Urban Gadabout: Newark Bay or bust! (Is there anyone else whose pulse is sent racing by the prospect?)

A nice overview of the waters in and around New York City (which is in light gray), pretty much all really inlets of the Atlantic Ocean: 1. Hudson River; 2. East River, though the number indicates the wilder upper portion, which has more in common with -- 3. Long Island Sound, to the east (between Long Island and Connecticut); 4. Newark Bay; 5. Upper New York Bay, and on the other side of the Verrazano Narrows -- 6. Lower New York Bay; 7. Jamaica Bay (that big purple splotch along its shore being JFK Airport); 8. Atlantic Ocean. Newark Bay (4) connects via the Kill Van Kull (to the northwest of Staten Island) to the Upper Bay and via the Arthur Kill (to the southwest of Staten Island) to Raritan Bay, at the bottom-left corner of the map.

by Ken

Here's the news in a nutshell: a New York Harbor tour that targets . . . Newark Bay!

I realize it's a pretty small subset of readers who will share even a fraction of my excitement about this news. Newark Bay? The more or less inland harbor -- hidden from view from the outer coast by the big land blob that is Staten Island -- that is the, the industrial hub of North Jersey? Would it help to think of it as the maritime heart of Sopranos country?

It's still not exactly glamorous, but Newark Bay is now where the hottest action of New York Harbor, since despite its remove from the open ocean, thanks to diligent dredging of the Kill Van Kull and Arthur Kill, its outlets to that ocean, it can handle all many of the larger ocean-going freight vessels, and its western shore gives them access to the North American mainland, a major saving in shipping costs.

Maybe it's just this thing I've developed, this late-life fascination with the real geography of the harbor,now going beyond the obvious part that's on display from the Battery (the southern edge of Manhattan Island) and from the New York City Department of Transportation's gift to harbor hounds, the Staten Island Ferry. That's the Upper Harbor, 5 on the map --

* lying between Manhattan to the north, Brooklyn to the east, Staten Island to the south, and New Jersey (north to south: Hoboken, Jersey City, and Bayonne) on the west;

* with Governors Island sitting just south of Manhattan and east of Brooklyn, and with Liberty and Ellis Islands just east of the New Jersey coast;

* and with the Hudson River projecting north on the west side of Manhattan, separating it from New Jersey;

* and the East River to the east of Manhattan, separating it from Brooklyn (spanned in these lower reaches by the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg Bridges) and as it continues northward separating Manhattan and the Bronx from Queens;

* and just visible from standard Upper Bay outposts, the Kill Van Kull separating Staten Island on the northwest from New Jersey (with views from some angles of the Bayonne Bridge over the kill);

Nowadays there seem to be all sorts of boats cruising the upper harbor, and I've done those tours. Mostly, though, they seem to be about what you do besides harbor-viewing, like dinner, or brunch, or fireworks (or sailing on a yacht, or a sailboat, or . . .). In the summer there's now free ferry service to Governors Island. (In fact I'm headed to Governors Island tomorrow.)

I've been trying to fill in my picture of the harbor and the coastline. To the east I did my pilgrimage to Plum Beach, Brooklyn (on Rockaway Inlet, more or less midway between 6 and 7), to observe horseshoe crabs with Urban Park Ranger Andrew. Farther east I took advantage of an Urban Park Rangers walk along Rockaway Beach, and still farther east there was a Shorewalkers walk along Jones Beach.

Farther up the East River, I seized the opportunity of a Municipal Art Society walk to get a close-up view, and actually walk over, Newtown Creek, which forms four-plus miles of the border between Brooklyn (to the south) and Queens (to the North), the NYC boroughs that occupy the western end of Long Island.

For the harbor itself, for Jane's Walk weekend in May, the tour I chose took me to the north shore of Staten Island, with a good view of the working harbor, even on a Sunday -- you're reminded that ships don't get "days off" while they're at sea and under intense pressure to make their schedules), including my best view as of then of the Kill Van Kull separating Staten Island and New Jersey, including a pretty good view of the Bayonne Bridge spanning the kill.

By now it should be clear that a major role in the geography of the southern part of the harbor is played by Staten Island, and for that reason, and also for my shocking ignorance of this borough of the city of New York, I've been undertaking a sort of crash course in Staten Island, taking advantage of Municipal Arts Society tours to Snug Harbor, on the Kill Van Kull shore (though we didn't get much of a view of the water): Tottenville, on Raritan Bay, at the southern tip of the island (to which I recently returned for the Second Annual Raritan Bay Festival), and Stapleton Heights. (In fact, I'm about to head out to an MAS tour of the budding cultural scene in Staten Island's St. George.)

In my mind, at least, all of this was pointing me toward -- what else? -- Newark Bay, but I honestly had no idea how I might tackle it as a destination. That is, until I was, as usual, perusing the week's listings in Time Out New York and found myself staring at this listing:

Hidden Harbor Tour: Newark Bay Tour

South Street Seaport, Pier 16, Tue 6:15pm. Fulton St (at South St)
(866) 977-6998circlelinedowntown.com
Subway: A, C to Broadway-Nassau St; J, M, Z, 2, 3, 4, 5 to Fulton StGet directions
$29, seniors $22, children $15

As one of three of its New York Harbor tours, this trip around Newark Bay on Circle Line's Zephyr includes views of the Red Hook Container Terminal and Bayonne Bridge, a passage through Kill Van Kull, which divdes Staten Island and New Jersey, and an exploration of the busy container ports across the water.

Sure enough, the Circle Line Downtown website lists the three Hidden Harbor Tours:

Tour 1 - The Newark Bay Tour
Feauturing the Kill Van Kull, Bayonne Bridge and The Giant Container Ports of Newark Bay

Tour 2 - The Brooklyn Tour
Featuring Brooklyn's Maritime Heritage & Future - Brooklyn Navy Yard to Sunset Park

Tour 3- North River Tour
The Changing Waterfront of North River - Passengers Ships to Kayaks

There are much more detailed descriptions of each onsite. Still-to-come dates for the Newark Bay Tour, in addition to July 12, are August 9 and September 13; for the Brooklyn Tour, July 26 and September 27; and for the North River Tour, August 23. If there was any financial advantage to booking all three tours, which I was certainly prepared to do, I couldn't find any trace of any, but you better believe I went ahead and booked Tuesday's epic trip to Newark Bay.

Luckily for me, I work within walking distance of Pier 16, so with just a little fudging I'll be able to make that 6:15 departure. I've already printed my ticket, but I'm still supposed to be there 30 minutes before departure time. Can you tell that I'm excited?

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Urban Gadabout: Back from Tottenville!

Alas, the Pavilion at Conference House Park was used as a stage for the "musicians," and so was off limits to us Second Annual Raritan Bay Festivalgoers.

by Ken

So I really did it, and it all went off without a hitch -- the subway to South Ferry, the 10:30 Staten Island Ferry to St. George, the Staten Island Railway all to the end, at Tottenville, the walk to the Conference House Park Visitors Center for the Second Annual Raritan Bay Festival.

It's a good thing I'd been in the Pavilion at Conference House Park on my previous expedition to Tottenville. We ate our bag lunches in the Pavilion -- in the rain -- on that Municipal Art Society tour last month (link for Municipal Art Society tours: mas.org/tours/) led by the remarkable Justin Ferate, without whom I would never have gotten to Tottenville once, let alone wanted to go back, or actually known where the heck I was going. As I explained last night, the view from the Pavilion was so reduced by the dreadful weather conditions that I could hardly see anything.

Today the weather held pretty well. There was a threat of showers, and from time to time the puffy white clouds gave way to gray ones of varying intensity, but mostly it was okay. So today I could see that what I thought looked like a view of the open ocean, but was really Raritan Bay, was no such thing -- the low visibility simply lopped off the Monmouth County shoreline. (Also, I have to say that Perth Amboy, across the Arthur Kill from Tottenville, looks more picturesque in the mist and gray.) Oh yes, the reason I was glad we'd made it to the Pavilion on that first trip: It was closed off to festivalgoers, to be used as a stage for the, er, musicians (I guess any group of people holding noise-making devices attached to amplifiers and speakers qualify as "musicians") scheduled throughout the afternoon.

This time, however, I made it down onto the beach, where I gave a wide beth to the kiddie kayaking that seemed to be drawing most of the crowd that had arrived in the first hour, in favor of the half-hour horseshoe-crab walk offered every hour by a smart fellow from the Staten Island Museum. (This seems to be my horseshoe-crab season.) I scored some cool literature from the tables of the aforementioned Staten Island Museum and a couple of other interesting-themed organizations (even including a free DVD from one, just for signing up for their e-mail list), and by then I'd been there an hour and decided I'd pretty well "done" the festival, and realized I was probably within striking distance of the S78 bus, which I'd scouted on my way to the park and which would take me close to the train station -- and which came exactly, and I mean exactly at the posted schedule time, 1:07, though I didn't take it all the way, realizing that (a) I would wind up getting to the station way too early for the next train, and (b) I would be deprived of the opportunity to fortify myself with some local victuals.

So I got off at the corner of Amboy Road and Main Street, which passes for a bustling intersection in Tottenville, and bought some local specialties at the Main St. Deli -- Sprite Zero and a Little Debbie peach pie (we urban gadabouts know that while gadding you need to provision yourself to last at least to the next deli). Then I walked on to the station and made the reverse trip again without a hitch. Since I was going to be home so much earlier than I expected, and from the ferry terminal had the whole of the city at my (and my unlimited MetroCard's) disposal, I did allow myself an only slightly out-of-the-way detour to Manganaro's Hero-Boy on Ninth Avenue between 37th and 38th. It was easy to set my sights on s chicken parmigiana hero. The agonizing part -- all the way from the ferry terminal to Manganaro's, in particular the walk from Seventh Avenue to Ninth -- was whether to eat in, as I normally do, or get the sandwich to go, so I could really celebrate the early return. (It was a tough call, but in the end I chose the "to go" option.)

Total travel time, deducting the added stopovers, was just over seven hours door to door. Which means roughly six hours traveling for one hour of festival. Is that a good ratio? You might not think so, but I thought it was a pretty swell adventure.

And the sandwich was, as always, wonderful. You'd think you wouldn't want to schlepp a chicken parmigiana hero around for another 45 minutes, but in fact, great as it is when you eat it freshly made and hot, when you let it sit like that, so it cools off and gets a little mooshy, it's just as good. The flavors mingle or something.


SPEAKING OF TRAVELS . . .

Howie has a post up on his Around the World Blog about his further adventures in Kathmandu, "Kathmandu Essentials: Flying, Breathing, Eating."

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Urban Gadabout: To the end of the island (Staten) -- I'm headed back to Tottenville (weather permitting)

If you look out onto the water from Conference House Park in Tottenville, at the southern tip of Staten Island, you can imagine you're looking onto the open Atlantic Ocean, but off to the east skinny Sandy Hook juts northward from the Monmouth County shoreline, forming the eastern boundary of Raritan Bay. (For a larger view, click on the map.)

by Ken

If you don't have anything planned tomorrow between noon and 5pm, plus whatever travel time it would take you to get to Tottenville, at the southern tip of State Island, why not hie on down for the Second Annual Raritan Bay Festival?

It's going to be quite a schlepp for me from the northern reaches of Manhattan -- upwards of three hours if I do it the cheap way, by subway to South Ferry, Staten Island Ferry to St. George, the full length of the Staten Island Railway to Tottenville, then a 15-minute walk to the Conference House Park Visitors Center at Hyland Boulevard and Satterlee Street. I can cut a chunk of time off if instead I catch the X-1 express bus from Lower Manhattan across the Verrazanno Narrows Bridge, connecting with the S78 bus on Hylan Boulevard virtually to within a block of the Visitors Center, but I have to be prepared to spend the $5.50 express-bus fare.

THE "CONFERENCE" IN THE CONFERENCE HOUSE

A conference took place there on Sept. 11, 1776, in the hope of resolving the unpleasantness (you may have heard of it -- the American Revolutionary War) between the newly-declared-independent Americans and their erstwhile colonial masters, the British. The Americans were represented by Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Edward Rutledge; the British, by their military commander in America, Admiral Lord Richard Howe, who was then occupying the house of Col. Christopher Billopp, which had been built in 1680 by his grandfather, British naval Capt. Christopher Billopp. (That's a reenactment in the photo, not the original event!) The conference doesn't seem to have accomplished anything. After the war, the actively Tory Billopp family was stripped of its properties.

Actually, I'm kind of looking forward to doing the walk between the SIR station and Conference House Park in at least one direction, which will be retreading old ground, from a Municipal Art Society walking tour to Tottenville led by the inexhaustibly knowledgeable Justin Ferate, on which we actually got to the Pavilion in Conference House Park, and also in the course of our tour visited a stunning private home where we got to meet a special guest, the preeminent historian of State Island, Barnett Shepherd, author of the 2010-published Tottenville: The Town the Oyster Built, published by the Tottenville Historical Society. (To put it another way, or maybe more or less the same way, the town was built on, and prospered from, the rich harvest of oysters in surrounding waters in the 19th century, until pollution put an end to its oyster trade.) Barnett had had quite a schlepp himself -- from the other side of the island, we were told, on an island that developed as a plethora of separate communities, where it's frequently not so easy to get from there to here.

On the May MAS Tottenville walking tour we made it to the Pavilion in Conference House Park at the southern edge of Staten Island, with a view across the Arthur Kill (separating Staten Island and New Jersey) of Perth Amboy, NJ.

The one downside to that trip was the weather, which was mostly rotten. By the time we got to Conference House Park, the overcast and mist were so heavy that, while we could see across the Arthur Kill, which separates Staten Island from the North American mainland, to picturesque Perth Amboy, NJ, we couldn't see much else, and it wasn't exactly an ideal day for exploring the shorefront.

A ferry used to join Tottenville to Perth Amboy, nestled between the Arthur Kill and the Raritan River ("perhaps the major drainage channel along the ice front throughout the Wisconsin glaciation," according to Wikipedia) Now they're linked by the Outerbridge Crossing, whose name derives not from a geographical description, as most of us initially suppose, but from Staten Island resident Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge, the first chairman of the Port of New York Authority. It's called "crossing," it was explained to us, because how goofy would "Outerbridge Bridge" sound? There are decent views of the bridge from the Tottenville railway station, by the way.

The Outerbridge Crossing over Arthur Kill, from Tottenville

For tomorrow the Conference House Park Conservancy is promising 45-minute shoreline walking tours (hourly, at 12:30, 1:30, 2:30, and 3:30) plus "local musicians on two stages, crafts, exhibitions from maritime organizations and historic societies, and plenty of entertainment for children, including a petting zoo and water rides."

Provided the weather cooperates, of course. I mean, I've already seen the view from the Conference House Park in crappy weather, and it's not worth six hours' combined travel time for that again! (At the moment, NY1.org is holding out: "Morning clouds/fog. Partly sunny in the afternoon. Spot thunderstorms." Uh-oh.)

An aerial view of the Pavilion in Conference House Park

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So what did you do for your Jane's Walk free(!) walk this weekend?

"The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations."

-- Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American
Cities, the epigraph on the 2011 Jane's Walk USA website

by Ken

Really, I'd be curious to know what people did and saw around the country in this weekend of free walks (yes, free!) celebrating and keeping alive the memory of that pioneer of modern urban life Jane Jacobs (1916-2006), author most famously of The Death and LIfe of Great American Cities, timed to her birthday (which was Wednesday).

On the Jane's Walk USA website there's a list of 25 cities represented this year: Anchorage, Austin, Baton Rouge, Brunswick (ME), Boston, Chattanooga, Heber Valley (UT), Houston, Jackson (MS), Kansas City (MO), Mesa (AZ), New Orleaans, New York City, Oakland (CA), Orange (NJ), Philadelphia, Phoenix, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Scranton, Syracuse (NY), Tempe (AZ), and Waterbury (CT).

On the actual birthday, the Municipal Art Society has an annual tour, "Her Village," in which architectural historian Matt Postal leads participants through sites associated with Jane's life and causes in the neighborhood. We wound up in front of the modest little three-story house on Hudson Street (down the block from the White Horse Tavern) which she and her husband, Robert, bought and in which they raised their two sons and a daughter until pulling up stakes for Toronto in 1968, unwilling to allow the coming-of-age Jacobs boys to be subject to the draft for the Vietnam War, which they vehemently opposed.

I think my very first MAS tour was one of Matt's, which remains one of my all-time favorites from a "concept" standpoint: a walkthrough of a project that never got built, thanks in part to the activism of Jane Jacobs. It was the legendary Robert Moses's first major defeat, planned as another of his slash-and-destroy neighborhood-killers, the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have provided a direct vehicular link between the Holland Tunnel on the west and the East River bridges to Brooklyn on the east, at the cost of a neighborhood filled with the kind of people that neither Moses nor the business community that supported him cared about.

Every time Moses was pushed back, he came back with an altered version of the plan, until finally community groups discovered -- with Jane Jacobs playing a major role -- that they really could fight City Hall. (Moses wore so many public hats that fighting him was in effect fighting a united wall of bureaucracies.) The strategic breakthroughs involved in the LME fight(s) included organizing community resistance and finding ways, normally (necessarily) through the standard media, to make a "story" of that opposition.

It was a stark reminder of the gulf between Robert Moses's way of looking at cities and Jane Jacobs's. If you look at Moses's plans for the city of the future, you see high-rise buildings containing hermetically sealed dwellings that the dwellers leave only to go to their cars to drive on Moses's highways to . . . well, destinations, including Moses's parks and other recreation facilities. Left out was any kind of human interaction, any kind of community -- the very thing that counted for so much in Jacobs's thinking, that and the idea that people living and working in neighborhoods are entitled to a say about the use made of their neighborhoods.

Jane famously loved low-rise buildings with stoops, which encourage neighborhood interaction, and buildings with stairs rather than elevators. She was an obsessive observer, getting out in the field, seeing what made neighborhoods work, what made them active and vital, and what made them work less well. She was correspondingly distrustful of top-down planning by people who didn't know, or often didn't care, how people actually live their lives.

My only regret about the Jane's Walk weekend was how many interesting-looking tours were scheduled in New York which I wasn't able to go on. I was out of commission Saturday because I wasn't going to be deterred from another Queens tour led by Jack Eichenbaum, with whom I've done both New York Transit Museum and Municipal Art Society tours and last week his own spectacular all-day "World of the #7 Train" tour (for which in the end he had to turn away eight would-be registrants). I didn't imagine I'd have another opportunity to walk "The Right-of-Way of the Flushing Central Rail Road" (under the auspices of the Queens Historical Society), which for some seven years in the 1870s connected Flushing to Hempstead, Long Island, and which "lives on in a swath of parkland and streets," of which we walked the portion from Flushing to Fresh Meadows.

BY THE WAY, JACK EICHENBAUM HAS A WHOLE
SERIES OF QUEENS TOURS COMING UP

One of the things that makes Jack, as an "urban geographer," such an interesting tour leader (he's the current Queens borough historian, by the way) is his fascination with how and why areas and neighborhoods have developed and continue to develop, and one of his current fascinations is the incredibly rapid evolution of Long Island City in the wake of a major zoning overhaul by the city. He has five tours of the area coming up: next weekend ("Daylight Loft Buildings in Long Island City," Saturday, May 14, and "Long Island City Shoreline to the Noguchi Museum," Sunday, May 15), the following Wednesday evening ("Queensboro Plaza to the Waterfront at Sunset," May 18), and the following weekend ("Long Island City Studio Strolls," Saturday and Sunday, May 21 and 22). The sunset walk to the waterfront is also part of an extensive series of Wednesday-evening tours Jack is doing from May through July under the heading "Changing Cultures of Queens: A Walking Anthology," including "Flushing's Chinatown" (this Wednesday, May 11) and "Sunnyside to Jackson Heights" (May 25).

They're all $15, and no advance reservations are required. For more information, check Jack's website.

THE JANE'S WALK I FINALLY CHOSE FOR TODAY


In addition to the Saturday Jane's Walks I couldn't take, but tried to keep track of in case maybe someday I can try to do them on my own, there were a number on Sunday I might have done, but in the end I opted for "The Draw of a Vibrant Waterfront," a tour organized by two New York Harbor-obsessed bloggers, Will Van Dorp (of Tugster, recently profiled in nytimes.com's City Room), an English professor by day who thinks of the vast working New York Harbor as the city's "sixth borough"; and Christina Sun (of Bowsprite), an artist whose passion is directed toward the people who work the harbor -- people who are mostly from someplace else. On a picture-perfect day, with just enough clouds to add drama to the blue sky, our small but hardy band took the noon Staten Island Ferry (it was a difficult decision, knowing how unpunctual people are these days, to depart on time rather than wait the half-hour till the next ferry), then headed west from the St. George Ferry Terminal along the north shore of Staten Island, with spectacular views of the Upper Bay from the Kill van Kull (which separates Staten Island from New Jersey) on the west to the distant Brooklyn shore on the east.

As excited as I was by my recent Municipal Art Society outing to Staten Island's Snug Harbor Cultural Center, farther around the bend on the Kill van Kull, I had one regret: that of necessity, by taking the short bus ride from the ferry, we zoomed past that magnificent shoreline. So I couldn't resist returning in the company of people who could help point me at and explain what there was to see from that wonderful vantage point, and Will and Christina (and their tugboat-savvy friend Burke) were splendid guides -- and our small group included terrifically interesting people. I had a grand time.

Thanks to Will and Christina. And thanks of course to Jane.

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