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.
This video conveys a certain sense of one-of-a-kind tour leader Justin Ferate, but really not much of his irresistible enthusiasm or unflagging ebullience or considerable funniness -- even, for that matter, the sheer range of knowledge he brings to bear on seemingly every subject.
by Ken
There's a fair amount of exciting news to share with the gadaboutishly (or armchair-gadaboutishly) inclined, but one piece of that news has set me to recalling the time a couple of decades ago when I walked up to, but wasn't able to go in, the Mark Twain House in Hartford, under curious circumstances I'd just as soon not go into. But I've always felt deprived, and in a couple of weeks I'm going to get to do something about it. More about this in a moment.
Now that the May Municipal Art Society walking-tour listings are available, one of the first things that caught my eye is one being led by Justin Ferate, "Hildreth Meière Exhibition Tour" (Sunday, May 20, 9:45am-12:30pm, members $25/nonmenbers $35, including museum admission), a tour of the exhibition at "the remarkable jewel-like exhibition" at the Museum of Biblican Art of "the renowned and versatile Art Deco muralist and mosaicist," who
during her career completed over 100 projects that were evenly split between the secular and religious. She left her mark on New York City’s vast landscape, including the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Radio City Music Hall, the truly striking Red Mosaic Banking Room at One Wall Street, and Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.
The first tour I did with Justin was an unusual-for-MAS all-day trek to the southernmost tip of Staten Island, Tottenville, and it remains one of my most memorable tours. (I acutally went back to Tottenville! And in fact wrote about the return to Tottenville in a pair of Jun 2011 Urban Gadabout pieces, before and after: "To the end of the island (Staten) -- I'm headed back to Tottenville (weather permitting)" on the 24th and "Back from Tottenville" on the 25th.)
"WOLFE WALKERS" TOURS WITH JUSTIN FERATE
That got me to looking at the tour schedule on Justin's own website, Justin Ferate's Tours of the City (justinsnewyork.com), a treasure trove of resources and links, where I was delighted to find a group of tours offered with the Wolfe Walkers (a group new to me; you can download their spring tour brochure here, including the registration form) -- so deliighted that an hour or two later I had a check in the mail for three of them:
Broad Channel (Queens) and Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge (Saturday, June 2, 1-4:30pm, not including travel time to and from Howard Beach; offered with Don Riepe, official Jamaica Bay Guardian; $25 with $3 early-registration discount, including all admissions)
(Registration is by mail using the downloadable form. For the early-registration discount, the registration has to be received a week before the tour. There's no discount on bus tours.)
Jamaica Bay: with "mainland" Queens to the north, Brooklyn to the west, and the Rockaway Peninsula to the south
Obviously, the bus and walking tour that includes the Mark Twain House was a no-brainer for me. But I was almost as excited about the through Broad Channel into the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge.
It may help if you understand that you're dealing here with someone who actually thrilled at the prospect of taking a NY harbor cruise that would venture into the waters of Newark Bay, as I wrote here last July, in "Newark Bay or bust! (Is there anyone else whose pulse is sent racing by the prospect?." For how many years had I stared at NYC maps with the vast expanse of water indicated as Jamaica Bay (yes, that's JFK Airport to the northeast of the bay on the map), wondering what it could be like? Eventually I discovered that the version of the A train that carries passengers to the Rockaways actually crosses the whole length of the bay, still perhaps my favorite ride in the NYC subway system, and one I still do fairly regularly. (Actually, I still remember my first subway maps, which indicated that Rockaway-bound passengers had to pay an extra 5 cents.)
IN NYC WE'VE GOT 70-PLUS FREE JANE'S WALKS THIS WEEKEND (CHECK FOR YOUR LOCAL LISTINGS)
"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
My goodness, it's already a year since I wrote about my (free!) Jane's Walk experience last year. I've had the upcoming Jane's Walks NYC weekend (Saturday-Sunday, May 5-6) in my head for a few weeks now, and assumed that wherever they're happening, all around the world, they're happening on these same dates. Now I gather that this is not the case, and indeed in some places the events have already taken place. I'm afraid sorting this all out is beyond me, so I offer the two relevant links: Jane's Walk (http://www.janeswalk.net/) and Jane Jacobs Walk (http://www.janejacobswalk.org/).
In New York once again the Municipal Art Society is spearheading Jane's Walk NYC, and I have to say I find the listing of "70-plus free walks" (plus two bike rides) pretty awesome. When I went through the master list highlighting walks I'd be interested in doing, I wound up lingering over almost all of them! Most don't require preregistration, which means that -- especially if the weather is favorable -- some of the walks may draw seriously large crowds, so my thinking is going to be to target the less obviously grabbing events. I'm not necessarily great at this, though.
I have a temptation to forego two-a-day schedule cramming and instead, on one or both days, go for a tour that's far enough off the beaten path that it defies combining with other events. For example, "New Dorp (Staten Island): Possibilities for Walkability and Transit in a Railway 'New Village'" (Saturday, 11:30am, RSVP required), one of only two walks scheduled for Staten Island, the other being to -- where else? -- my old stomping ground: "Tottenville: Main Street U.S.A. (Sunday, 1pm; note that I wasn't able to get the link to work).
Or there's "The Unknown Riverdale" (Sunday, 12n), one of only two offerings in the Bronx -- and if there's one thing that Riverdalites and rest-of-the-Bronxites tend to agree on, it's that Riverdale isn't much more than technically part of the borough. Actually, the other Bronx walk looks interesting too: "Woodlawn: A Small Town in the Big City" (Sunday, 1pm), being concerned not with the cemetery of that name (one of the Bronx's most famous destinations) but with the former village of Woodlawn itself as a particular kind of urban enclave.
It's not surprising that Manhattan is abundantly represented. Two East River destinations caught my eye: "An Accessible Waterfront for East Harlem" (Saturday, 2:30pm, RSVP) and the area that includes the site of the U.N., "Turtle Bay: From Quiet Farmland to the International Stage" (Saturday or Sunday, 11am).
Properly speaking, Roosevelt Island (Sunday, 2pm), which sits in the East River between Manhattan and Queens, is part of Manhattan, and this is billed as a "moderate length" walk, covering "approximately 12 blocks." But I'm really trying to focus on sites that aren't so easy to see with expert guidance, and for Roosevelt Island I see that there's a self-guided tour downloadable in PDF form.
Listings are slim for the city's largest borough, Queens. Not counting offerings in the Rockaways (the ocean-front peninsula on the far side of Jamaica Bay), there's just Jackson Heights and Elmhurst (Saturday, 11:30am), "Historic Flushing" (Sunday, 1pm), and a walk built around the sculpture "The Rocket Thrower," still housed in the Flushing Meadows Park site of the 1964-65 World's Fair (Sunday, 12n). Not that there's anything wrong with Rockaways tours. I did a couple myself there last summer, and among this year's Jane's Walks I've been eyeing is "Far Rockaway: Beauty of the Bungalows" (Saturday, 2pm).
JACK EICHENBAUM HELPS PLUG THE BRONX-QUEENS GAP
I might mention that the second and third parts of ace urban geographer Jack Eichenbaum's series of Municipal Art Society walking tours through the area broadly known as the South Bronx, which began with Mott Haven in March, continues in June with "Melrose: Between the Rails" on Sunday the 3rd and "Morrisania: From Suburbia to the Grand Concourse" on Saturday the 24th. (Check the tour schedule on Jack's website, which also lists a number of walks he'll be doing in May and June in his home ground of Queens.)
When it comes to the city's most populous borough, the range of Jane's Walks NYC offerings shows just how radically Brooklyn has come up in the world. Even with all the Brooklyn walks I've done, I could easily fill both days with Brooklyn events and still have to bypass some that tempt me. Some that I'm looking at: Brownsville (Saturday, 10am), "Red Hook: Layers of History" (Saturday, 10am), Wallabout (the area near the former Brooklyn Navy Yard; Saturday, 11am), "Atlantic Yards: Brooklyn's Most Controversial Development" (Saturday, 2pm), and "Prospect-Lefferts Gardens: Jewel in Brooklyn's Crown" (Sunday, 11am, RSVP). There are a bunch of Brooklyn Heights and Williamsburg walks, but these are pretty actively explored areas -- and I'm also thinking these walks may be among the heavier draws.
from 240th Street (Van Cortlandt Park) in the Bronx down to Bowling Green in Manhattan. It's broken down into six two-hour units, with fixed starting points for each: 240th Street to 190th, 8-10am; 190th Street to 112th, 10am-12n; 112th Street to 59th, 12n-2pm; 59th Street to 23rd, 2-4pm; 23rd Street to Canal, 4-6pm; and Canal Street to Bowling Green, 6-8pm. So you can join in for one or more segments, not even necessarily contiguous ones, or if you're feeling really hardy, you can attempt the whole bloody thing. (Um, no, I don't think I'll be doing this.)
Alas, the Pavilion at Conference House Park was used as a stage for the "musicians," and so was off limits to us Second Annual Raritan Bay Festivalgoers.
by Ken
So I really did it, and it all went off without a hitch -- the subway to South Ferry, the 10:30 Staten Island Ferry to St. George, the Staten Island Railway all to the end, at Tottenville, the walk to the Conference House Park Visitors Center for the Second Annual Raritan Bay Festival.
It's a good thing I'd been in the Pavilion at Conference House Park on my previous expedition to Tottenville. We ate our bag lunches in the Pavilion -- in the rain -- on that Municipal Art Society tour last month (link for Municipal Art Society tours: mas.org/tours/) led by the remarkable Justin Ferate, without whom I would never have gotten to Tottenville once, let alone wanted to go back, or actually known where the heck I was going. As I explained last night, the view from the Pavilion was so reduced by the dreadful weather conditions that I could hardly see anything.
Today the weather held pretty well. There was a threat of showers, and from time to time the puffy white clouds gave way to gray ones of varying intensity, but mostly it was okay. So today I could see that what I thought looked like a view of the open ocean, but was really Raritan Bay, was no such thing -- the low visibility simply lopped off the Monmouth County shoreline. (Also, I have to say that Perth Amboy, across the Arthur Kill from Tottenville, looks more picturesque in the mist and gray.) Oh yes, the reason I was glad we'd made it to the Pavilion on that first trip: It was closed off to festivalgoers, to be used as a stage for the, er, musicians (I guess any group of people holding noise-making devices attached to amplifiers and speakers qualify as "musicians") scheduled throughout the afternoon.
This time, however, I made it down onto the beach, where I gave a wide beth to the kiddie kayaking that seemed to be drawing most of the crowd that had arrived in the first hour, in favor of the half-hour horseshoe-crab walk offered every hour by a smart fellow from the Staten Island Museum. (This seems to be my horseshoe-crab season.) I scored some cool literature from the tables of the aforementioned Staten Island Museum and a couple of other interesting-themed organizations (even including a free DVD from one, just for signing up for their e-mail list), and by then I'd been there an hour and decided I'd pretty well "done" the festival, and realized I was probably within striking distance of the S78 bus, which I'd scouted on my way to the park and which would take me close to the train station -- and which came exactly, and I mean exactly at the posted schedule time, 1:07, though I didn't take it all the way, realizing that (a) I would wind up getting to the station way too early for the next train, and (b) I would be deprived of the opportunity to fortify myself with some local victuals.
So I got off at the corner of Amboy Road and Main Street, which passes for a bustling intersection in Tottenville, and bought some local specialties at the Main St. Deli -- Sprite Zero and a Little Debbie peach pie (we urban gadabouts know that while gadding you need to provision yourself to last at least to the next deli). Then I walked on to the station and made the reverse trip again without a hitch. Since I was going to be home so much earlier than I expected, and from the ferry terminal had the whole of the city at my (and my unlimited MetroCard's) disposal, I did allow myself an only slightly out-of-the-way detour to Manganaro's Hero-Boy on Ninth Avenue between 37th and 38th. It was easy to set my sights on s chicken parmigiana hero. The agonizing part -- all the way from the ferry terminal to Manganaro's, in particular the walk from Seventh Avenue to Ninth -- was whether to eat in, as I normally do, or get the sandwich to go, so I could really celebrate the early return. (It was a tough call, but in the end I chose the "to go" option.)
Total travel time, deducting the added stopovers, was just over seven hours door to door. Which means roughly six hours traveling for one hour of festival. Is that a good ratio? You might not think so, but I thought it was a pretty swell adventure.
And the sandwich was, as always, wonderful. You'd think you wouldn't want to schlepp a chicken parmigiana hero around for another 45 minutes, but in fact, great as it is when you eat it freshly made and hot, when you let it sit like that, so it cools off and gets a little mooshy, it's just as good. The flavors mingle or something.
