Urban Gadabout: Summer gadding around the outer boroughs of NYC, with news from MAS, Jack Eichenbaum, and the NY Transit Museum

Lighthouse Park at the northern tip of Roosevelt Island -- we'll be there tomorrow evening for the Municipal Art Society's walking tour, Roosevelt Island: The Northern Route.

by Ken

I haven't been writing much about my late-spring and summer wanderings, but after my enforced decommissioning in late April and May, I've been getting my rhythm back, and having some especially good times outside Manhattan. In fact, including tomorrow night's Roosevelt Island: The Northern Route (7/26, 6pm -- an evening tour, note), with Roosevelt Island Historical Society president Judith Berdy (who a few weeks ago led us on a terrific walk through the "Southern Route," down to the new Four Freedoms Memorial at the island's southern tip), I'll have had something like nine consecutive excursions over seven weeks outside Manhattan, including neat destinations like City Island, the tiny island off the coast of the northeasternmost Bronx, and the Little Italy along the Bronx's Arthur Avenue, both Municipal Art Society tours.

I actually undertook a walk less than four weeks after total-knee-replacement surgery, because I'd been wanting to do Joe Svehlak's tour of the few remains of Manhattan's once-thriving Lower West Side, a neighborhood that was basically to make way first for the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and then the World Trade Center. I've done a lot of tours with Joe, both his own and other tour leaders' -- and who should I run into on the Lower West Side tour but another of my favorite tour leades, urban geographer Jack Eichenbaum?

There's exciting news from Jack, maybe the most exciting New York tour news of the summer, but we'll get to that. Meanwhile I'm delighted to see that Joe is repeating his tour of Brooklyn's Sunset Park: The Old Neighborhood (Saturday, 8/31, 10:30am), where he grew up and later became a first-time property owner. I'm a huge fan of Joe's neighborhood tours (I still kick myself for missing his walk through Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood but loved the follow-up tour of Ridgewood, straddling the Brooklyn-Queens border), which provide a great feel for the way geographical and historical factors have shaped development as well as a feel for the way area residents live their lives.

Joe pointed out, by the way, that in his time Sunset Park wasn't yet a neighborhood in its own right, but was "the Sunset Park area of Bay Ridge," which then covered the full four miles or so of Brooklyn's waterfront along New York's Upper Harbor, down to the Verrazano Narrows. And the day after Joe's Sunset Park tour, Melanie Macchio will be leading a walk in Bay Ridge: Brooklyn's Western Waterfront Neighborhood (Sunday, 9/1, 4pm) -- I can hardly wait for that one! (The Bay Ridge walk means I won't be able to do another of architectural historian Tony Robins's patented art deco-themed tours, Art Deco on Central Park West; Sunday, 9/1, 2pm.)

Even though I did it last summer, I'm tempted to redo Norman Oder's Atlantic Yards: Urban Debate, Arena Debut (Saturday, 8/3. 10am), now that the first-completed part of the massive Brooklyn development project, the Barclays Center arena, has been open for nearly a year and is in full swing. Of course, as Norman, who has been the blogger most assiduously tracking the fairly squalid (and often flatly illegal) history of the project, stressed last year, when the arena was just opening, we won't know how seriously it will impact the immediate and surrounding neigborhoods until the serious parts of the develoment, the money parts, the 16 planned towers, are built and functioning -- if they ever all are.

One of the more suspicious aspects of the development is the way the modest concessions to the community which probably made it possible to finally get the project going don't kick in until virtually all of the planned development is completed, which may never happen. There doesn't seem to be much question that there will be enough towers built to alter the lives of everyone living in the area now, but that by itself won't trigger the community concessions.

Last summer I loved Norman's Atlantic Yards walk and presentation, which really gave us an immersion in the welter of issues raised in and by the project. I was all the more impressed since my attention was serious compromised by clock-watching even as we were walking farther and farther in the wrong direction to help me make the rendezvous for Francis Morrone's walk through Red Hook, the low-lying area on the western Brooklyn shore that would soon be devastated by Superstorm Sandy.

As it happened, i didn't make the start of the walk, but did manage to catch up, as did my friend Laurence Frommer, who had also been on the Atlantic Yards walk and had separately made his frantic way from one tour to the other. Laurence is an MAS tour leader himself, and I've been on countless tours with him, both his own and other tour leaders'. Earlier this summer he did a series of Pride-themed LGBT walks. This weekend he continues his exploration of the city's new phenomenon of cultural districts with a walk through the South Bronx's Mott Haven Cultural Corridor (Sunday, 7/28, 2pm-5pm -- yes, it's three hours). Then next weekend he's doing a pair of tours, Off and Off-Off Broadway, Parts 1 and 2 (Saturday and Sunday, 8/3 and 4, 3:30pm each day).

Let's see, I still have a tour coming up with Harlem (and Uptown Trinity Church Cemetery) maven Eric K. Washington: namely, Manhattanville: Recalling a Neighborhood's Activist Heritage (Sunday, 8/11, 1pm). I've really wanted to do a tour of this West Harlem neighborhood with Eric, and last time had it sell out on me before I realized I hadn't registered! Eric is also doing a Harlem Week edition of his terrific Harlem Grab Bag walk (Saturday, 8/17, 11am).

I'm also signed up for Bedford Stuyvesant's Eastern District (Saturday, 8/24, 11am) with architecture bloggers Suzanne Spellen and Morgan Munsey, who I'm happy to see have become MAS mainstays specializing in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area (and related areas). The next day they're doing Stuyvesant Heights Expansion District (Sunday, 8/25, 11am).

Staten Island will be represented too, with a two-part investigation of the north shore led by lifelong Staten Islander Georgia Trivizas: Part 1, basically the St. George area (I thoroughly enjoyed an earlier version of this walk with Georgia), tomorrow (Saturday, 7/27, catching the 10:30 Staten Island Ferry from Manhattan); with Part 2, the northwestern shore around to Snug Harbor, to follow (Sunday, 8/18, also catching the 10:30 ferry).

AS FOR JACK EICHENBAUM . . .

As I've said, I've probably learned more about how the underlying geography has conditioned the development of New York City neighborhoods from Jack Eichenbaum, a geographer, than from anyone else. I've still got a summer tour with Jack coming up, and it should be fascinating: Willets Point (Saturday, 8/17, 4pm), "a sewerless hardscrabble area of auto junkyards and related businesses" lying between the Mets' baseball stadium (now-gone old Shea Stadium and now-functioning Citi Field) and now-booming Flushing, a sort of wasteland "that has twice beaten back attempts at redevelopment." Once again the developers have their beady eyes on an imagined wonderland. "We’ll walk to the area from central Flushing," Jack says, "to
understand its important setting, confront ecological issues and learn why
'Willets Point'  is a misnomer."

The September-November MAS schedule won't be announced till, probably, mid-August, but Jack has tipped his mailing list off that he has some tours coming up: Forest Hills to Corona (Saturday, 9/7, 4pm), Maps, Realities and the People's Palace (from the exterior of Grand Central Terminal to the interior of the New York Public Library, specifically the Map Division; Saturday, 9/14, 11am), Flushing's Koreatown (Saturday, 10/19, 11am), and Astoria (Saturday, 11/23, 11am).

But the really exciting development I referred to earlier is an addition to Jack's famous all-day expeditions built around a subway line. He has been doing The World of the #7 Train annually for a number of years now, and not that long ago revived his Day on the J. Now he's taking on Brooklyn's Brighton Line (Howie's and my old subway connection to "The City" in our Brooklyn years).

BRIGHTON LINE MEMOIRS -- meandering off the Q train

Saturday, September 28, 10am-5:30pm

This is a series of five walks and connecting rides along what was once the Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Island RR dating to 1878. Walks take place in Prospect Park, Brighton Beach, along Avenue U, in Ditmas Park and Central Flatbush. Lunch is in Brighton Beach where you can picnic on the Boardwalk. Tour fee is $39 and you need to preregister by check to Jack Eichenbaum, 36-20 Bowne St. #6C, Flushing, NY 11354 (include name, phone and email address). Get the full day’s program and other info by email jaconet@aol.com. The tour is limited to 25 people. Don’t get left out!

Those who didn't know about Brighton Line Memoirs -- meandering off the Q train or weren't able to register when Jack originally intended to offer it, on July 21, are benefiting from a blow of misfortune he suffered this summer: a knee injury that didn't ground him but made it medically inadvisable for him to be on his feet so long. So he has rescheduled this exciting outing for the end of September when, as he notes, it will also be cooler.

I had my check in the mail the day the tour was originally announced, but the delay also helps me. I'm hoping that by the new date my leg will be a good bit stronger. (I also would have had walking tours on back-to-back days, something I've found I don't do so well yet.)


OH YES, THE TRANSIT MUSEUM STILL HAS
ONE MORE NOSTALGIA RIDE THIS SUMMER

I've also had a busy summer with NYTM, including a vintage subway-and-bus trip to the Bronx's Orchard Beach (on a day that turned out to be singularly un-beach-friendly). The third of the summer's three popular Nostalgia Rides is still coming up.

THE BRONX EXPRESS: VOYAGE TO VAN CORTLANDT PARK

Sun, Aug. 25, 10 am to 5 pm – Tickets
Non-members Adults $50 / Children $25 Museum Members Adults $35 / Children $20

Venture uptown on our WWI-era IRT subway cars to spacious public grounds at Van Cortlandt Park, the third largest park in NYC. During a 3-hour layover, explore Van Cortlandt House Museum and a stroll along the John Kieran Nature Trail. Pack a picnic blanket and “staycation” with us!

Information on Municipal Art Society walking tours is ridiculously easy to find. Just go to mas.org and click on "Tours." Preregistration is required, but you can probably do it online right up to tour time. For New York Transit Museum tour information, go to the Programs and Excursions page of the website. For information about Jack Eichenbaum's activities, and to sign up for his e-mail list, visit his website, "The Geography of New York City with Jack Eichenbaum."

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Urban Gadabout: It's Jane's Walk weekend -- be sure to check to see what's happening in your area`

The NYC subways' Brighton Line had its origins in the Brooklyn & Brighton Beach Railroad, one of the railroads that connected to Brooklyn's ocean beaches. The big news in summer gadding is that Jack Eichenbaum is devoting another of his day-long subway-line odysseys to the Brighton Line.

by Ken

Okay, I've been kind of grumpy about the fact that I'll be on the shelf for one of my favorite weekends of the year: that of Jane's Walks, in honor of pioneer urbanologist Jane Jacobs, who did so much to reorient the way we think about urban life and to empower urban folk to feel that we can claim a voice in shaping the life of our cities in the direction of design and scale optimized for heightened human interaction.

Jane spent as much of her time as she could out in the field observing -- watching the way real people live actual lives, and see what sorts of design configurations produce the most diverse and enriching experiences. If you don't know her work, one word that should give you a clue is neighborhood. She was a great believer in the richness of neighborhood life, at a time when her frequent nemesis Robert "Pave It and Run a Parkway Through It" Moses was destroying every neighborhood he could get his eminent-domain-empowered mitts on.

In New York City we now have the best imaginable situation, since the Municipal Art Society took over the planning and execution of Jane's Walk offerings, which are free and mind-bogglingly rich, diverse, and generally tantalizing. With some dedicated work I can winnow the list -- numbering 100-plus this year -- down to about 30 walks over the two days which I would really, really like to do. I hadn't even planned to look at this year's list, knowing the weekend would fall less than three weeks after my knee surgery. I finally sneaked a peek, and with enough work I think I could get it down to 30 again.

As it happens, although not formally part of the Jane's Walk festivities, on Saturday there's an open house at the 225-plus-year-old Dyckman Farmhouse, now a museum, which I can reach easily via a bus that passes right in front of my building, so I'm thinking I'll give that a shot -- plus I can't help noticing that just sticking to my home bailiwick of Northern Manhattan, between Jane's Walk offerings and those of NYC Parks there are a number of other outings Saturday and Sunday.

Note that most of the MAS-organized Jane's Walks don't require preregistration. If I were zeroing in on tour possibilities, I might incline to those that seem likely to be less crowd-drawing to enjoy a more intimate walk. That said, though, the offerings are awesome. And it's all free!

MAY AT MAS

As it happens, my knee is coming along well enough that I've gone ahead and signed up for two Municipal Art Society tours I've had in my sights for the following week ever since the March-April-May schedule was announced. I can get to both by bus, so I don't have to deal with subway steps yet.

On Saturday the 11th, my old pal Joe Svehlak is doing "Downtown's Lost Neighborhood," 11am-1pm, exploring "the diverse immigrant history of Manhattan's Lower West Side in conjunction with the Arab American National Museum's exhibit on 'Little Syria.' " Now "Lower West Side" isn't a geographic term you hear a lot in connection with Manhattan. The Manhattan end of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel -- a Robert Moses project -- wiped out the heart of the onetime neighborhood, and the various immigrant groups that once clustered there, including Joe's Czech parents, dispersed. I once almost did a version of this walk with Joe, but it was pouring that day and I didn't even have an umbrella.

Then on Sunday the 12th I'm going to try to do Laurence Frommer's "Bloomingdale Blocks" (2-4pm) -- "the quiet tre line streets from West 96th Street to West 110th Street that boast some of New York's finest remaining turn-of-the-century row-houses, apartment buildings, institutional structures and public monuments. I figure that will be easier on my legs than Eric Washington's "Uptown Trinity Church Cemetery Spring Tour,"

On Saturday the 11th baseball aficionado-historian Peter Laskowich is leading a tour called "Brooklyn and Jackie Robinson," 1-3pm. And the following weekend, if I felt more secure about those subway stairs, I might venture to Brooklyn for Matt Postal's "New to New York: Downtown Brooklyn," Saturday the 18th, 11am-1pm, and for Suzanne Spellen and Morgan Munsey's "Brooklyn's Automobile Row" (Bedford Avenue between Fulton Street and Empire Boulevard in Crown Heights), Sunday the 19th, 11am-1pm. It's looking as if my first subway venture may be for the rescheduled version of Snyder Schools scholar Jean Arrington's "Brownsville's Cache of C.B.J. Snyder Schools," Saturday the 25th, 11am-1pm.


NEW YORK TRANSIT MUSEUM SUMMER TOURS

Meanwhile, New York Transit Museum members have been early-registering for the newly announced summer schedule since Tuesday, with registration for nonmembers scheduled to begin this Saturday the 4th. Among the tours I signed up for is one I've been awaiting eagerly for months: a visit to the (now finally reopened) totally rebuilt Smith-9th Streets elevated subway station perched on the viaduct over Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal along with the neighboring 4th Avenue-9th Street station. There are more Grand Central Terminal-themed tours, food tours, visits to the 240th Street Maintenance Facility, and more, including the summer's three "Nostalgia Rides," to Coney Island (June 29), the Bronx's Orchard Beach (another Robert Moses legacy, July 13), and the Bronx's Van Cortlandt Park (August 25).


FINALLY, NEWS FROM JACK EICHENBAUM

First off, Jack is doing a Jane's Walk this Sunday the 5th, "Bowne Street, My Street," "a walk along the length of historic and multiethnic Bowne Street in Flushing where I have been living for 35 years." If I weren't mobility-impaired I would definitely do this. About a month ago Jack did a walk through the Bayside (Queens) neighborhood where he grew up that was notable both for personal and for regional history. Meet at the northwest corner of Main Street and 39th Avenue (St. George Episcopal Church), near the Main Street (Flushing) station of the no. 7 train.

Jack has a couple of walks scheduled in rapidly developing Long Island City in conjunction with the third Long Island City Arts Open (LICAO), May 15-19, and in May he'll be resuming the series of Wednesday evening walks (6-8pm) he's been doing in recent summers. Scheduled so far under the heading "Changing Cultures of Queens" are: On and Off Jamaica Avenue Avenue (May 22), Sunnyside to Jackson Heights (May 29), and Long Island City to Old Astoria (June 5).

The big news for those who have done or wish they had done Jack's daylong subway-line odysseys ("The World of the #7 Train" and "A Day on the J") is:

Brighton Line Memoirs: Meandering off the Q train
Sunday, July 21, 10am-5:30pm

This is a series of five walks and connecting rides along what was once the Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Island RR dating to 1878. Walks take place in Prospect Park, Brighton Beach, along Avenue U, in Ditmas Park and Central Flatbush. Lunch is in Brighton Beach where you can picnic on the Boardwalk. Tour fee is $39 and you need to preregister by check to Jack Eichenbaum, 36-20 Bowne St. #6C, Flushing, NY 11354 (include name, phone and email address). Get the full day’s program and other info by email jaconet@aol.com The tour is limited to 25 people. Don’t get left out!

You better believe I've already sent my check in! (And not just because the Brighton Line was my subway lifeline to "the City" growing up in Brooklyn.)

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Urban Gadabout: Say, NYC-area dumpling lovers, are you up for a Dumpling Crawl tomorrow (Saturday)?

There's a serious goal: to bring customers
back to NYC's Sandy-whacked Chinatown

It's dumplings, dumplings, dumplings tomorrow (March 2) in New York's Chinatown, thanks to Rally Downtown's four scheduled "Dumpling Crawls" -- at 12n, 2pm (two crawls), and 4pm. Of the two crawls at 2pm, one will be led by NYS Sen. Daniel Squadron, who hatched the idea for the "Dumpling Rally."

"[NYS Sen. Daniel] Squadron, who held his wedding's rehearsal dinner as well as his first-ever political meeting in Chinatown, passionately described the ideal dumpling as 'a rich and satisfying filling' that 'unleashes the full power' of its flavor from its dough wrapping at exactly the right moment.

"'Chinatown is full of small businesses run by independent entrepreneurs -- many of them immigrants -- who, despite all the challenges of succeeding in the city, work hard, stick with it and provide extraordinary food,' he wrote in an email to DNAinfo.com New York."

-- from "Dumpling Rally Looks to Bring Business Back to
Sandy-Damaged Chinatown," on DNAinfo.com New York

by Ken

Talk about an obvious mark! I only had to learn that a new conglomeration of downtown Manhattan businesspersons called Downtown Rally has scheduled four "Dumpling Crawls" for tomorrow (Saturday, March 2) than I was searching frantically for the "more info" and "buy tickets" buttons. I love dumplings more than just about anything on the planet.

As the invaluable NYC news source DNAinfo.com New York's Serena Solomon explains below, "Rally Downtown is a project to help businesses get back on their feet post-Sandy with events that bring shoppers through their doors once again." As I noted in the caption, the Dumpling Rally was conceived by State Sen. Daniel Squadron, as one way of bringing cash-carrying patrons back into this portion of his district which was devastated by Superstorm Sandy.

In case you can't bear to read through Serena's piece to get to it, here's the link for the page on the Rally Downtown website devoted to the Dumpling Crawls.

Dumpling Rally Looks to Bring Business Back to Sandy-Damaged Chinatown

March 1, 2013 7:14am | By Serena Solomon, DNAinfo Reporter/Producer

CHINATOWN -- To successfully eat a soup dumpling don't bother with chopsticks, according to Christine Seid, the second-generation owner of the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory.

"You have to really carefully put it onto a soup spoon and eat it in one bite so you don't break it and the soup comes out," she said, adding that waiting a few minutes for the broth to cool down is ideal to avoid burning your mouth.

This is the type of knowledge Seid and others will be passing on to amateur dumpling eaters during this Saturday's Dumpling Rally that is providing tours to some of Chinatown's best dumpling houses.

The rally, an idea from State Sen. Daniel Squadron who is a self-professed authority on Chinatown food, is aiming to bring business back to Chinatown as stores still fight to recover from Hurricane Sandy.

"That is one of our goals, to showcase the gems of New York," said event organizer Tom Gray, executive director of the Greenwich Village Chelsea Chamber of Commerce and co-founder of Rally Downtown that is organizing the tours. "People will go to places they have never been before. The event will drive traffic, raise awareness and get people to come back to these dumplings houses."

Rally Downtown is a project to help businesses get back on their feet post-Sandy with events that bring shoppers through their doors once again.

The Dumpling Rally is offering four tours this Saturday -- one at noon and 4 p.m. and two at 2 p.m. Squadron will host one of the 2 p.m. crawls.

Squadron, who held his wedding's rehearsal dinner as well as his first-ever political meeting in Chinatown, passionately described the ideal dumpling as "a rich and satisfying filling" that "unleashes the full power" of its flavor from its dough wrapping at exactly the right moment.

"Chinatown is full of small businesses run by independent entrepreneurs -- many of them immigrants -- who, despite all the challenges of succeeding in the city, work hard, stick with it and provide extraordinary food," he wrote in an email to DNAinfo.com New York.

Tickets for the dumpling crawl are $25 and include dumplings at houses such as Prosperity on Eldridge Street and Lam Zhou on East Broadway. The tour ends at the Chinatown Ice Cream factory for dessert.

"It will be a little bit cheaper, you get the social aspect, a set of chopsticks. The dumplings are included and you get ice cream at the end," said Gray. The tour also gives out a map so those who attend can return to the dumpling houses.

While the organization is yet to apply for nonprofit status, Gray said any funds left over will go to planning more business-generating events for Sandy affected areas.

Ten percent of the ticket price will also go to the Chinese American Planning Council, a local nonprofit.

"It took a lot longer for business to pick up for a long time after Sandy," said Gray. "At the very least everyone went without power."

To purchase tickets for the Dumpling Rally go to the event's website.

My first temptation was to try to sign up for one of the 2pm crawls led by Senator Squadron, who has been impressing me as one of the more watch-worthy of the city's rising pols. And I could probably get to one of the 2pm crawls from my 11am Municipal Art Society walking tour with Matt Postal, revisiting one of the Midtown Manhattan walking tours originally proposed by longtime New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable's ground-breaking 1961 book Four Walking Tours of Modern Architecture in New York City. (Tomorrow's walk is sold out, but there may still be space in the second walk from the book which Matt is re-creating, on March 16.) But I'm thinking the senator will be wanting to talk dumplings, or maybe economic development, rather than politics, and am I really that confident of his self-proclaimed dumpling expertise? In the end I decided to play it safe and sign up for the 4pm crawl, with Julie Menin.

As it happens, I'm familiar with two of the stops, Excellent Dumpling House on Lafayette Street, just below Canal (where in fact I came very close to popping in this afternoon after a physical-therapy session, but it was just too crowded), and Prosperity Dumpling on Eldridge Street (which I first visited on a NY Transit Museum eating tour led by Saveur magazine's Todd Coleman). But I'm only too happy to go back to both! Maybe I'll even get some tips about ordering at Excellent Dumpling House. I have eaten there while on jury duty, but the menu doesn't seem terribly dumpling-oriented, merely listing a few varieties as appetizers.

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Urban Gadabout: Were Mayor Bloomberg's paratroopers in the City Hall area Sunday to provide a Civil War backdrop for our Lincoln walk?

At City Hall, New Yorkers say a final farewell to President Lincoln.

by Ken

I had thought about writing about my touring (and nontouring) weekend here in NYC as rearranged by the storm (see my Friday post, "While we're on storm watch here in the Northeast, maybe it's an OK time to play '2016'"), but I couldn't find an angle that seemed apt to be of much interest. What's more, I felt awkward, since however life here may have been disrupted, we were largely spared by comparison with our neighbors to the east and north. As you headed east on Long Island the storm was progressively more severe, until in easternmost Suffolk County, the southern shore of which was still reeling from Superstorm Sandy, those unlucky folks got the 2-3 feet of snow that had been threatened, as did areas to the north in a path through Connecticut and Massachusetts. You don't want to go whining about what that mean storm did to you when there are so many people so nearby who had it so much worse.

I originally heard after the snow stopped that the city had gotten 5-8", but later I heard 8-12". As I note in the rambling account that follows, I wound up not setting foot outside on Saturday, when I did venture out on Sunday, it looked to me that at least up here in Washington Heights it was more like 5".

As I said, I had kind of given up on writing about the weekend. And then a friend I hadn't had contact with since before the storm e-mailed asking how I had made out, and by the time I had finished answering, I realized i just had written about it. I've fleshed out the account a little here and there, but what follows is basically my answer to his question of how I had made out during the storm, which I began: "Not bad, actually."

I had a Municipal Art Society walking tour of the Tompkins Square area of the East Village with Francis Morrone canceled on Saturday, so I wound up not budging out of the house, and then a New York Transit Museum tour that would have been mostly in the subways was also canceled, because of possibly iffy scheduling in the subways, and the difficulty of traveling into the city from Long Island. (The scheduled tour was the second half of a riding-the-rails exploration with transit historian Andy Sparberg, a longtime veteran of the Long Island Rail Road, of what is known as the Dual Contracts phase, roughly in the 1910s, of the construction of the NYC subway system. We had done the connection from Manhattan into Brooklyn in the first part, and were scheduled to look at the connections from Manhattan to Queens and the Bronx. Signing up for Andy's tours is a no-brainer for me. One of the best took place the very Sunday that the city was counting down to the transit shutdown in anticipation of Sandy, when we looked at surviving traces, from Queens to Manhattan, of the long-gone Second Avenue El.)

But the cancellation of the NYTM tour, much as I regretted it, worked out fine, because it meant I was able to do an MAS walking tour I'd paid for before that part of the NYTM tour schedule was announced. I knew I didn't want to miss Andy's tour, and so had planned to skip the Sunday MAS tour, intriguing though it looked.

It was a Lincoln's Birthday-themed walk with Matt Postal focused on a part of the city that Lincoln is known to have known from his visits here -- and through which his casket traveled on his final "visit," when it was brought to City Hall (which, remember, dates back to 1810!) for a public viewing and then transported up Broadway. Matt pointed out that the newspapers were filled with accounts of the massive public outpouring for the slain president -- and this in a city that had had little interest in or sympathy for the then-new Republican Party or its hardly-known presidential candidate.

The cool thing is that if you start from City Hall Park, which isn't all that different now from the way it was in Lincoln's time, and walk up Broadway, if you know where to look, there are a surprising number of buildings that actually existed in the 1860s (including, for example, St. Paul's Chapel a block below City Hall Park), you can begin to get a glimmering of how the city looked at that time. In addition, there are many more buildings just a decade or two newer, products of the construction boom that followed the Civil War. Again, you need to know where to look, but if you do, you can get some sense of the city of the 1860s, '70s, and '80s.

We only walked up as far as about midway between Canal St and Houston St, but some of the side streets in TriBeCa and SoHo are still mostly buildings from that period. Also along the way on or near Broadway are some of the early department stores and other businesses where Mary Todd Lincoln is either known or thought to have shopped on her visits to NYC, which were actually more frequent than the president's. For one thing, the White House was redecorated during her time residence, and this is where she did much of the purchasing for it.

Matt pointed out when we started that there's an area farther north, leading to Cooper Union, that we know Lincoln knew, but very few buildings there survive from that time EXCEPT Cooper Union, which of course is one of the seminal sites of Lincoln's life. We do know that on at least two of his visits to NYC he stayed at the Astor Hotel, which is long since gone, but whose site Matt pointed out to us right across Broadway from our starting point at the southern end of City Hall Park (i.e., the block north of St. Paul's). One of the visits was when Lincoln, still a locally little-known presidential candidate, gave the great speech at Cooper Union, one of the most important speeches in American history, a speech that, when it was printed in newspapers across the country, transformed his candidacy. To get from the hotel to Cooper Union, he would have walked pretty much the path we did, up Broadway!

Matt made a point of taking us past the statue of Horace Greeley, the onetime ardent Whig who was a founder of the Republican Party, which now sits at the eastern end of City Hall, across from what was once the city's Newspaper Row on Park Row, where Greeley's New York Tribune was headquartered. The story is that after Lincoln's Cooper Union speech, he and Greeley repaired to the Tribune building to watch over the typesetting and proofing of the speech for publication in the next day's paper.

Matt noted that he's done the Lincoln walk a number of times now, and one thing he knows is not to expect cooperation from the weather. It's always going to be scheduled on what is likely not to be the weather-friendliest weekend of the year. The tour was sold out, meaning 30 people had paid either $15 (for members) or $20 (for nonmembers). About a dozen made it. Which was probably lucky, since the condition of the streets and sidewalks so soon after the storm wouldn't have made it easy for a group of 30 people to navigate. (Of course all 30 people NEVER show up, even when there's no weather excuse! In fairness, I should point out that if the Transit Museum tour hadn't been canceled, I wouldn't have showed up either!)

What's more, the whole City Hall area was being transformed, as we passed through it shortly after 11am, into a locked-down fortress area -- the Bloomberg administration's typical military-stye response to the demonstration that was coming of striking bus drivers. I didn't know anything about it, and was totally puzzled when I came up from the Park Pl subway station and saw about 30 cops huddled at the corner of Broadway and Park Pl. They turned out to be just a tiny contingent of what must have been hundreds (perhaps many hundreds?) of police officers pressed into service for the military operation.


BY THE WAY, THE NEW MAS TOUR LISTINGS ARE POSTED

It's easy to remember. You go to mas.org and click on "Tours." The new listings cover March, April, and May, and the first thing that popped out for me is an interesting pair of tours Matt Postal is doing, "Remembering Ada Louise Huxtable in Midtown" (March 2 and 16), retracing two of the routes proposed by the NYT"s legendary architecture critic in her 1961 book Four Walking Tours of Modern Architecture in New York City, published by MAS and MoMA.

Matt and a host of other ttour leaders, familiar and unfamiliar (at least to me) will be leading a host of other walks. I started doing some quick notes, but it's a tribute to the range of offerings that it quickly expanded to a length that requires a post of its own, so that's what I'll do, perhaps tomorrow. [<b>UPDATE</b>: Not tomorrow. Make that Friday.]

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Urban Gadabout: Preview of a bountiful NYC fall gadding season

I'm taking the day off work to do the New York Transit Museum tour Squire Vickers, Subway Architect (Monday, October 15, 3-5pm), which features New York City Transit's chief architect, Judith Kunoff, who was gangbusters on NYTM's tour of the beautifully renovated landmark Avenue H and nearby stations on Brooklyn's Brighton Line.

by Ken

In case anyone was wondering, I've had an incredibly busy and rewarding summer gadding season, which for assorted reasons I haven't been moved to write about. Then, with fall schedules piling up, I had the clever idea of combining some highlights of the season with some look-ahead info. Only I'm still disinclined to write about it, and meanwhile the clock is ticking on more and more of the info, so I think we'd better just get on with it, starting with the New York Transit Museum, since the start of general registration is . . . yikes, tomorrow!

NEW YORK TRANSIT MUSEUM
Fall tours, September-December
Early registration for members in progress
General registration begins AUGUST 28

Already many of the most sought-after tours will be booked up from the members-only early-registration period, not to mention the tours (of the old City Hall subway station and the ghost site of the old underground trolley terminal at the Manhattan end of the Williamsburg Bridge) that are members-only -- by themselves excellent reasons to become a member, as I keep pointing out, though there are others, like free admission to the museum and major discounts on all the tours and at the museum shop.

Check out the Transit Museum calendar here. It includes not just the fall tours but the Transit Museum's fall educational programs, many of which are free!

MUNICIPAL ART SOCIETY
Fall tours, September-December
Registration in progress

I thought I would do some highlighting of the highlight-filled fall season, but there are so many highlights (I personally have registered for so many tours that I'd be embarrassed to tell you how many) that I would just encourage you to check out the listings for yourself (click on "Tours"). Remember that advance registration is now required for all tours; I think the online registration system is working out pretty well. Considering the quality of the tours, the asking price of $15 for members, $20 for nonmembers, is a pittance.

WaHi TOURS
Northern Manhattan: Washington Heights, Inwood, Marble Hill
by Northern Manhattan historian James Renner
Fall tours, September-October
No advance registration (pay at tour)

All tours are Sunday at 12 noon; $15 for adults, $10 for seniors and students; no reservations necessary. Since Jim's schedule isn't available online otherwise, I've posted the whole thing with his full descriptions here. In brief:

MARBLE HILL (the part of Manhattan that was joined to the Bronx when the Harlem River was rerouted)
DATE: September 2, 2012
MEET: 225th Street and Broadway in front of Chase Bank

TUBBY HOOK (Dyckman Street, Riverside Drive and Broadway)
DATE: September 9, 2012
MEET: Northwest corner of Dyckman Street and Broadway

FORT GEORGE (190th to 193rd Amsterdam and Audubon Avenues)
DATE: September 23, 2012
MEET: Northeast corner of 190th Street and Audubon Avenue

SHERMAN CREEK
DATE: September 30, 2012
MEET: Entrance of IRT #1 Dyckman Street Station

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER (165th to 168th Broadway to Haven Avenue)
DATE: October 14, 2012
MEET: Southwest corner of 168th Street and Broadway

FORT WASHINGTON-HUDSON HEIGHTS
DATE: October 21, 2012
MEET: 181st Street and Fort Washington Avenue, northwest corner

WHAT'S OUT THERE WEEKEND NYC (WOTW, from The Cultural Landscape Foundation)
vs. OPEN HOUSE NEW YORK (OHNY)
Weekend of October 6-7
Registration for WOTW in progress, information for OHNY still to be published in the Sept. 26 issue of Time Out New York

WOTW has an absolutely sensational list of tours for this NYC version of its What's Out There Weekend, which I should have told you about sooner, because I'm told registration has been exceedingly brisk -- hardly surprising considering the range and degree of interest of the offerings, even apart from the price, which is $00. (Yes, that's zero.)

TCLF invites you to explore and discover the Big Apple during What’s Out There Weekend NYC, featuring a series of FREE expert guided tours highlighting the city’s remarkable landscape legacy. During the weekend, members of the public can visit more than two-dozen different sites around the city.

Check out the listings here, or just register here.

But wouldn't you know that WOTW NYC falls in the exact same weekend as one of the city's most cherished gadding institutions, the also-free Open House New York? OHNY will feature a much larger and even more diverse roster of events -- as soon as the listings become available. And you can be sure that as soon as they do, within seconds the dozen or two events that everyone wants to do will be booked up. Fortunately, the listings are likely to feature an assortment of events at least as interesting, or actually more interesting, that will appeal to gadders of quirkier tastes.

It's important, then, that as soon as you see an OHNY event listing that appeals to you, you pounce on it. Myself, I'm out of the running for 2012, having filled up my gadding card for that weekend with WOTW NYC events I couldn't resist (in all four outer boroughs, though not technically, since my Staten Island walk, around St. George, although originally announced as a WOTW event in conjunction with MAS, became a strictly MAS tour, whereupon I happily plunked down my $15).

JACK EICHENBAUM'S GEOGRAPHY OF NEW YORK CITY
For public tour info, or to sign up for Jack's e-mail list for announcements of scheduled events, go here

By now I've written so often about Jack that you can probably recite the litany on your own. As an "urban geographer," Jack is fascinated by how geographic factors (including topography, water and land access, transportation, and demography) shape the way cities -- or anyplace else -- develop, all illustrated before your very eyes. Nobody has done more to enable me to see neighborhoods and regions as living entities that develop for specific reasons, and I've hardly ever come away from a tour with Jack without some fundamental new understanding of the city -- not to mention all sorts of fascinating information about the area covered, including restaurant tips. It's a good bet that on any tour with Jack you're going to see places and things you won't see on any other tour.

Jack has four tours in the MAS fall season:

Renaissance in Newtown Creek (Saturday, September 29, 1-3pm)
Corona (Queens) Circuit (Monday, October 8, Columbus Day, 11am-1pm)
Public Housing’s Fertile Crescent (Thanksgiving Friday, November 23, 11am-1pm)
Keeping Off Midtown Streets (East Side): Grand Central Terminal to Bloomingdales [Jack also does a West Side version] (Saturday, December 29, 11am-1pm)

Undoubtedly he'll be scheduling other tours and perhaps other events, which is why it's so important to sign up for his mailing list, which anyone else would call a newsletter, except that Jack's contains real news. It is, for example, how I found out about the blockbuster of NYC's fall gadding season, a counterpart to his not-to-miss World of the #7 Train:

A DAY ON THE J
Sunday, October 21, 10am-5:30pm

This series of six walks and connecting rides is astride the colonial route between Brooklyn and Queens. We focus on what the J train has done to and for surrounding neighborhoods since it began service (in part) in1888. Walks take place in Highland Park, Richmond Hill, downtown Jamaica, Bushwick, South Williamsburg and the Lower East Side. Tour fee is $39 and you need to preregister by check to Jack Eichenbaum, 36-20 Bowne St. #6C, Flushing, NY 11354 (include name, phone and email address). The full day’s program, registration coupon and other info is available by email jaconet@aol.com The tour is limited to 25 people. Don’t get left out! Registration is proceeding briskly.

Jack hasn't done this tour in eight years, and it's going to sell out. The only question is when, and why anyone would take a chance of being shut out is beyond me. (I handed my registration to Jack personally at the first tour I did with him after the official announcement of the J train extravaganza.)

You can also find the public tour schedule by going to the home page of Jack's website, The Geography of New York City with Jack Eichenbaum.

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Urban Gadabout: Under Delancey Street -- a visit to the ghost of a once-crucial underground trolley transit hub

The Essex Street trolley terminal today, more or less (photos borrowed from Joseph Brennan's "Abandoned Stations" article "Williamsburg Bridge Railway terminal")

Last night, Community Board 3′s land use committee voted unanimously (with two members abstaining) to support the Delancey Underground, the high profile plan to bring a park to a 60,000 square foot abandoned trolley terminal. Project co-founders Dan Barasch and James Ramsey outlined the proposal for CB3 last fall, and received a warm reception, but no vote was taken following the initial presentation. CB3′s endorsement will become official after the full board votes later this month.

-- the start of Ed Litvak's Lower East Side News report yesterday

by Ken

The trolley terminal under Delancey Street, at Essex Street, on the Manhattan side of the Williamsburg Bridge, served more than a dozen trolley lines running across the bridge to Brooklyn. The bridge opened on Dec. 13, 1903, and by the following November cross-bridge trolley service was in operation. The underground terminal is thought to have opened on May 18, 1908, according to Joseph Brennan's splendid article on the abandoned Williamsburg Bridge Railway terminal, and remained in use for decades after subway service was added to the bridge. The last of the trolley lines was discontinued in 1948, at which point the underground terminal was to all intents and purposes abandoned, as it has remained for going on 65 years, though lately talk has turned more serious as to possible reuses of the 60,000-square-foot space.

The Delancey Street approach to the Williamsburg Bridge in 1919, with kiosks at center that took trolley passengers to the terminal below, the larger kiosk at left leading to the subway station, and foreground waiting areas for terminating Manhattan trolleys

The Delancey Underground project -- conceived as a sort of underground version of the wildly popular High Line conversion of the abandoned West Side elevated train line -- is merely a proposal, albeit one that has gathered a certain amount of momentum. At the moment it isn't even a formal proposal, because the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which among many other tri-state-area transportation-related divisions includes New York City Transti (NYCT), which operates NYC's subways and buses, has yet to ask for RFPs (Requests for Proposals) for the space, as Pedro Zevallos, associate director of real estate development in the MTA's Real Estate division, explained to us today on a New York Transit Museum visit to the abandoned Delancey Street terminal. When the MTA does ask for RFPs, he explained, and obviously the agency has every interest in finding productive use for the space, a Delancey Underground will compete with whatever other proposals are submitted. Clearly a lot of people, inside and outside the MTA, hope that the Delancey Underground proponents can assemble a persuasive proposal, in terms of feasibility and financing, but for that we'll have to wait and see.

The terminal in operation, "sometime before 1935"

The one thing that I would really have liked to see today in our visit to the ghost of the subterranean trolley terminal, onetime hub of trolley traffic that carrying large numbers of commuters across the East River into Brooklyn, was the actual connection whereby all those dozen-plus trolley lines -- which came underground in eight loops for loading and unloading -- actually made their ascent onto the bridge. But of course that can't be seen because it no longer exists. When the trolley lines on the south side of the bridge (there were also trolley lines running on the north side of the bridge, but they're a whole other story) were taken out of service, those lanes were opened to vehicular traffic that accessed them via a newly built on-ramp to the bridge.

Nevertheless . . .

The Transit Museum members-only tour was expensive ($55) and short, with not a whole lot to see, and yet it was all worth it for the incredibly exciting opportunity to see something few New Yorkers have seen. And we had the benefit of Pedro Zevallos's expert's-eye perspective on the present and future of this ghostly space. One of my favorite categories of Transit Museum tours is the kind that bring us together with people who have held, or currently hold, positions of authority over the particular subject matter.

The landmarked Avenue H station house, triumphantly reconstructed

Last Sunday, for example, for a presentation on and visit to three historic stations on Brooklyn's Brighton line, we had the inestimable benefit of the participation of NYC Transit's chief architect (on the job five years now), Judith Kunoff. Did Judy ever have insight to share (and stories to tell!) about the process whereby building decisions are made in the system -- and of course the way specific projects like (but not limited to) the overhauls of the three stations we visited (Cortelyou Road, Avenue H, and Beverley Road) have been designed and executed.

For more information about current Transit Museum programs (many of them free) and tours, check the calendar.


The Transit Museum members-only tour "Trolley Ghosts: The Terminal Under Delancey" is repeated Thursday, July 12, at 5:30pm. "Look at a Landmark: The Historic Station House at Avenue H" is repeated Sunday, July 20, 2pm-4pm.

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Urban Gadabout: You may still be able to find an Obscura Day event near you

Plus NY Transit Museum news and other NYC
gadabout notes, including big MAS news

From obscuraday.com (click to enlarge)

by Ken

I sure hope you're not depending for information on the now-certified Last Person to Know, but I swear I never heard of Obscura Day, which happens this Saturday the 28th, until I opened my new issue of Time Out New York last night. There's a full page in the magazine, but only this for online coverage. Of course, as I write, in mid-afternoon, the only one of the five events highlighted in the print edition seems to be an added time, 3-6pm, for "The Forgotten Beaches of the Forgotten Borough," meaning Staten Island, which starts at the border of the borough's Cedar Grove and New Dorp Beaches.

Even at this late date it's worth letting the Obscura Day website direct you to offerings in your area. You just might get lucky. There's always next year. This is the third incarnation. The organizer, Atlas Obscura ("A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities and Esoterica"), explains:

Each spring, Atlas Obscura (that’s us), organizes a global event called Obscura Day.

On Obscura Day thousands of people, all over the world, go out and explore interesting and unusual places. Sometimes we organize the event, sometimes folks organize it themselves! Over the past two years nearly 10,000 people have attend over 200 different events on Obscura Day.

Well, even if you can't find an available event for this Saturday, there's always next spring.
My chance of finding an event worth signing on to if I'd heard about Obscura Day even a couple of days earlier, when I created a schedule conflict I might not have if I'd known. have a schedule conflict Saturday which I didn't have a couple of days agoIn general, by the time I joined the world of the sentient most of the jazzy-looking offerings were sold out (prices seem pretty modest), but it's worth going to the Obscura Day website, which will direct you to offerings in your area. but even so there are some in the NYC area -- bear in mind that it's a worldwide event -- I might have been able to do if I didn't have a schedule conflict that I might not have if I'd found out about Obscura Day just a couple of days earlier. (I'll explain in a moment.)

FROM THE NEW YORK TRANSIT MUSEUM,
A BOUNTIFUL SUMMER COMING UP

Whew, it was a busy day for me: the first day of the members-only early-registration period (which runs through May 2) for the New York Transit Museum's summer tours. I managed to confine myself to five:

* An outing by bus to the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange, New Jersey (offered on May 19 and July 22, $50 for Transit Museum members, $65 for nonmembers).

* "Look at a Landmark: The Historic Station House at Avenue H," a converted turn-of-the-century real-estate office on Brooklyn's Brighton line, landmarked in 2004, with promised visits to "other local stations of the same era" (June 3 and July 29, $30/$45)

* One of this year's three Summer Nostalgia Rides, where frolickers young and old get to ride on various old-style subway cars -- and even, in one case, an assortment of vintage buses. Last year I did all three Nostalgia Rides, but having already done "Coney Island Bound!" (this year July 29) and "To the Rockaways, by Rail and Bus!" (August 12), this year I'm just going to do "Cultural Treasures of Brooklyn" (July 1):

Brooklyn's in bloom! Ride in style to the cultural treasures of Brooklyn on board the Museum's classic Lo-V vintage trains. Emerge from underground at Eastern Parkway where you can explore the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's summer blossoms and “Urban Garden” exhibit or pay homage to the iconic art of Keith Haring –- whose work was inspired by the subway system -– at the Brooklyn Museum. Spend the day enjoying these and other local attractions, or stay on the train for a ride underground. It's your day, your Brooklyn.

All three Nostalgia Tours are $50/$65 (children $20/$25). The hard part is deciding between partaking of events at the destination and staying on board the train for those extra rides.

* An eating tour with Saveur magazine's gastronomically omnivorous executive food editor, Todd Coleman, "Bridging the Gastronomic Gap," homing in on the "international noshing extravaganzas" at either end of the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn (August 1 and August 8, $45/$65 including the food).

* And one of the summer's two members-only tours "Trolley Ghosts: The Terminal Under Delancey" (June 7 and July 12, $55), a rare opportunity to see the underground site of the onetime streetcar terminal at the Manhattan end of the Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn. The other members-only offering is also subterranean: the always-popular "Jewel in the Crown", an otherwise-impossible visit to the long-disused station, designed to be the showplace of the then-new subway system (twice each on May 12 and June 17, $40).

This doesn't by any means exhaust the summer tour offerings. Photography buffs in particular are directed to "Bridge Photography: A Tour and Workshop", inspired by the upcoming Transit Museum exhibition of water colors by Antonio Mosi, who has made a specialty of painting all nine of the city's great bridges (July 14 and August 19, $35/$50). And if you've never seen a subway-system power substation, the tour of Lower Manhattan's Cliff Steet Station (July 7 and August 5, $30/$45), including a walk through the South Street area where Edison built his 1882 powerhouse, is a no-brainer.

I haven't even mentioned the wide range of "public programs" offered by the Transit Museum's Education Department -- the best thing I can do is to refer you to the Calendar of Events. I signed up for a whole bunch -- and am waiting to see the Municipal Art Society May schedule to help choose a date for yet another. The programs are free, or free with museum admission, which itself is free for members. Considering what a genuinely cool place the Transit Museum is for anyone with even a passing interest in urban public transit, membership is obviously a great deal. Do it now and you can still take advantage of the members-only early-registration period.

One innovation, by the way, is that all registrations are now being done online, as is the case with the Municipal Art Society (see below). I love it, and I suspect I'm talking now to people who are similarly cyber-schooled. I do wonder, though, how welcoming it is to people not used to arrange their lives online.


SPEAKING OF THE MUNICIPAL ART SOCIETY,

THE NEW WAY OF DOING THINGS STARTS NOW

In just the time since I began writing this post, MAS has finally gotten the May walking-tour schedule up -- the long wait presumably accounted for by the introduction (at last!) of the long-promised new system of online electronic ticketing for all MAS tours. All the information about the new system is here, ; the May tour schedule is here.

I've only begun to digest it all, and at first glance the May listings don't look as interesting as, say, April's, but that's all subjective -- and the fact is that this month I've actually done more MAS tours than I have in a long while, and I'm happy about that.

In fact, the reason I can't even try to squeeze in any of the remaining Obscura Day offerings is that I belatedly added a Saturday MAS tour, "Lower East Side -- Art and Culture," to my schedule. And the reason I was free to that brings us to one last story.


FOR JACK EICHENBAUM'S #7 TRAIN TOUR IT'S
"WAIT TILL NEXT TIME." IS THE J TRAIN NEXT?

As I've mentioned a number of time, this Saturday -- yes, Obscura Day (though who knew?) -- is the current version of what my favorite urban geographer Jack Eichenbaum's "signature" tour, "The World of the #7 Train" to Flushing. I did it last year, and was seriously thinking of doing it again, but put off thinking about it until finally I checked with Jack and learned that the tour has been booked up for two weeks! I was delighted to hear it (don't say I didn't warn you!), and decided what the heck, why not do the Lower East Side tour?

Oh yes, I forgot the best part. Jack mentioned that he "may" do "A Day on the J" in the fall. To which I replied that I would have my check in the mail as soon as he announces it.

Meanwhile, keep an eye on Jack's websitebe sure to sign yourself up for Jack's website, "The Georgraphy of New York City with Jack Eichenbaum" (geognyc.com), and e-mail him at jaconet@aol.com and ask to be put on his e-mail list for schedule updates. He's got a couple of MAS tours coming up in May focused on area of his native Queens of special interest to him, Long Island City, which has been undergoing astoundingly rapid changes since the city's adoption of major zoning changes there:. First there's "Daylight Loft Buildings in Long Island City" (May 12), then "What's New in Long Island City?" (May 20).

It's often possible to get advance notice of Jack's MAS tours, but more important there's news of his own tours and all sorts of other lectures and such he's giving around town. Great stuff. Oh, and you might mention in your e-mail that you've heard about that "D on the J" tour and would love to do it. I know I would.

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Urban Gadabout: NY Transit Museum tours announced plus those "WAHI" Upper Manhattan tours

Wikipedia offers this view of Washington Heights beyond the George Washington Bridge, from the west. For a listing of historian James Renner's upcoming tours of the Northern Manhattan neighborhoods of Washington Heights, Inwood, and Marble Hill, see below.



by Ken



Since I last wrote, the New York Transit Museum tour schedule has been announced (you can find it on the Calendar of Events page of the website, and the early registration period for members is in full swing. As I mentioned, all the regular tours on the fall schedule are offered at least twice, and some of the especially popular ones, which in the past were generally already offered more than once, are offered even more often.



The four I pounced on start with two led by peerless "urban geographer" Jack Eichenbaum. With Jack you not only begin to understand why neighborhoods and regions have developed the way they have, but you see things you just wouldn't see with less tuned-in tour leaders.



PENN STATION "ECOLOGY"

Saturday, September 17, 10am-12n, and Sunday, October 9, 1-3pm

Constructed in a once squalid are known as the "Tenderloin," Penn Station united rails from Long Island, New Jersey and points south that previously terminated on the other side of the Hudson. Urban geographer Jack Eichenbaum will lead this walking tour through the remnants of the neighborhood's past and look at its proposed future, including the Farley Post Office building, the historic Hotel Pennsylvania, Herald Square, and "Koreatown."

LIFE ALONG THE L TRAIN

Saturday, October 15, 10am-1pm, and Saturday, November 19, 10am-1pm

Since its expansion to 8th Avenue in Manhattan in the 1930s, the L line has stimulated gentrification along its route. We will explore the West Village and Meatpacking District -- including a portion of the new Highline Park -- and on to Bushwick and Williamsburg, noting the continuous transformation of each of these neighborhoods.

By the way, Jack has announced some additional fall tours of his own, including an on-the-ground survey of the area he's currently watching with perhaps the greatest fascination, What's New in Long Island City? (Saturday, October 22, 11am-1pm) and one in his home area, which has already undergone an unrecognizable transformation, Religion on the Land: Polytheologic Flushing (Saturday, November 12, 12n-2:30pm). I've already done a fair amount of wandering in both Long Island City and Flushing with Jack, and I can assure you it's a special experience. (I would definitely do LIC with him again if I weren't already registered for the Municipal Art Society tour of the Chinatown-Little Italy Historic District at the same time.)



Jack also invites us to "hold the dates" for a pair of cold-weather tours ("both partially indoors"), with details to be announced: Keeping Off the Streets of Midtown Manhattan (East Side) (Saturday, December 3) and Flushing's Chinatown (Sunday, December 18).



The other two tours I couldn't resist are:



POWER UP! A SUBSTATION INSIDER

Saturday, November 5, 10am-12n, and Saturday, December 3, 10am-12n

As part of subway construction in 1904, the 59th Street Powerhouse was built to supply the massive amounts of power required to move trains and light tunnels in the new subway. Robert W. Lobenstein, former General Superintendent of New York City Transit, will take us inside magical Substation No. 13 and lead a sidewalk tour of the 59th Street Powerhouse.

MOVIN' ON UP: 75 YEARS OF SUBWAYS UNDER QUEENS BOULEVARD

Sunday, November 13, 11am-2pm, and Saturday, December 10, 11am-2pm

Seventy-five years ago the Independent Subway System was extended from Jackson Heights to Jamaica under Queens Boulevard, now a shopping mecca. Ridership at Forest Hills station now ranks 40th out of the system's 468 stations. Ride sections of this line and walk its surrounding neighborhoods with subway historian and retired LIRR manager Andrew Sparberg.

These are all $30 for NYTM members, $45 for nonmembers.



Two perennial favorites are offered four times each but are so popular that they're likely still to be tough to book.



At some point I will definitely do the CONEY ISLAND YARD tour again, and prepare for it better by schooling myself on the various kinds of subway cars that are serviced in this giant maintenance facility, and how exactly they work, to better appreciate this unparalleled close-up view of how that maintenance done. But the pièce de résistance is the visit to the tower where New York Transit personnel oversee the extraordinary coming together at Coney Island of four separate subway lines.



This is a must. It's being offered Tuesday evenings, 6-8:30pm, on September 13, October 11, November 8, and December 13 ($30 for members, $50 for nonmembers), and you're going to need photo ID -- they take security very seriously at the Coney Island Yard. (Anyone who didn't understand how essential the subways are to the life of the city got a demonstration when they were shutdown in anticipation of Hurricane Irene.)



The visit to THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN: OLD CITY HALL STATION is also enormously popular. When the old City Hall station was built, it was the anchor of the original subway line, and the station was built on a decorative scale that was never repeated. You're really traveling back in time here, and the station may be less "wow"-inspiring than you expected. (For one thing, it's not that large. The trains of the time were only five cars, cars that were much shorter than later ones.) But more than anything, you're seeing history here. The station was abandoned both because of lack of use and because the extreme track curve on which it sits could never have been adapted to handle the much larger, multiple-trains that became standard on the NYC subways.



You can glance at the station by staying on a no. 6 train after its last southbound stop at Brooklyn Bridge, when it makes the loop that turns brings it onto the northbound local track of the station -- and you are allowed to stay on the train, we were told, unless Transit personnel tell you the train is going out of service -- but you won't see much. The tour is the only way to get out onto the station platform and actually see what there is to see. This is the one NYTM tour that's members only, and may be itself be reason enough to join, though there seem to me plenty of other reasons, not least all those other tours. (Note that in addition to using my early-registration privilege, I paid $120 for my four tours, which for nonmembers would be $180.)



And oh yes, as I mentioned last time, there's one more of the museum's famous day-long NOSTALGIA RIDES, once again riding the old IRT lo-V cars up the Lexington Avenue line to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx (Sunday, October 23, 10am-3pm; $35 for members, $50 for nonmembers). This time it's offered as a package deal with a box lunch and a tour of this final resting place of some of New York's Fanciest citizens (with cemetery architecture by some of New York's fanciest architects).



And I haven't even mentioned the museum itself, in downtown Brooklyn, which is terrific, both for its permanent exhibitions and the special ones offered for limited periods. (I was grateful at the two cracks that the summer Nostalgia Rides that departed from the museum gave me at the incredible exhibition on the Triborough Bridge, an amazingly thorough documentation with photos, archival documents, models, plans, etc. of how the concept for this complex of structures took shape and how it was executed, including what it displaced.)



Nor have I mentioned the numerous other special events, including all sorts for kids (many of whom are incredibly knowledgeable about the subways; at the Coney Island Yard, the youngsters on the tour knew everything about those trains!). Or the Museum Annex at Grand Central Station, which has free admission and is currently hosting an exhibition called "The Once and Future Penn Station." If you're visiting the city, you should definitely try to get to one if not both locations, and if you live here and haven't been yet, you really should go. For basic information, the Transit Museum website is a great starting place.





"WAHI" TOURS



Well, I've gotten my copy of James Renner's Washington Heights, Inwood, and Marble Hill, and it's a terrific book. But it didn't register for me before that it's part of the valuable Images of America series, which means it's basically a book of photos. There are lots of fine historical photos, informatively captioned, but alas no, it's no substitute -- as I was hoping -- for the tours I'll have to miss, owing to schedule conflicts, in this six-Sunday September-October series offered by the official historian of Manhattan Community District 12.



By way of overall introduction, James writes:

Washington Heights and Inwood (WAHI) are communities that have, over the years, gained recognition in massive demographic changes. People from other parts of the city are visiting and moving here because of its affordable housing and beautiful parks. These tours will demonstrate to the resident and visitor alike how upper Manhattan has changed and adapted to suit the needs of its new inhabitants and tourists.

You can find the full schedule with tour descriptions here. There are parts of the city it's easy to find covered by multiple walking tours; these aren't among them. The tours on the schedule ($15, $10 for students and seniors) are:



JUMEL TERRACE HISTORIC DISTRICT & SUGAR HILL (Washington Heights)

Sunday, September 11, 12n (additional fee for Morris Jumel Mansion admission)



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER (Washington Heights; 165th to 168th, Broadway to Haven Avenue)

Sunday, September 18, 12n



FORT GEORGE (Washington Heights; 190th to 193rd, Amsterdam and Audubon Avenues)

Sunday, September 25, 12n



SHERMAN CREEK (Inwood)

Sunday, October 2, 12n



TUBBY HOOK (Inwood; Dyckman Street, Riverside Drive and Broadway)

Sunday, October 9, 12n



MARBLE HILL

Sunday, October 16, 12n

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Urban Gadabout: NYC tour updates -- breaking news!

The Bowery in 1896 -- it sure doesn't look like this now, and the long-ago disappearance of the el is almost the least of the changes. The third in Francis Morrone's MAS tours focusing on the East Village (October 9) targets the Bowery.



by Ken



As I wrote Sunday, given how perilously close we're getting to September, the new tour schedules of the Municipal Art Society had to be released momentarily, and now they have been, more or less. I've done some difficult triage and filled in a lot of my fall calendar.



NEW YORK TRANSIT MUSEUM



Again as I wrote Sunday:

In the case of the Transit Museum, the smartest thing you can do for now is to become a member. While it's technically true that very few of its tour offerings require you to be a museum member, in fact members take such advantage not just of the lower members' price but of the early registration period that it's awfully hard to squeeze onto most of the tour lists if you aren't a member.

Members have now received the full fall tour schedule, and the members-only early registration period is set for August 31-September 8, and this time it's going to be doable online as well as by phone. (I've got my sights set on four tours.)



I assume there will be a general announcement of the tour list shortly. I don't feel at liberty to pass on what we've been told, except to note that the cutthroat competition for tour slots should be eased with all of the fall regular tours offered at least in duplicate, and some of the likely most popular ones being offered even more frequently. There is, by the way, another one of the Transit Museum's famous Nostalgia Tours, scheduled for late October.



My advice still is to join immediately, and ask to have the tour list sent to you if it's still not posted.



MUNICIPAL ART SOCIETY



The September and October listings are now up on the "Tours" page of the MAS website, and there's lots of exciting stuff. I'm conflicted out of a couple I would have loved to do: The Architecture of Literacy: University Heights, the Bronx (Saturday, September 17, 11am, with Jean Arrington), Arts for Transit: Brighton Line (Sunday, October 2, 11am, with Amy Hausmann, registration required -- when I moved to NYC at age 12, the Brighton line from Brooklyn was my lifeline to "the City," as I learned to refer to Manhattan), and Crown Heights North (Sunday, October 16, 11am, with Suzanne Spellen and Morgan Munsey, with whom I did an MAS tour of sections of Bedford-Stuyvesant a month or two ago -- unfortunately that's the day of my Working Harbor Committe Circumnavigation of Staten Island, also mentioned in my Sunday post).



However, in a frenzy of excitement I've already registered for seven tours. Except as noted, the tours are all still $10 for members, $15 for nonmembers.



Dawn Powell and the Greenwich Village of Her Time. Sunday, September 4, 2pm, with Francis Morrone

The World Trade Center: 10 Years Later. On the eve of the anniversary, Saturday, September 10, 6pm, with Francis Morrone, $20

The Architecture of the Garment District. Tuesday, September 20, 5:30pm, with Andrew Dolkart

Starchitecture NYC, 2011, "a concentrated three-hour tour via small motor coach and on foot of some of the city's most talked-about buildings, structures, and spaces," Saturday, September 24, 10am, with Matt Postal (also offered Saturday, October 15 -- I think! the schedule says "Sunday, October 15), $49 for members, $55 for nonmembers

East Village III: The Bowery, the third in a series of East Village tours Francis Morrone is leading. Sunday, October 9, 2pm

Chinatown-Little Italy Historic District. Saturday, October 22, 11am, with Kerri Mulhane



Then there are a bunch of tours offered on a walk-up basis (as I've mentioned, tours director Tamara Coombs likes offering the tours in both formats, to accommodate the widest range of potential tour-walkers) which I've inscribed on my calendar:



Sixth Avenue and the 1961 Code Revisited, the first of two walks looking at the wave of high-rise construction that was build in accordance with the major changes in the code implemented in 1961 (Sunday, September 18, 11am, with Matt Postal)

Battery Park City Evolving, "love it or hate it," focusing on the northern section. Sunday, September 25, 4pm, with Francis Morrone

Catalysts for Change: East Midtown and the 1961 Code, the East Side continuation of Matt Postal's Sixth Avenue walk above (September 18). Saturday, October 1, 11am

Forest Hills: Garden City in the City. Sunday, October 23, 2pm, with Francis Morrone

Downtown's Forgotten Neighborhood, the immigrant-rich "Lower West Side" that remained a multicultural hotbed until it was largely displaced by the World Trade Center. Saturday, October 29, 11am, with Joe Svehlak ("whose family settled here in the early 1900s")



There are also a pair of "Beyond Sight" tours specifically conceived for people with visual impairments (though open to others), stressing "visual description and multi-sensory exploration," led by art historian Sylvia Laudien-Meo (reservations required for both): Grand Central Terminal, September 3, 11am, and The September 11 & Irish Hunger Memorials, October 20, 12n.



And a tour of a project that was never built --



I'm also delighted to see that Matt Postal is once again doing what was my first MAS tour (only last fall!), one I talk about all the time: LOMEX Remembered (Thursday, September 15, 5:30pm) -- a tour of a project that was never built (!), Robert Moses's planned Lower Manhattan Expressway, when a local community threatened with destruction discovered that it could too fight City Hall, in a long series of battles (Moses didn't give up easily; every time the opponents thought they had thwarted the project, he came back with a revised plan and they had to start all over) in which Jane Jacobs's name was heard for the first time.



I STILL HAVE TO WRITE ABOUT THOSE "WAHI" TOURS



Sherman Creek seen from the northern edge of Inwood, Manhattan -- target of James Renner's October 2 WAHI tour.



It's a series of six, covering areas of Washington Heights, Inwood, and Marble Hill, being offered Sundays at noon from September 11 to October 16 by Northern Manhattan historian James Renner, author -- by strange coincidence -- of the book Washington Heights, Inwood, and Marble Hill (Arcadia Publishing; I've ordered my copy!) and the official historian of Community District 12 Manhattan. Again, you'll find the schedule here, and the tours are $15, $10 for students and seniors.



I'm sorry to say that after the triage with the NYTM and MAS schedules, plus other tour plans (like, again the Staten Island circumnavigation, which I have no intention of missing!), I'm probably only going to be able to make two of the six, but they're two I'm especially eager for: Jumel Terrace Historic District & Sugar Hill (Washington Heights and Harlem, the first of the series, September 11) and Sherman Creek (Inwood, October 2). I'm hoping that the book will help me plug some of those gaps. And of course I assume James will be offering more tours in the future.

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While we wait for tour announcements from MAS and the NY Transit Museum, here are some upcoming NY area tours for your schedule

I was really looking forward to this morning's MAS walking tour of Manhattan's Lower East Side, but no, I was still struggling with my Sunday Classics post on Andrea Chénier. Oh well.



by Ken



I've recovered my wits a bit since the post I wrote yesterday upon return from the New York Transit Museum's subway-and-bus Nostalgia Tour to the Rockaways, and I want to add some information.



First, while I focused on NYTM and Municipal Art Society (MAS) tours, anyone who clicked through to the respective websites would have found the tour cupboards pretty bare. (Well, MAS had an awfully interesting-looking walking tour of Manhattan's Lower East Side scheduled for this morning, but I had to blow that off because I was doing battle with Andrea Chénier.) I should have mentioned that both NYTM and MAS are presumably days if not hours away from announcing schedules that cover September and beyond.



I've been checking the MAS website daily. Oh, even the tours that require preregistration won't sell out that quickly, but I'm kind of out of my mind with excitement to see what MAS's Tamara Coombs has cooked up for us. And for your planning purposes, it's wise to assume that the tours that do require preregistration will sell out well before the tour date. The prices are ridiculous for tours of this quality -- as of the summer offerings, still $10 for members and $15 for nonmembers for most tours. (Longer tours or more elaborate tours are priced higher.)



In the case of the Transit Museum, the smartest thing you can do for now is to become a member. While it's technically true that very few of its tour offerings require you to be a museum member, in fact members take such advantage not just of the lower members' price but of the early registration period that it's awfully hard to squeeze onto most of the tour lists if you aren't a member. I can't wait to see what Luz has cooked up for us, and assuming I have the information in time, I plan to do what I did this summer: call in with my request list as early as possible the morning of the start of the registration period!





WORKING HARBOR TOURS



In July I wrote with great excitement about the first of three Hidden Harbors Tours I was doing, arranged jointly by the Working Harbor Committee (WHC) and Circle Line Downtown this one through the Kill Van Kull, which separates the west of Staten Island from New Jersey, to exotic Newark Bay. The trip was fantastic! Since then I've also done "The Brooklyn Tour," which took us up the East River to the junction of Newtown Creek, then close along the Brooklyn waterfront until we swung across New York Harbor past Staten Island to the opening of the Kill Van Kull and the New Jersey shore, then past the Statue of Liberty and back to the Fulton Street pier. We did much of the trip with lightning flashing, and then a wild thunderstorm broke out just as we passed the Battery for the short trip back to the pier -- it's a shame they can't plan on including this effect all the time!



I mention them now because both "The Newark Bay Tour" (September 13) and "The Brooklyn Tour" (September 27) have one more incarnation coming up for the current season, while the final offering of the "North River Tour" (i.e., the Hudson River, formerly known as the North River) which I haven't done yet, is this Tuesday, August 23. I bought all my tickets online; there's a discount for WHC members.



CIRCUMNAVIGATION OF STATEN ISLAND



For all the tours, the WHC's Captain John provide running commentary along with a guest for the particular tour. One event he has talked about on both the tours I've taken is a circumnavigation of Staten Island, for which the date has finally been announced -- Sunday, October 16 -- and ticket sales begun. A planned WHC Lighthouse Tour sold out before I had a chance to book it, so I wouldn't wait on this one. (As a matter of fact, I didn't!)



FIVE WALKING TOURS OF NORTHERN MANHATTAN



I also wanted to report on an exciting series of tours "WAHI Tours" of Northern Manhattan being offered Sundays from September 11 through October 16 at noon by James Renner, author of Washington Heights, Inwood, and Marble Hill (Arcadia Publishing; I haven't had a chance to get my copy yet!), and the official Community District 12 Manhattan historian -- priced at $15 for adults, $10 for seniors and students. I'll write more about them soon.

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