Walking Up Along The East River - First Leg (from Manhattan Bridge to Houston Street)

Wanna take a walk?   I'm paraphrasing slightly, but those pretty much were my words to my pal Nature Girl as the weather started turning warmer late last May.   Yes, you read it right...LATE LAST MAY.   So, you're probably wondering why nothing appeared on the blog all summer long (or maybe not).   We did take our first stroll up along the East River the first Sunday in June, but I've been too preoccupied with other issues and endeavors to sit down and blog about it.  So, as we move into mid-September on this sad day, I'll try to lighten the tone with my remembrances (enhanced by notes and photos taken) of a lovely Sunday, June 6, walk on the wild East Side (thank you, Lou). 

Under the Manhattan Bridge

We pretty much started where we left off from "the Bridges Tour" -- underneath the Manhattan Bridge.  It was hot...pretty much a pre-cursor of the kind of summer we were going to have...but at the time, I wasn't too bothered by it.   Nature Girl (NG) was walking with a toe impairment, so we knew it wasn't going to be a long hike.  Per tradition, we stopped what we believed were this mother/daughter team to take our photo at the start of the days "walk."   They took the photo, but didn't really want one taken of them.  I did catch a "sideways" shot of them, as they were playing "tourist" themselves...

Right away, we knew this was going to be a whole different adventure from our trek down along the Hudson River.   For one thing, it was a lot more industrial-looking and definitely much more run-down than most of what we'd seen on the West Side.

Without getting all Jacob Riis on you (more about him later), it also seemed like many of the people walking, sitting or laying on this stretch were from a lower economic strata than those on the other side of town.  

We were walking fairly parallel to the ever-growing Chinatown (encompassing people from many Asian nations).   It was early in the morning, about 9:30 a.m., so we mostly ran into elderly folks taking their morning constitutionals, and even a few practicing their exercises along the route.

                                                                                        

We hadn't walked more than five or so minutes when we were "cut off" from the water by a construction-type fence announcing that the waterfront was "off-limits" while they restored it.   However, it looked to me like the waterfront here was being used to house buses and other municipal vehicles.   Sure enough, as we were being forced to walk under the southernmost part of the East River Drive (known to most as the FDR), we saw a sign that proclaimed the area for the city transportation and sanitation departments.   There was also a huge board describing what was going to be done by December 2010 (I think not!) to allow pedestrians access to the shoreline there. 

   Both NG and I had the sneaking suspicion that the economic downturn had probably with the Parks Department's Utopian plans.   We were still operating according to our criteria (walking within one block, and sight, of the water) but the view between all the garages and ugly warehouse-like buildings was sparse, to say the least.   There were glimpses of Brooklyn (I believe Fort Greene going into Williamsburg)...so we decided to turn our attentions to the other side of the road.  Hmmm...No offense, but where are we...Queens?  (Said expressly to get a rise out of NG, who hails from that proud "borough of churches.")   Neither side of this walk was looking all that promising, until......and...These were buildings about which I was always curious when cruising down the FDR.  They were so "out of place" in a neighborhood of "soulless" high-rises...and yet, such a welcome sight (the one with the rounded balconies has a faint New Orleans or Savannah-like quality to it).   We never found out if the buildings had names -- I imagined aloud that they may have been built as some kind of school, or orphanage, or other such civic buildings of a much earlier era.  I believe they are now pretty cool-looking co-ops or condos on what is now the easternmost portion of the "chic" Lower East Side (LES). 

While the waterside was not showing much promise,

the street side actually got "arty" on us.  

Check out the religions mosaic on this Catholic school building.  And someone in the Parks Department was really paying attention when they created the fence that separates the walkway from the FDR...

I believe we counted five or six different wildlife images in the ironwork along the highway...and for all the times I've driven up and down that road, I never noticed them until we were meandering past them.   While still not right on the shoreline, the path itself started to look a little less desolate!  

And, the folks using the path had morphed into the young, tattooed hoards that have invaded what once was the tenements of the "teeming millions" of Jewish and Italian immigrants who were stuffed into this part of the city during the late 1800s into the early part of the 20th Century.  Between the urban housing projects of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the great experiment in "self-contained" urban living that is Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, and during the past five years, the building of geometrically-interesting, mostly glass apartment towers that is characterizing New York City architecture in the early part of the 21st Century, less and less is left of those tenements that used to be the symbol of poverty and over-crowding, made famous by the "social reformers" of the early 20th Century -- photo/journalists like the aforementioned Jacob Riis (so, that's who he is).  I may have mentioned the LES Tenement Museum before -- I've recommended it to people visiting the city many times, but have never been there myself.   It's on the "bucket list."

The path suddenly lurched back into the 1890s and then fast-forwarded into the 1960s, almost at the same time.   While still a short distance from the shoreline, the path suddenly sprang a number of those elegant light poles that I recall best from the iconic Edward Steichen photo of the Flatiron Building in the early 1900s (with my office only a few blocks away now, I see that gorgeous throwback to elegant urban architecture at the turn of the 20th Century almost every day).

 

In less than 100 paces, we were thrown headlong into our childhoods...a completely unexpected treat to be continued in the next installment.