Walking Brooklyn

I mentioned yesterday that my walk through Brooklyn on Saturday was a much calmer event than most of my walks through Durham. Here's what i'm thinking.

As the comedian Steven Wright once said, "any place is walking distance if you have enough time." And we had plenty of time. We started out around 10 am on Pearl St. in lower Manhattan, and walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. The Bridge itself is about 3/4 mile long; add in the pedestrian access areas, and you're talking between a mile and a mile and quarter. Google puts the whole trip by car at about 5.3 miles; figure on foot all together it was about 5 miles total.

First, entering and exiting the bridge on foot felt completely safe. The sidewalks started and ended where you expected them to, and the walkway across the bridge was separated from vehicular traffic. Compare that to the bridge across I-85 at Duke Street, for example, or crossing I-40 on foot near Southpoint. Both of those are shorter walks than the one across the East River that thousands of people make every day. But the feeling that you are taking your life in your hands to walk across either of those keeps the number of pedestrians down in the single or low double digits on a daily basis.

Our walk varied from the route highlighted on the map. We crossed under the BQE (I-278) at Navy St., turned right on Flushing Ave. and walked along the old Navy Yards, crossed under the BQE again near Kent St., turned left on Bedford, and followed Bedford all the way to N. 8th St. We crossed under the BQE a 4th time on Bedford (at the "31" marker), and also crossed under the Williamsburg Bridge overpass. As you can see from the pictures in the post below, it's not the most beautiful walk i've ever taken. It's all concrete, chain link fences, and a sense of aging. Leaving out, of course, the hole in the space-time continuum that is Williamsburg from roughly Hewes St. to Division Ave. To walk those blocks on a Saturday morning is, literally, to enter a time and place so different from any other in the United States as to defy description. Details in the comments if you want them.

But, getting back to more, ahem, pedestrian concerns, even crossing under the Expressway and bridge overpasses four or five times never felt dark or threatening. There were other people out walking, even in the most abandoned feeling blocks. Cars drove the speed limit (30 mph), yielded to pedestrians at crosswalks. At one point, a driver turned and was headed the wrong way on one-way Bedford Ave. At first, a few people waved to call his attention to the fact. When he ignored them and continued driving the wrong way, the mood changed from concern to anger, and people stepped in front of the car to get him turned around before anyone got hurt. I guess he was only going a few blocks and didn't want to make the big loop.

The biggest difference between Brooklyn and Durham, though, was the noise. Figure roughly 200 to 250 cars passed on surface streets during our two and a half hour walk. That doesn't include cars on the Expressway, obviously. That's a far lower number than would pass during a walk from, say I-85 to Brightleaf Square along Gregson or Duke. And of those, only one was playing a sound system loud enough to be heard on the sidewalk, fifteen feet away. Just one. On an average Sunday afternoon, if i'm in my backyard 100 feet from Avondale Drive, i can count between 15 and 20 times an hour that sound systems loud enough to rattle my windows drive by. Hell, some of these are loud enough than i can hear them over my lawnmower while i'm cutting what remains of the grass in the back yard. Why is it that Durham can't figure out how to minimize this problem?

As nice as it might be, i don't expect to see the kind of change here that i saw on Bedford Ave., which, when i lived on N. 8th St. in the 80s had a couple of pizza places and convenience stores, and now has, between Division Ave. and N. 11th St., about 30 sidewalk cafes, sushi, Thai, fusion, eclectic restaurants, a couple of bars, real estate offices, and, believe it or not, two apparently thriving record stores selling CDs and music. I know the population density in Durham isn't high enough to support that kind of commerce. But really, can't we figure out a way to encourage people in cars to drive the speed limit, respect people who are not in cars, and consider that not everyone in the entire city is interested in hiring them as a DJ at any point in time?

Is that really so hard?

(Oh, by the way, brunch at Juliette's for the four of us, including 7 bloody mary's, came to well under a hundred bucks with tax. Some of the on-line reviews for this place have been less than kind, but i'll say that our service was impeccable, and the banana-stuffed French toast was superb.)