This coming Sunday is the New York Marathon, and if, unlike me, this is something you can enjoy either on the sidelines cheering on a family member or a friend who has been lucky enough to win a spot in this world class foot race, or watching the highlights on the local network coverage, more power to ya! This race and others like them: NYC bike race, Staten Island half marathon, Staten Island bike race, or even the innocuous sounding Bay Street restaurant walk, drive me to distraction.
Now, runners come from all over the world to take part in this event. We even meet them at the Tourist Kiosk at the Staten Island Ferry where I work on Thursdays. We had one gentleman and his wife from Finland who stopped by last week to scope out the best way to get to the starting point at the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. God help me, I had to tell him to take the ferry and get on one of those damn buses that block my personal building egress along with his wife and his whole retinue of cheering Finnish fans. I hope THEY have fun! I will be sulking on my terrace, shaking my fist, muttering under my breath, and eating pancakes...I will actually have the time to make them this Sunday.
So, in preparation for this event, today I made my own two and a half hour 'round the city touring event hitting all five boroughs in the process...well...mostly the edges of the city, as I drove from Staten Island through Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx to get to an appointment in Mount Vernon. On the way back I toured the bubonic parts of the Bronx, Queens...mostly highway, back through Brooklyn and home over the VZ Bridge. And, boy, how the place is still strangely familiar, yet also eerily different!
Across the bridge and through the tunnel up the East Side, Willis Avenue Bridge, and through the Bronx on the way up through Yonkers and onto Mount Vernon. To get home it was down the Hutch, across the Whitestone onto the LIE and the dreaded BQE, a nightmare no matter when one is on it, under the promenade and back across the VZ.
The familiar neighborhoods are there: Bay Ridge, Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights, Bushwick, Williamsburg, the East Village, Hell's Kitchen, Murray Hill, Upper Eastside (where I went to college), past the Stadium...Yankee for you who need the reference, Fordham, City Island, Co-Op City, Flushing, Whitestone, Maspeth...all looking so very familiar, yet so very different with new skinny glass apartment buildings popping up all over pointing ever upwards and casting new shadows on old neighbors. These new edifices all seem to be struggling to peer over their older neighbors to see the water, the skyline or a patch of urban green offered by something as simple as a park or even a cemetary.....any green will do.
I remember when my parents finally moved from Brooklyn to Connecticut. My Dad said he had finally gotten out of Brooklyn and had happily bought a nice condo apartment in his beloved Danbury. I said, "Pop, you couldn't afford to live in Brooklyn." It was true then, and it is still true today.
You know that old adage, "You can't go home again."? Well, you can, but you need to bring money.
