»"Surely nothing on earth ..."

Francis X. Clines has a meditative editorial on cycling Manhattan in yesterday's New York Times.

Happily, Clines points out one of the most enjoyable aspects of urban cycling: "... storefront bars can be found for cold beer or hot coffee."

January 12, 2004
THE CITY LIFE

Rounding the Island, on Wheels
By FRANCIS X. CLINES

Urban biker's appropriately abrupt diary: begin tour by checking out familiar landmarks. The wild turkey dubbed Giuliani is still pecking around unharmed in the bushes up from the bike path on Riverside Drive. (Bird seems overfed by West Side liberals, and badly named — more resembling Ed Koch, as mayoral stares and prancings go.) Back on the bike, and zipping past the Amiable Child Memorial (5-year-old lad fell to his death in 1797, when New York was more rural than urban-wild). Soon shifting gears to curl down and around onto one of the modern wonders of Manhattan: the Waterfront Greenway bike path that circumvents the island by shoreline. Splendid. Most shocking, it is perfectly sign-marked; no way to miss a turn. Whoever heard of such consideration in New York? Must be a new and cunning biker's lobbyist at City Hall.

You don't need one of those Spider-Man designer costumes or racks of water bottles, as if traversing the Gobi. Scruffy is fine enough on a New York winter morning. "Watch it," works better as a caution to a pedestrian than the imperious "On your right!" that is standard elsewhere. The Hudson, Harlem and East Rivers ripple past, dark waters fiercely defining terra firma. The path unfolds north, east, south, the biker with a sense of pedaling upward into a simple, exhilarating city escape. "Surely nothing on earth of its kind can go beyond this show," Whitman said of his own Manhattan tour, and his summary works as well by bike as by boat.

Wheeling up to and under the George Washington Bridge, so high its traffic hum does not overwhelm the slapping sound of the river. Temptations abound: the Cloisters for a medieval detour? The great brownstone side streets of still another Harlem renaissance? The Bronx looms, salt of the city earth, half-finished as ever. The few forced veerings from the shore — down St. Nicholas Avenue, later dodging the United Nations — are a perfect respite: storefront bars can be found for cold beer or hot coffee. Studying passing faces on the sidewalk fuels the race back to more sights on the river.

Just across the water, there is beloved, beleaguered Queens, packed as ever with strivers. Green and stony Brooklyn glistens, its spirit arching like its bridge. Sea winds whirl round the jutting Battery, making the bike feel mortal-heavy; but then transcendent light at the sudden sight of distant pedestrians, small and still as architects' pin-people. They stare down on the island's trade center scars. The Hudson mercifully rushes on like time, escaping city history as much as explaining it to the laboring biker. Sights clash in review: the aircraft carrier ludicrously displaced at the peaceful midtown shore. The buckled and rusted skeletons of old terminals leaning wanly toward the river. They dodge extinction uptown, as dedicatedly as the biker.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company