Urban Gadabout: Check out the Spring 2015 schedule of Justin Ferate and Wolfe Walkers

This time Justin's hardy Tottenville explorers will get inside Conference House. (Click to enlarge, and download a pdf of the Wolfe Walkers Spring 2015 Brochure here.)

by Ken

Just about every time I take a walking tour (or bus-and-walking tour or train-and-walking tour) with the amazing Justin Ferate, I have occasion to tell the story of the first tour I ever did with Justin, back when he still occasionally did tours for the Municipal Art Society. It was a pretty much all-day affair to Tottenville, at the southern edge of Staten Island, and it was, well, amazing. As I always say, as soon as Justin got us grouped on the Staten Island Ferry at the Manhattan terminal, he started talking, and all those hours later when we arrived back at the end of the ferry terminal terminus of the Staten Island Railway, he came up for breath.

The weather was dismal, raining on and off, with mist so heavy that when we got to Conference House Park, at the southern tip of the island, we could barely make out Perth Amboy, New Jersey, across the Arthur Kill. Nevertheless, the whole day was magical, and I was inspired to return to Tottenville on my own. And of course I was inspired to take as many tours with Justin as I've been able to.

Nowadays those tours are mostly in spring and fall seasons of the Wolfe Walkers, the venerable band of urban gadders originally gathered together by Prof. Gerard Wolfe when he was teaching at NYU. As Justin noted last year, though, he sudenly realized that he has now been doing the Wolfe Walkers walks longer than Gerard.



And in the brand-new Spring 2015 Brochure that Justin just passed along, I see that he's doing a new verson of the Tottenville expedition on May 31, which I would have signed up for in a heartbeat if I didn't have a schedule conflict. (This time the group is promised access to the inside Conference House.) I had a couple of other schedule conflicts with dates on the Spring 2015 schedule, but one of them I'm blowing off, in order to do the ever-so-Edith Whartonesque Summer Mansions of Astoria, Queens. (I've been reading a lot of Edith Wharton, including the Old New York novellas, for which the tour should practically be a required field trip. I had my registration form and check -- for both bus tours, the "Titanic Memorial Tour," "Summer Mansions of Astoria," and "Kleindeutschland" -- sitting in the mailbox across the street in time for the next pickup after I received the brochure.

Dear Friends,

Another Spring Season awaits! Responding to several requests, we are offering a walk of Spiritual Sites along Central Park West [Sunday, April 12] that will include (among other locations) a private tour of Congregation Shearith Israel Synagogue. Three tours celebrate the New York waterfront: Brooklyn Bridge and Brooklyn Heights with a tour of Plymouth Church [Sunday, April 26]; Summer Mansions of Astoria, Queens [Saturday, May 9]; and the charming waterfront village of Tottenville, Staten Island [Sunday, May 31] -- including a tour of Conference House, where attempts were made to resolve the issues of the American Revolution. (Needless to say, the Conference was unsuccessful.)

We’ll explore the history and remnants of “Kleindeutschland” or “Little Germany” on the Lower East Side [Saturday, May 16]. On our bus trip to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Hyde Park [Sunday, June 7], we’ll travel to Springwood, the Roosevelt Mansion. A special treat will be a visit to Eleanor Roosevelt’s unusual snuggery, Val-Kill Cottage as well as the FDR Presidential Library. The Hyde Park trip will also include a tour of the Frederick Vanderbilt Mansion, designed by McKim, Mead and White.

A very exciting offering this year will be a day of 17th and 18th Century Stone Houses in the towns of New Paltz and Hurley [Saturday, July 11]. The New Paltz houses form a National Landmark district and the houses are maintained in a protected museum environment. The houses of Hurley date back as far back as 300 years and are currently residences today. This is the only day of the year that these private homes are opened for public visitation. A rare treat!

Come join us for another exciting season!

In addition to the above tours, all led by Justin, there's a Saturday-evening Titanic Memorial Tour (April 18) led by Dave Gardner, "a gold member of the Titanic Historical Society."

You can find a pdf of the Spring 2015 Brochure here. The brochure includes the registration form (it's page 2), but if you want to download just the registration form, you can find it here.

And while you're on Justin's "Tours of the City" website take a look around, and if you have any interest in what's going on in and around New York, you should sign up for Justin's mailing list, which will land you an ongoing cornucopia of information. As I always say, I always read Justin's pass-alongs, and have been tipped to all manner of fascinations.

#

Urban Gadabout: Jane's Walks NYC reminder (May 5-6)

by Ken

One last reminder that the Municipal Art Society has coordinated a bumper crop of 70-plus walks (plus a few bike tours) in all five boroughs for Saturday and Sunday's annual celebration of Jane Jacobs's vision of the livable city. The complete list is here, with start and finish points, and presumably any changes will be noted on the website.

Without exaggeration I must have noted at least 40 walks I would be happy to do. I finally settled on one relatively remote destination for each day, in the two least-accessed boroughs: to Staten Island Saturday for "New Dorp: Possibilities for Walkability and Transit in a Railway 'New Village'" (10:30am-1pm), and to the Bronx Sunday for "The Unknown Riverdale" (12n-2pm). I'll be reporting on my travels, and would love to hear about readers'.

#

Urban Gadabout: How I spent the earthquake, plus gadding to the North River, SI's Freshkills Park, and Constitution Island (opposite West Point)

"It's not nice to fool Mother Nature."

So I guess it was a little before 2 this afternoon. Hey, if I'd known it was going to be history, I'd have checked the time -- I just thought it was, well, I didn't know what the heck it was, but I considered and dismissed "earthquake" as a possibility. We don't normally have earthquakes on the 14th floor of my building in the Financial District (Lower Manhattan) of New York.

So like I said, it must have been a little before 2, and I was at my desk in my cubicle on the 14th floor of a pretty sturdily built building (at least in the 2½ years my company has been here, the building has never moved that I'm aware of), and for a while the floor and everything kind of trembled, and after awhile people sort of looked at one or another, and somebody mentioned that there had been a 5.8 earthquake in Washington. Only I didn't make out exactly what that person said; I reconstructed it later after I found out that there had been a 5.8 earthquake centered in northern Virginia, which was also reported as 5.9 or even 6.0 Online somebody joked that S&P had upgraded the earthquake from 5.8 to 6.0.

Then we were hustled into the conference room to hear our HR director, who happened to be in California (as it happens, our office manager was also out of the office -- coincidence?), via conference call tell us to do whatever we felt necessary for our safety. She also warned us about taking precautions before getting on a subway, but somebody else reported that New York Transit was reporting no service delays. (And New York Transit wouldn't kid us now, would it?)

Me, I figured if an earthquake is coming to get me, I really wouldn't know where to go to escape its clutches. I figure you're just as likely to walk into it as to escape it. When I went back to working on the InDesign file I had been working on, the computer claimed that the file was damaged. I rebooted and tried reloading it, and while the program still voiced suspicion about the file being damaged, it then accepted and saved some small changes, and the asterisk went away. So far the file seems to be OK.

And that's how I spent the earthquake. We're not used to this sort of stuff here, but believe me, I take it seriously. It's not nice to fool Mother Nature.

STILL, I HOPE MOTHER NATURE ISN'T PLANNING MORE OF
THIS SEISMIC STUFF JUST NOW, WITH URBAN GADDING AHEAD

Constitution Island, viewed from the West Point side

As I write, I'm getting read to leave the office for this evening's Hidden Harbor Tour of the "North" (i.e., Hudson) River waterfront, and then tomorrow I'm actually taking off work for my first look, courtesy of a tour offered jointly by SI 350 (a volunteer group promoting celebration of Staten Island's 350th birthday -- apparently someone thinks Staten Island is 350 years old; I wonder how Mother Nature feels about that) and the NYC Parks Dept., at the work-in-progress Freshkill Parks, built with huge infusions of technology, cash, and manpower on top of the old trash megadump.

The Parks Dept. has been offering tours, but I could never figure out from the website where I would have to get to, or therefore whether I could get there via public transit. This tour, however, is leaving from in front of the library in St. George, the part of Staten Island where the ferry lands -- and that I know how to find.

Then Saturday I'm actually venturing outside the five boroughs of NYC, well up the Hudson River to venture onto Constitution Island, which is opposite West Point on the west bank of the river, and is only open three weekends a summer. I'm expecting to meet up with a Shorewalkers group at the Metro North train station in Cold Spring, on the east side of the river from the island.

#

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.

#

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

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

by Ken

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hidden Harbor Tour: Newark Bay Tour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

by Ken

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

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

THE "CONFERENCE" IN THE CONFERENCE HOUSE

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

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

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

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

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

The Outerbridge Crossing over Arthur Kill, from Tottenville

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

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

An aerial view of the Pavilion in Conference House Park

#

Seeing America-- Free Walks

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

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

by Ken

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE JANE'S WALK I FINALLY CHOSE FOR TODAY


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

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

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

#

By itself worth the trip to Staten Island's Snug Harbor Cultural Center: The Noble Maritime Collection

The houseboat that seaman-artist John A. Noble used as a studio (mounted on a barge on the industrial Bayonne side of the Kill Van Kill, which separates New Jersey from the north shore of Staten Island) was laboriously disassembled, transported, reconstructed, and painstakingly restored in the Noble Maritime Collection, a constituent of Staten Island's Snug Harbor Cultural Center. During Noble's lifetime, the houseboat-studio was featured in a 1954 issue of National Geographic.

by Ken

As I mentioned Friday night, my principal activity yesterday was a Municipal Art Society all-day trip to and walking tour of Snug Harbor Cultural Center on the north shore of Staten Island. The weather was lousy, but held up well enough for tour leader Francis Morrone, a noted architectural historian (best known for his extensive writing on the architecture of Brooklyn, but he's quick to point out that it has been a largely accidental "specialty," and some of the best MAS tours I've taken with him, like this one, have been in other boroughs), to give us a splendid introduction to the history of the first five buildings (known, efficiently, as Buildings A to E), all in the Greek Revival style that was in vogue in the early 1930s, for the "decrepit" sailors' home, Sailors' Snug Harbor, funded by the will of Robert Richard Randall -- a fascinating story in its own right.

"Temple Row": the original five buildings, in Greek Revival style, for what was then Sailors' Snug Harbor and is now the Snug Harbor Cultural Center. The central building, "Building C" -- begun in 1931 and finished in 1933 -- was discovered as late as 1970 to have been designed by the massively influential architect Minard Lafever. (Other buildings were built, Francis explained to us, from Lafever's wildly popular published plan books.)

At its zenith, Sailors' Snug Harbor housed some 1000 retired seamen who upon being no longer fit for seagoing had no place on dry land to "retire" to. With changes in the way maritime commerce is conducted in the 20th century, not to mention social innovations like Social Security, the haven enjoyed steadily declining use, until finally the last residents were moved to a new facility in North Carolina. Over the clamoring of developers eager to get their clutches on the extraordinary site, with immense effort on the part of the rising preservation movement of the 1960s most of the site was eventually landmarked and designated for use as a new Snug Harbor Cultural Center, already home to an assortment of constituents, with the rest of the site still very much a work in progress.

We actually benefited from the lousy weather. It encouraged our leaders, Francis and the MAS's director of tours and programs, Tamara Coombs, herself a Staten Islander, to revise the original plan for the afternoon to concentrate on indoor-type activities, notably allowing us additional time in the John A. Noble Maritime Collection, which occupies Building D. We were already scheduled to eat our lunches there (we had been instructed to come sack-lunch-equipped) but wound up with an extra hour to explore a museum I'd never heard of, but which has become one of my prized spots in the city. Now that I know what and where it is (Snug Harbor, by the way, is a barely 10-minute bus ride from the St. George Staten island Ferry terminal), I definitely plan to go back. As I said to our incredibly gracious and informative host (I feel terrible for not getting his name -- the collection's assistant director, Ciro Galeno, perhaps?), the Noble Collection is a destination worth the trip by itself.

John A. Noble was a seaman-slash-artist, who developed an early fascination for the way the sea tested the men who made their living sailing it, and for a number of years made his living at it, but gradually retired from active seagoing when he discovered he could make a living as an artist of the sea. He drew and painted, but discovered he had a special affinity for lithography, which also provided him with a regular source of income. Noble's parents, both artists, split their time between France, where the younger John was born, and the U.S. The elder John Noble, a painter, somehow managed to be known in France as "Wichita Bill." One of the remarkable exhibits in the museum is a room called "The Atelier of Wichita Bill," a painstaking reconstruction, using actual family objects, of the senior John Noble's studio in France.

Noble's passion for tugboats is well documented in the Noble Maritime Collection's current exhibition on the subject. As our host pointed out to us, tugboats are still an active part of harbor life, and the exhibit has drawn a lot of visitors just for their interest in the tugboat life.

Probably the most fascinating exhibit is the transplanted and restored houseboat that Noble used as a studio, eventually mounted on a barge on the industrial Bayonne side of the Kill van Kull, which separates New Jersey from the northwestern corner of Staten Island. His bio on the Noble Maritime Collection website (noblemaritime.org) explains:

From 1928 until 1945, Noble worked as a seaman on schooners and in marine salvage. In 1928, while on a schooner that was towing out down the Kill van Kull, the waterway that separates Staten Island from New Jersey, he saw the old Port Johnston coal docks for the first time. It was a sight, he later asserted, which affected him for life. Port Johnston was "the largest graveyard of wooden sailing vessels in the world." Filled with new but obsolete ships, the great coalport had become a great boneyard. In 1941, Noble began to build his floating studio there, out of parts of vessels he salvaged. From 1946 on, he worked as a full-time artist. Often accompanied by his wife, he set off from his studio in a rowboat to explore the Harbor. These explorations resulted in a unique and exacting record of Harbor history in which its rarely documented characters, industries, and vessels are faithfully recorded.

.
Along with the restored studio houseboat itself, the exhibit includes wonderful photographs showing how the houseboat was actually moved to and then into the museum and then restored. As our host (given his tremendous hospitality and helpfulness, I feel terrible for not getting his name -- the collection's assistant director, Ciro Galeno?) pointed out, the story of how the exhibit came to be is probably at least as fascinating as the exhibit.

And throughout the museum there is a sensational attention in the presentation to context, with writings of Noble's to provide background for his artwork, and all manner of objects, from Noble and a wide range of other sources, to fit both Noble's life and work and the history and mission of Snug Harbor in context. There is, for example, a room that's been reconstructed to the state it would have been when it housed a pair of Snug Harbor residents. There's a room that has been left unaltered for a glimpse of the state the building was in when the museum was created in Building D.

The museum's executive director, Erin Urban, had met and interviewed Noble not long before his death and became fascinated by both his life and his work, and after his death determined that the latter needed to be made accessible, out of which came the idea for the Noble Maritime Collection, taking full advantage of its constituency in Snug Harbor Cultural Center. Apparently through sheer force of will Urban has made into a reality, with a staggering range of activities, and support not just from funders but from a small army of volunteers known as the Noble Crew, whose estimated $1 million worth of labor she has paraded before all manner of potential donors to raise more money.

If you're in the city and have a free day for the expedition, don't miss the Noble Maritime Collection. The gallery is open Thursday-Sunday, 1-5pm.


SPEAKING OF GREAT NYC OUTINGS, A REMINDER ABOUT "THE WORLD OF THE #7 TRAIN" THIS SATURDAY

The last I heard there were still openings for what "urban geographer" Jack Eichenbaum calls his "signature tour," coming up this Saturday, April 30 -- an all-day exploration of selected sites along the route of the no. 7 subway line to Flushing in Queens, which I mentioned recently. Jack is a terrific tour guide, and this is some of his favorite turf. Here again is his description:

THE WORLD OF THE #7 TRAIN 10am-5:30pm SATURDAY, APRIL 30, 2011
This series of six walks and connecting rides along North Queens’ transportation corridor is my signature tour. We focus on what the #7 train has done to and for surrounding neighborhoods since it began service in 1914. Walks take place in Long Island City, Sunnyside, Flushing, Corona, Woodside and Jackson Heights and lunch is in Flushing’s Asiatown. Tour fee is $39 and you need to preregister with Jack Eichenbaum. The full day’s program and other info is available by email jaconet@aol.com. Questions? 718-961-8406. The tour is limited to 25 people. Don’t get left out!

You can also get information on Jack's website. I sent my check in as soon as I heard about the tour. It sounds to me like a unique opportunity.

#