"Will Walk For Food...": Ahh--The Sporting Life (Third Day, Third Leg)

From "The Frying Pan"... into the rest of our walk south along the Hudson. Very quickly, we strolled down to 23rd Street and Chelsea Piers, which was really the first salvo by the "forces of good" to clean up and "re-purpose" (love that word) the piers that once lined the river from Greenwich Village all the way up to the 120s when commerce was the waterway's main function, probably well into the 1950s. I believe that OG and I were still happily living in the Village when Chelsea Piers was first opened. As "the sporting life" really isn't my thing, I paid little attention to the warren of indoor sports arenas (for basketball, hockey, ice and roller-skating, even wall climbing), but I vividly recalled OG's ears perking up when I casually mentioned that one interesting feature of Chelsea Piers was a golf driving range.

Now, I may "walk for food" but the OG will crawl anywhere for golf. You can imagine how difficult it was for him, when we were living our idyll in the city -- the poor fellow would be up before the birds (sometimes at 4:00 a.m.) to drive way out into the wilds of Brooklyn (where the mighty Atlantic pounds the shores of Ris Park) for a 6:30 a.m. tee-off time on a course that lay over a garbage dump.

No surprise that I found myself lugging a bucket of balls and a driver over to the OG's little slice of heaven on the Hudson. I thought, for sure, we'd be whacking balls out into the waves. But, no...they had actually built a patch of green on a pier that was totally covered in netting, thus protecting the Circle Line and all other ocean-going vessels coming into or leaving the harbor. Not protecting them from my feeble attempts to hit golf balls.

I have to confess that this was not my finest hour. I have fairly good hand-eye coordination and am pretty consistent at making steady contact on the tennis courts, but the racket's net surface is a mite larger than the surface of a golf club head. And, those fuzzy, usually yellow and pretty LARGE tennis balls are surely an easier target than those puny puckered white spheres that golfers go "ga ga" over. I whiffed some many more time than connected, and probably looked so contorted in the effort, that it was more akin to Seinfeld's Elaine dancing--and likely as hysterical.

The one part of Chelsea Piers I did find interesting is the TV studios that take up a good portion of the southern end of the complex. That is, until I was invited to be part of the studio audience of a show that was filming there back in the 1990s. It was the Michael J. Fox comedy "Spin City" probably in the second season. I have always been a huge Michael J. Fox fan and was even more enamored of him on this show as he had a Fordham University banner in his bedroom on the set (it would make perfectly good sense that an aspiring political operative of Irish decent born and raised in the New York area would have gone to my alma mater -- I knew many of them). I remember hearing some story of how the banner actually got there, having to do with it being given to Fox by Fordham's dean at the time, but don't know where I heard it or if it's true.

Anyhow, here I was sitting in some bleachers with the various sets for the show -- the Mayor's office, Fox's office, the "bullpen" outside both, the media room at City Hall, Fox's apartment bedroom, etc. running down the length of a football field. So, the only part of the show the audience actually saw in front of them was one or two of the aforementioned sets. Everything else was shown on TV monitors. So, this "live" show wasn't really so live if you were sitting in the audience. And, like all creative endeavors, there are a quite a few "starts and stops" though, in TV, they do try to make it through in one or two takes. After about two hours of this, I'd pretty much had enough and was definitely cured of any notions that it was fun to watch them make TV.

So, overall, my experiences at Chelsea Piers were not terrific.

However, on this particular walk, there is one thing for which Chelsea Piers is extremely handy...the public restrooms.

Above are some satisfied customers who were visiting from Canada and allowed me to snap their photo...and others who would rather remain totally anonymous as they pick up where they left off on their own stroll along the Hudson.

Now, regressing back to the trail at hand (after that long digression on sports, modern media and bladders), a lovely park is being build just north of Chelsea Piers. We've seen small areas jutting out into the river all along our hike down from 213th Street...but none as large and ambitious as this one. About half of it is finished -- with the rest slated for completion within the next year. It will be a fine addition to what has turned out to be an amazing stretch of walkways and paths that have combined to bring a touch of "graciousness" to the eastern shore of the lower Hudson River.

Now, turning our attentions to across the West Side Highway, we find the only work by one of America's best-known living architects, Frank Geary. No Guggenheim or even Disney, but an office building on a portion of the West Side Highway not known for anything more than small warehouses and the formerly rotting steel beams of what is being transformed into the now-famous High Line Park (more on that a bit later).

I am a sucker for those undulating walls, so integral to Geary's designs. I get the same feeling looking at his buildings that I do when viewing most of Brancusi's sculptures -- something about the roundness of them pleases me greatly.