piano sits smack in the middle of the front room at the end of the bar, which forces the upright bass player to squeeze into a corner. A drummer sometimes joins them on a rudimentary kit made up of a snare, a high hat, and one cymbal. He has to squeeze over on the other side of the piano and he almost blocks the entrance to the kitchen. Singers grab a hand mic that rests on top of the piano and often have to dodge waiters and customers who want to use the restroom in back, which has a bathtub in it. A big one. I wonder how many people have fallen into it, or if the staff sometimes decides to have a hot bath.

A pear-shaped woman begins to sing, to enthusiastic applause. Someone mentions to me that she is the mother of Savion Glover, the famous tap dancer. I can see the resemblance, in her face at least. Her hair is a mixture of black and gray and is wound in a tight vortex, like Kim Novak’s in the movie Vertigo. She sings a standard, and she’s great, astounding even.

She sings another song and then sits down at a nearby booth with some friends. The pianist shows Paul some chord charts then sits in the booth behind the singer, near the kitchen door. He begins furiously focusing on some music scores he has with him, spreading them out across the tabletop. He’s suddenly oblivious to the scene.