No More Drugs For Tourists In Holland?

I never got into the 12-step thing. I was severely addicted to drugs a couple times while I was a teenager and I went for the one step thing: stop. It wasn't easy and there was some spiritual intervention that was helpful but it worked, eventually. By the time I was 21, the drug demon was over... and I moved to Amsterdam. I lived there for almost 4 years and even worked in a licensed hash distribution center-- the Kosmos, which was actually a meditation center-- but never participated in the free and easy drug life. But it was certainly all around me, all the time. In fact, I didn't know that many people who weren't smoking hash. That's all changing now... at least for foreigners. Pressured by E.U. conservatives, the right-wingers who won the last Dutch elections passed a law preventing foreign tourists from using drugs... and this week a judge upheld it. That reversed 36 years of a very easy-going policy towards soft drugs in the country.

While soft drugs are tolerated, there is growing concern at tourists visiting just for drugs, and foreign dealers selling illegally at home.

The ban is due to start in three southern provinces next month, and go nationwide by the end of the year.

A group of cafe owners argued at The Hague district court that the ban was discriminatory against foreigners.

Under the new law, Dutch residents will still be allowed into the cafes, as long as they have valid identification, or possibly hold a new "weed pass," which is also being debated.

There are about 700 coffee shops, as they are called, in the Netherlands. The cultivation and sale of soft drugs through them is decriminalised, although not legal; police generally tolerate possession of up to five grams of cannabis.

A lawyer for the coffee shop owners said he would immediately lodge an appeal.

Michael Veling, a spokesman for the Dutch Cannabis Retailers Association, is among those challenging the government plan.

"It is going to cost me 90% of my turnover," he told the BBC World Service. "That is a very good reason for anyone to oppose any plan. Second it puts our customers in a very difficult spot, because why do you have to register to buy a substance that is still illegal?"

The BBC's Anna Holligan in The Hague says the nationwide ban is being strongly opposed by the Mayor of Amsterdam, Eberhard van der Laan, because around a third of the city's tourists visit to smoke cannabis in the cafes.

If the coffee shop owners lose their case they say they will take it to the European Court of Human Rights, on the grounds that the Dutch should not be allowed to discriminate against people on the basis of where they live.

The moves are part of a tougher approach to drugs introduced by the coalition conservative-led government, elected 18 months ago.

In October strong cannabis was reclassified as a hard drug, amid concerns that it has a psychotic effect on some users.

The move forced cannabis coffee shops to remove the more popular stronger varieties from their shelves.

In November the city of Maastricht brought in a coffee shop ban for foreign tourists from all countries, except Belgium and Germany, from where the majority of foreign customers come.

Now I guess there's going to be a big black market springing up for the wietpas or weed pass that permits coffee shops to sell drugs. Or will a big portion of the tourist trade dry up starting January first when the ban goes into effect? When I was there in the early '70s, there were always kids from England, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Japan visiting Amsterdam and I had the feeling it wasn't just to see the Rembrandt pictures. Funny thing is, the only social problems I ever saw related to intoxication in Holland was from drunks, not from people smoking weed. The pilot program launched on October 1 in Maastricht confined cannabis sales to Dutch, German and Belgian customers. This reportedly led to the loss of over 345 jobs and will cost the city approximately $41 million dollars per year in pot tourism. But, on the other hand... I had a perfectly delightful 4 years there-- without drugs.

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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German Banksters Are Forcing Greece To Sell Off Some Islands-- But Just Small Ones For Now

Oxia got snapped up for a song-- but Scorpios may still be for sale

Over the weekend, the cause of Austerity, banksterism and German hegemony over Europe were dealt a (probably very temporary) setback, when Nicolas Sarkozy received a stinging slap across the face from the French electorate. Only 25.5% of the electorate voted for him to have a second term. It looks like the European version of Mitt Romney won't be getting another chance to drive France further into the clutches of International Aryan Bankers Conspiracy. Too late for poor Greece. We joked about Wolfgang Schäuble forcing them to sell off islands to pay the interest on German loans and fees last February. Well, guess what... some greasy Qatari "royal" bought Oxia at a bargain basement rate and plutocrats from all over the world are descending on Greece to see what's for sale. Thus far, Greece is holding onto big ones like Crete, Lesbos, Mykonos, Rhodes and Korfu but the little ones... ever think of building a vacation home on your own Aegean Isle? Greece aims to raise 50 billion euros through privatisations and real estate sales by 2015. Last year, it set up the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund to dispose of 70,000 properties including monasteries, tax offices and tracts of beachfront land. And the islands are starting to go like hotcakes.

[M]ajor activity is currently being observed in the sale and development of Greece’s private islands. According to experts operating in this singular market, a number of owners, especially those who inherited the island properties, are trying to sell them off due to recently introduced high taxation.

As a result, asking prices have dropped considerably, while in cases of serious offers, it is estimated that the owners are willing to make some substantial concessions. This is the case in the alleged sale of Oxia, an island owned by the Greek-Australian Stamoulis family, to members of Qatar’s royal family.

The island, which has a surface area of approximately 1,236 acres, was initially advertised at 6.9 million euros. The property’s final price, however, is said not to have exceeded 5 million euros. The island is located in the Ionian Sea, near Ithaca.

While a major portion of Oxia is protected as a part of the Natura 2000 ecological network, part of the island may be developed, according to sources.

The sale of Patroklos island, off the tip of Attica and 3 kilometers from Sounio, might be nearing. According to a well-informed source, the property’s owners, the Giatrakos family, are currently working in tandem with a Canadian investor and collaborating with local authorities in a bid to clarify which part of the island may be commercially developed. Given Patroklos’s major development potential and its proximity to the capital, it is estimated that the price will exceed the 100-million-euro mark.

Nevertheless, previous attempts to sell the island have come up against obstacles due to the lack of a clear urban-planning and land-use scheme, as well as a series of archaeological issues. The Giatrakos family is making all possible efforts to put the aforementioned matters to rest in order to finalize the island’s transfer.

A well-known private island, Scorpios, has also been up for sale for the last few years. The island, which currently belongs to Athina Onassis, is situated opposite the village of Nydri, Lefkada, in the Ionian Sea.

The Onassis heir is citing financial reasons for putting Scorpios on the market. According to Kathimerini sources, however, the sale has run into difficulties given that Aristotle Onassis’s will forbids the sale of the island, unless its maintenance is unfeasible, which is what the magnate’s granddaughter claims. Given this legal complication, the owner is actively pursuing the option of a 99-year lease to an investor.

Urban Gadabout: Think you know what delimits Manhattan's Upper East Side and Harlem? Jack Eichenbaum can set you straight

Properly speaking, as I learned from Jack Eichenbaum, the "Upper East Side" is (or at least historically was) the high ground alongside Central Park -- the two blocks between Fifth and Park Avenues, "upper" meaning, well, upper, not "northern," as most of us assume. If you were to draw a diagonal line from the mid 70s at the East River up through the northeastern corner of the park and on beyond Morningside Heights to the north, you would have the stark dropoff from the rock-underpinned main body of Manhattan to the relatively swamplike valley where the Dutch established their agricultural town of Nieuw Haarlem.

by Ken

What you've got in the above caption is some of what I learned, or think I learned, from one of my most eye-opening walking tours ever, a recent Municipal Art Society tour led by urban geographer Jack Eichenbaum, "Where does Harlem Begin (Nieuw Haarlem)?"

I've written a bunch of times about Jack's illuminating perspective as a geographer: showing us how the development of neighborhoods and regions is conditioned by natural geography and features that develop, most often transport. In the case of the "real" Upper East Side, for example, that two-block-wide swath of high ground which eventually became the eastern boundary of Central Park was delimited on the other side from the pushing through, in the '80s, the New York and Harlem Railroad (later the New York Central, now part of the Metro-North system) over what was then still Fourth Avenue, and became Park Avenue only when the railroad was moved underground below 97th Street and covered over with, well, a "park" avenue. While the railroad was above ground, it marked a stark eastern boundary to that high ground where the city's elite had begun to move -- the rich, Jack always points out, generally gravitate to high ground. East of Fourth Avenue was literally "the other side of the tracks."

Once the railroad was safely buried, the new Park Avenue became part of the "real" Upper East Side, and became home to many of the growing city's most expensive apartment buildings, now that apartment living had become acceptable for the swells. (The original upper-class development along Fifth and Madison Avenues had been mansions.) Now the next blocks, to Lexington and Third Avenues, became suitable for middle-class residential development, but the even more noticeably dropping-off land was rendered further unsuitable by the pushing through later in the 19th century of the Third and Second Avenue Els. The els provided a huge impetus to development of previously little-used terrain, but for working-class and industrial use. When the els came down in the '50s, not just Third and Second Avenues themselves but the whole character of the area east of Third became ripe for change, but amid the considerable high-rise development that's taken place, it's still possible to see many of the low-rise 18th- and 19th-century buildings that once lined both avenues.

Thanks to Manhattan's rigidly rectangular street grid, as established in the 1881 plan whose bicentennial we celebrated last year, it's possible for even the most hardened New Yorkers not to notice that diagonal dropoff from higher-ground Manhattan to the valley that's Harlem. Oh, on any numbered street you'll notice the sharp descent going from west to east, and ditto on the avenues going from south to north, but unless you walk enormous numbers of adjacent streets, it's highly unlikely that you'll notice how the "dropoff" points shift as you move north and west.

And with a guide as knowing as Jack, it's possible to tread this terrain and see how all these geographical factors intersected with the socioeconomics of old times and new to condition the kind of development and redevelopment that took place -- visible, for example, in the degree of, um, fanciness, of the architecture. We started at the corner of Lexington Avenue and 86th Street, then headed east to Third Avenue and headed north, and shortly down the considerable hill, before beginning our westward trek. Reaching the northeastern corner of Central Park, we could more easily see that portion of the diagonal dropoff to the Harlem valley, and continuing on through central Harlem we got to see the broad avenues and stunning residential buildings that took shape when northward transportation made this area ripe for development. We wound up by climbing the western delineation of Harlem, up to the heights of Morningside Heights, home of Columbia University and so many high-toned cultural institutions.

I don't suppose this drab recital suggests much of the visceral excitement of the tour itself. I can only suggest that you watch for the next time Jack gives it (he said he does it every two or three years), and pounce.

WE HAVE SOME CATCHING UP TO DO

Over the last couple of months I've gotten a bit back in the urban-gadding groove, even pulling off a two-in-one-day this weekend for the first time in a long while. So there are a number of walks to catch up on, with a particular emphasis on walks led -- in three of NYC's five boroughs -- by people who actually live or have lived in the immediate area. I'm thinking the time may be right after this Sunday's Municipal Art Society walk through Brooklyn's Boerum Hill with Joe Svehlak, whose recent MAS walks through Ridgewood in Queens (mostly) and Brooklyn's Sunset Park (where Joe grew up and later moved back as a home-owner) were truly outstanding, so much so that I've slotted the Boerum Hill walk in ahead of another tour I'd really wanted to do.

But priority now has to go to Jack Eichenbaum, the Queens borough historian with whom, as I've noted a number of times, I've done some of the most eye-opening tours I've taken. I recently did an especially memorable MAS tour with Jack which substantially overturned and reoriented my understanding of the northern half of Manhattan -- this after I've lived in NYC for 50-plus years! And Jack has some tantalizing projects coming up.

QUEENS: TOPOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES

First let me mention that anyone who happens to be free tomorrow (Wednesday) afternoon and is within striking distance of Jamaica, Queens, Jack is giving a lecture on "Queens: Topographic Influences" at 1:30 at Jamaica's Central Library (89-11 Merrick Blvd., between 89th and 90th Aves., accessible via the F train to 169th St.; free, no reservations required).

The library offers this description:

Ever wonder why Hillside Avenue is named Hillside Avenue, or why certain areas of the borough are hilly and other areas flat? Join us as urban geographer and Queens Borough Historian Jack Eichenbaum talks about the geography of Queens County.

HISTORIC JAMAICA AVENUE

Then, coming up this Saturday, April 21, 11am-1pm, Jack is giving a special tour, "Historic Jamaica Avenue," sponsored by the Queens Historical Society as a fund-raiser (at bargain-baement prices for a fund-raiser: $10 for QHS members, $15 for nonmembers).

One of the earliest settlements in NYC, Jamaica boasts centuries old homes, churches and cemeteries. Focusing on Jamaica Ave at the foot of the glacial moraine, we'll dwell on its strategic location, recent redevelopment strategies and make some interior visits.

(The meeting place is at the entrance to the Jamaica Station of the Air Train to JFK, adjacent to the Sutphin Blvd.-Archer Ave. station of the E and J trains and the Jamaica station of the LIRR.)

AND WE'RE IN COUNTDOWN TO JACK'S "SIGNATURE TOUR: A
DAYLONG SERIES OF WALKS ALONG THE #7 LINE TO FLUSHING

As I've mentioned, Jack is doing "The World of the #7 Train" again this year, on Saturday, April 28, from 10am to 5:30pm. I did it last year, and am powerfully tempted to do it again. A word of warning: The tour did sell out last year, and Jack had to turn people away.

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 by check to Jack Eichenbaum, 36-20 Bowne St. #6C, Flushing, NY 11354 (include name, phone and email address) The full day’s program and other info is available by email jaconet@aol.com The tour is limited to 25 people. Don’t get left out!

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Urban Gadabout reminder to New Yorkers and visitors: Upper Manhattan walks resume Sunday, continue through May 20

This aerial view of Sherman Creek in Northern Manhattan comes from the NYC Dept. of City Planning, whose note concerning the "currently inactive" Sherman Creek Study begins:

Sherman Creek lies along the Harlem River waterfront and is part of the Inwood neighborhood in Manhattan Community District 12. The primary study area is between Dyckman Street, Broadway, West 207th Street and the Harlem River, and includes Sherman Creek inlet, for which the surrounding area was named. The upland portion, between Broadway and Nagle Avenue, is a densely populated residential community, while the waterfront area, which is zoned primarily for industrial use, is characterized largely by underutilized and vacant land.

by Ken

Upper Manhattan historian James Renner began his spring series of WaHi walking tours of the neighborhoods of Washington Heights, Inwood, and Marble Hill with a walk through Fort Washington-Hudson Heights on March 25 -- a tour made that much richer by the presence of two lifelong residents of the area, who added all manner of wonderful local (and of course personal) detail.

Now, after a holiday hiatus, James's spring tours begin in earnest, with weekly tours every Sunday through May 20. On the scheule are: Sherman Creek, this Sunday; Fort George, April 22; Jumel Terrace Historic District & Sugar Hill, April 29; Audubon Park (see my notes on a Municipal Art Society tour of the area in the earlier post), May 6; Marble Hill, May 13; and Tubby Hook, May 20.

SHERMAN CREEK
Sunday, April 15, 2012, 12:00 noon

SHERMAN CREEK was named for a working class family that occupied a fisherman's shack in what is now Inwood in 1807. The family lived in the community for almost a century. During the American Revolution a ferry operated from Sherman Creek to the Bronx. The area was also home to the Dyckman Oval where the Negro Baseball League team the New York Cubans had played until the 1940s when the ballfield was razed for the Dyckman Houses, an urban renewal project. The Dyckman Houses was home to basketball great Kareem Abdul Jabbar.

MEET: Entrance of IRT #1 Dyckman Street Station

For the remaining tour descriptions and meeting places, see the full schedule, which I printed in the earlier post. All tours begin at noon and are $15 ($10 for students and seniors). You can contact James at 212-795-7830 JR6751@aol.com.

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Timbuktu Falls To The Tuaregs... Burkina Faso Swamped With Refugees

Here I am in downtown Timbuktu, 4 years ago

These days I just want to go to Tuscany or Paris or maybe Bali. And Roland is always coming up with Mongolia or Mozambique or Burkina Faso. The whole time we were in Mali he was grumpy we weren't going to Burkina Faso. I don't know if he has a check list or just wants to add a notch to his belt or what. I know for sure none of his friends have ever heard of Burkina Faso. None of them had ever heard of Mali. And now that hundreds of thousands of displaced Malians-- eager not to fall into the slavery that the Tuaregs practice-- are fleeing in every direction, at least 20,000 of them have arrived in Burkina Faso, which was already having a major problem feeding it's own population and keeping the lid on things. Like Mali's, Burkina Faso's "democracy" is what the aftermath of a far off military coup is called as long as the putschists adhere to corporate-friendly policies.

When I would tell people I was going to Mali or I had gone to Mali they would look at me incomprehensibly. Maui? Bali? I almost never met an American who knew where Mali was. But when I would mention Timbuktu there was at least some comprehension that I wasn't taking about Hawaii. Four years ago, a topper of a month Roland and I spent in Mali, we finally made it to fabled Timbuktu. I had imagined it as the city in Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, which it isn't, but we discovered a unique and fascinating, hospitable if remote town on the edge of the Sahara Desert.

This week Timbuktu fell to Tuareg rebels, savage desert nomads who fervently believe in slavery. Hundreds of thousands of Malians have fled south, as the Tuaregs captured Gao, Kidal and now Timbuktu, the entire northern two-thirds of the country.

Mali's army is reported to have deserted the military base of Timbuktu, the last town in the north under government control, as Tuareg separatists pounded it with heavy weapons. Coup leaders have reinstated the constitution after pressure from neighbouring countries.

Shells could be heard exploding at the base even though it was deserted, local residents told news agencies by phone Sunday.

The soldiers had fled, some shedding their uniforms, leaving Arab militias from the Bérabish community to defend the town, they said.

Al Jazeera television reported that the town, whose population is mainly ethnic Arab, had fallen to the rebel National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), which wants a Tuareg homeland in the north of the country.

On Saturday the army quit the largest town in the north, Gao, leaving it to the MNLA which has already captured Kidal.

The Tuareg rebels have been strengthened by the arrival of well armed fighters previously employed by deposed and murdered Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi.

The military claims that they have links to armed groups connected to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which operate in the Sahara.

Timbuktu, a historic city that is on the Unesco World Heritage list, is 800 km north of Bamako and 300 km west of Gao.

Now I'm reading about looting in the captured cities and that Muslim fanatics are imposing their primitive and unevolved version of the Koran on the conquered people. And the rest of the world just sits around bitching that the military coup that overthrew the last military coup has got to turn over power to the former coup leader or no on will help out. The Tuaregs are among the worst lot I ever came across anywhere in the world. My heart goes out for the people who fall into their clutches. Anyway, best tourism advice for anyone thinking of going there-- see a psychiatrist.




UPDATE: June 6- Tuaregs Declare An Independent Nation, Azawad

While the rest of the world forced Malian coup leaders, ostensibly reformers, to turn power back to the old regime (former coup leaders), the Tuaregs have captured over half the country and just declared their independence. The Tuaregs are brutal and primitive slavers who live for war.

Tuareg rebels who captured the three main towns in northern Mali this week unilaterally declared independence for their state of Azawad on Friday, adding to turmoil in the west African country.

...Tuareg nomads have rebelled three times since Mali’s independence in 1960, protesting at their marginalisation and demanding more autonomy.

But leaders of the National Movement for the Liberation of the Azawad (MNLA) were more ambitious when they started a fourth rebellion in January, seeking to carve out a new homeland in the Sahara.

...Jean Ping, chairperson of the African Union commission, rejected the independence declaration, and called on “the international community as a whole to fully support this principled position of Africa."

Algeria, Mali’s northern neighbour, also denounced the rebel claim.

France, the former colonial power, said other west African countries needed to see if it was possible to negotiate with the MNLA. Autonomy would be a more acceptable solution to the regional and international community.

France’s defence minister, Gerard Longuet, said: “A unilateral declaration of independence which is not recognised by African states would not have any meaning for us.”

The claim by the MNLA is not supported by all Tuaregs in Mali, let alone by other ethnic groups living in the north. It is further complicated by the fact that the secular rebels received help from another dissident Ismalist group, Ansar Dine, in capturing the three towns of Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu.

Ansar Dine seeks to impose sharia law in the north. Though it has fewer fighters than the MNLA, which has up to 3,000 men, Ansar Dine rebels were reported to have taken control of much of the ancient town of Timbuktu.

Are Frequent Flier Miles Worth the Trouble Anymore?

Some of my friends don't even bother collecting frequent flier miles. I used to be rabid about them. But most of the airlines-- particularly Delta-- have made them so difficult to use for anything worthwhile, that sometimes they barely matter any longer. Bottom Line published a post recently, How to Get More Mileage from Your Frequent-Flier Miles and it has some useful tips. Not earth-shattering, world-changing tips. Delta still sucks beyond belief... but useful tips.

Cashing in frequent-flier miles for the flights that you want can be devilishly difficult. Ways to overcome the barriers…

Use different airlines for different legs of the journey.

In the past, frequent-flier trips essentially had to be round-trips between two destinations on one airline or its partners-- that’s how the programs offered awards tickets. Today most airlines offer awards tickets per flight. So if you can’t find both the outbound and return awards seats you want at the frequent-flier price you want on one airline, you can search for a flight for each leg separately on two different airlines, assuming that you have enough miles on both airlines.

Add a third leg.

On some airlines, you might be able to add an extra destination without increasing the number of required frequent-flier miles. For instance, on Delta you could fly from New York City to London, then a few days later, from London to Paris on the same airline or one of its partner airlines, and then from Paris back to New York City. However, airlines are increasingly phasing out this practice.

Participate in the Southwest, JetBlue or Virgin America frequent-flier program.

These airlines do not impose limits on the number of available awards seats on a flight. Any seat that is available for cash also is available for frequent-flier miles.

There is a downside-- the number of miles required for an awards ticket increases with the cash price of the ticket. Still, participating in one of these three programs is a great way to ensure that you can get an awards ticket even to popular destinations and/or during busy travel times.

Call a reservations agent.

Airlines now impose fees for booking awards tickets over the phone-- usually around $25 per passenger for the entire trip-- but calling an agent can make sense when you’re having trouble finding the best ticket.

Good reservations agents not only know the ins and outs of the awards seat booking system, they also often have options available to them that are not available to customers through the airline’s Web site. These include cobbling together trips using partner airlines… changing planes in less obvious airports… or perhaps even unlocking seats that are not listed on the site as awards seats.

You pay nothing if the reservations agent can’t find a solution that satisfies you and you don’t book a ticket.

Book early, book late or book holiday flights.

The single best time to find an awards seat is 330 days before the flight, when these seats first enter the system. However, additional awards seats often enter the system within two weeks of departure. Awards seats also tend to be plentiful for people willing to travel on Christmas or Thanksgiving Day rather than during the week before or after.

Redeem British Airways miles on the airline’s partner, American Airlines.

British Airways (BA) now charges extremely steep fuel surcharges. A “free” round-trip flight between the US and London could cost upward of $500-- on top of the frequent-flier miles required. That includes unavoidable taxes, but it’s mostly the fuel surcharge. Many other foreign airlines charge fuel surcharges, too, though most are nowhere near as steep as those of BA. To avoid these massive surcharges, redeem BA miles for flights on American Airlines, a BA partner airline that does not impose fuel surcharges.

Urban Gadabout: Spring tours of Manhattan's northernmost neighborhoods, Washington Heights, Inwood, and even Marble Hill

The Audubon Terrace complex at Broadway and 155th Street, on part of the property once owned by naturalist-painter John James Audubon, must have been quite a sight when it was built, roughly between 1906 and 1930. The developers' assumption that Manhattan's seemingly relentless northward push would sustain such a grand assemblage of academic and cultural institutions has so far proved over-optimistic. (See the Audubon Park tour, May 6, in the list of Spring 2012 WAHI Tours below.)

by Ken

If you live in a place (if you don't live in a place, this may not apply to you), there are reasons -- whether or not it has occurred to you -- why that place is where it is and has developed the way it has. In the case of a city of any size and age, it's overwhelmingly likely that there are layers upon layers of history and geography and what-all, most of which can still be seen in one form or another. And of course in this country even our oldest cities aren't that old. I remember when I spent the fall of my junior year in college in Caen, the capital of Lower Normandy, and every day on my walk to and from the university I passed one of the two abbeys (one for men, one for women) built by the still-future William the Conqueror -- that is, before he moseyed off to England, when Caen was his capital as duke of Normandy. Guillaume made that crossing of the English Channel in 1066, you'll recall. Now that's old.

In Manhattan our history doesn't trace back anywhere near that far, but there's still tons of it, and it starts, straightforwardly, at least as far as settlement by European colonials is concerned, at the bottom. There's not much of Dutch New Amsterdam left, but we know a lot of where things happened there. Even with the English takeover, the new city was packed tightly down there, but when expansion began, even allowing for geographical obstacles in the form of marshes and heights, it moved amazingly rapidly, and for this transformation there's abundant surviving evidence.

The Native American populations that had long inhabited the area had their own travel and trade patterns, many of which the spreading settlers followed. Naturally there were soon colonial settlements scattered around the island even as the new city itself pushed northward, with the prosperous burgers pulling up stakes amazingly frequently and resettling in the new "in" precincts. For a time, the process of northward expansion must have seemed inexorable. In general, those venturesome souls and institutions that gambled on continued northward expansion won those bets. Eventually, as I was noting in a recent Urban Gadabout post ("Urban Gadabout: When east is west and north is south -- travels in the Bronx and Brooklyn"), the northward push jumped the Harlem River into the Bronx.

But there was a limit to how far north the "core" of the city would move. Oh, the whole of the island -- minus the parkland set-asides -- was eventually paved over and settled, but not settled in that core-of-the-city way. I got a graphic glimpse of what development "overreach" on a recent Municipal Art Society walking tour of "Audubon Park," which I put in quotes because there isn't any actual park. The name refers to a designated historic district occupying land that once constituted the rural estate of the great naturalist and painter John James Audubon, north of 155th Street and west of Broadway, which is to say across 155th Street from Manhattan's most important cemetery, the "uptown" cemetery of Trinity Church, the Episcopal heart of the growing city.

At the southeast corner of Broadway and 155th is the beautiful Church of the Intercession, which was built to house a merged pair of Episcopal places of worship as a far-northern outpost of, what else?, Trinity Church, which had a number of such satellite chapels around town, a partial measure of its considerable sway over the borough of Manhattan. There's a picture and a bit more comment on the church in the click-through.

The crown jewel of the area is the cultural complex built in the early 20th century by railroad heir Archer Huntington, who brought in some of the city's leading architects and in its various buildings housed such institutions as the Hispanic Society, American Geographical Society, Museum of the American Indian, American Numismatic Society, and Academy of Arts and Letters. Unfortunately, the neighborhood was never transformed into the kind of elegant social hub Huntington envisaged, and while the complex is still there, and even still has a couple of its original resident institutions, along with replacements for most of the other originals.

Which is the long-way-round way of explaining that James Renner, noted as a historian of Manhattan's far-northern neighborhoods, Washington Heights and Inwood, has scheduled a series of spring tours of the area Sundays at noon, which includes his own tour of Audubon Park on May 6. I bring it up now because the series begins this Sunday, March 25, with a tour of "Fort Washington-Hudson Heights." See the complete listing below.

The beautiful Church of the Intercession, at Broadway and 155th Street (diagonally across from Audubon Terrace), long a northern outpost of the Episcopal heart of New York City, Trinity Church in the Financial District, now struggles against the financial realities of surviving on its own. It's well worth a visit, not just for the gorgeous church itself and for the large and historic uptown cemetery of Trinity Church (which still belongs to Trinity), but for the current spiritual leader of Intercession, Father Berto (more formally, the Rev. José R. Gándara Perea, S.T.L., priest-in-charge, one of the most charming and inspring people you'll meet. When I visited, I bought a mug!


Here as promised is the schedule for the Spring 2012 WAHI Tours schduled by Northern Manhattan historian James Renner.


WAHI TOURS PRESENTS
SPRING 2012 SCHEDULED WALKING TOURS

James Renner


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.

The tours are $15 for adults and $10 for seniors or students. No reservations are necessary.


FORT WASHINGTON-HUDSON HEIGHTS (New Tour)
Sunday, March 25, 2012, 12:00 noon

FORT WASHINGTON-HUDSON HEIGHTS combines local history and real estate. The Battle of Fort Washington will be discussed at Bennett Park on Fort Washington Avenue and 184th Street where the last major battle of New York City was fought during the American Revolution. Hudson Heights is a real estate term used today by local realty companies to promote the neighborhood. Afterwards, other sites will include the estates of James Gordon Bennett, Dr. Charles Paterno, Lucius Chittenden, August C. Richards and C.K.G. Billings will be visited and discussed. The Shrine of Mother Francesca Xavier Cabrini will also be visited as well.

MEET: 181st Street and Fort Washington Avenue, N.W. corner


SHERMAN CREEK
Sunday, April 15, 2012, 12:00 noon

SHERMAN CREEK was named for a working class family that occupied a fisherman's shack in what is now Inwood in 1807. The family lived in the community for almost a century. During the American Revolution a ferry operated from Sherman Creek to the Bronx. The area was also home to the Dyckman Oval where the Negro Baseball League team the New York Cubans had played until the 1940s when the ballfield was razed for the Dyckman Houses, an urban renewal project. The Dyckman Houses was home to basketball great Kareem Abdul Jabbar.

MEET: Entrance of IRT #1 Dyckman Street Station


FORT GEORGE
(190th to 193rd Street, Amsterdam to Audubon Avenue)
Sunday, April 22, 2012, 12:00 noon

FORT GEORGE was named for the Revolutionary fort and the amusement park which overlooked the Harlem River. It is also home to two educational facilities (George Washington High School and Yeshiva University) and the Isabella Geriatric Center.

MEET: N.W. corner of 190th Street and Audubon Avenue


JUMEL TERRACE HISTORIC DISTRICT & SUGAR HILL
Sunday, April 29, 2012, 12:00 noon

JUMEL TERRACE HISTORIC DISTRICT & SUGAR HILL is noted for the Morris-Jumel Mansion, Sylvan Terrace and the homes of famous African American entertainers Paul Robeson, Count Basie and Duke Ellington at 555 Edgecombe Avenue. The area is home to a local bookstore, art gallery and the Washington Heights branch of the New York Public Library. Nearby Coogan's Bluff is where baseball fans watched the New York Giants play at the Polo Grounds at 155th Street.

There is an admission fee to the Morris-Jumel Mansion: $5 for adults, $4 for seniors and students.

MEET: 160th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue in front of the Library


AUDUBON PARK
(155th to 158th Streets, Broadway to the Hudson River)
Sunday, May 6, 2012, 12:00 noon

AUDUBON PARK was the home of naturalist and artist John James Audubon and conservationist George Bird Grinnell, founder of the Audubon Society. It has been designated a Historic District on May 12, 2009 by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. Audubon's grave at Trinity Cemetery and Mausoleums and the Audubon Terrace museum complex are some of the many steps included on the tour.

MEET: At the triangle at 157th Street and Broadway


MARBLE HILL
Sunday, May 13, 2012, 12:00 noon

MARBLE HILL is the landlocked part of Manhattan to the Bronx that had been separated from Manhattan (Inwood) when the Harlem River ws rerouted and dredged for improved ship navigation around Manhattan. The community has homes dating back to the 1870s for those who are interested in architecture known as "Painted Ladies." There are Dutch and English colonial sites and military sites from the American Revolution (Fort Prince Charles) within the community that will fascinate those interested in history.

MEET: 225th Street and Broadway in front of Chase Bank


TUBBY HOOK
(Dyckman Street, Riverside Drive and Broadway)
Sunday, May 20, 2012, 12:00 noon

TUBBY HOOK is a community that is coming of age. It started as a fishing village in the valley situated between Fort Tryon Park and Inwood Hill Park in 1819. During the American Revolution it was used as a transfer point for information between both parks in which the American army had fortifications. It was also known for its railroad and ferry service along and across the Hudson River. The Riverside-Inwood Neighborhood Garden is a beautiful oasis that is the centerpiece of the area.

MEET: N.W. corner of Dyckman Street and Broadway

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Mali... Falling Apart-- And Now A Coup

This week I went to see the country's foremost tropical disease specialists; wonderful woman! But she didn't want to take my case. Mostly she does research and academic work. But she agreed to a consultation. When I saw her I told her I had spent some time in the wilds of Mali and the consultation immediately turned into an examination and a series of tests. I'm down 6 vials of blood!

I've been warning readers that Mali has been disintegrating into civil war and that it is now so unsafe for tourists that some of the major sites are now shut down to foreigners-- like, for example, the cities of Timbuktu and Gao, for many people the primary reasons for even going to Mali. And today there was a military coup d'etat, overthrowing longtime president, Amadou Touré-- who had come to power in a military coup a decade ago.

The 7,000 man army is angry because there are no weapons and equipment to fight back against the Tuareg rebels up north.

Anger has been growing within the army at the handling of a Tuareg-led rebellion that has killed dozens of people and forced nearly 200,000 civilians to flee their homes.

While soldiers had been urging the government to provide better weapons to fight the rebels, bolstered by fighters who had fought in Libya's civil war, one of the mutineers said they now wanted to oust President Amadou Toumani Toure.

"He needs to leave power, that is all. The movement will only stop with the taking of the palace," said the sergeant, who asked not to be named.

...A military source said a trigger for Wednesday's events was a visit by the defence minister to a barracks in the town of Kati about 20 km (13 miles) north of Bamako.

"The minister went to speak to troops but the talks went badly and people were complaining about the handling of the crisis in the north," the source said.

An official in the defense ministry who was at the meeting said a soldier accused the defense minister of betraying them by not giving them means to fight the rebels. Soldiers then began throwing rocks at the minister before they took weapons from the armory and started shooting in the air.

Bamako was briefly paralyzed last month as hundreds of Malians put up street barricades and burned tires in the streets to protest at the government's handling of the rebellion.

Tuareg fighters seeking to carve out a desert homeland in Mali's north have made advances in recent weeks, including the seizure this month of the key garrison town of Tessalit by the Algerian border.

The MNLA rebel movement has been bolstered by heavily armed Malian Tuareg returning from fighting alongside Libyan forces who tried in vain to prevent Muammar Gaddafi's overthrow last year.

Apparently the coup was led by low level officers-- no generals or colonels-- and Touré, who was a paratrooper himself, is hiding out with a loyal paratroop regiment. A.P. painted a pretty chaotic picture tonight-- drunken soldiers looting the presidential palace and suspending the consititution.


UPDATE: Ex-President Touré Is Safe But...

Although the A.P. still insists on referring to Mali as "a functioning democracy" the president who was just overthrown in a military coup became president in a military coup of his own 10 years ago. And Timbuktu is about to fall to brutal Tuareg rebels (who still passionately believe in slavery, I might add).

Urban Gadabout: When east is west and north is south -- travels in the Bronx and Brooklyn

The Mott Iron Works, founded by Jordan L. Mott in 1828, and the source of the name given to the southernmost area of the Bronx, Mott Haven, is mostly forgotten and almost entirely gone -- but this sign remains.

The Bronx is divided by the Bronx River into a hillier section in the west, closer to Manhattan, and the flatter East Bronx, closer to Long Island. The West Bronx was annexed to New York City (then largely confined to Manhattan) in 1874, and the areas east of the Bronx River in 1895.

-- from the Wikipipedia article on the Bronx

by Ken

We had just walked across the Third Avenue from Manhattan into the Bronx, and the leader of this Municipal Art Society (MAS) tour, Jack Eichenbaum (the official Queens borough historian, who's actually allowed to venture into the other boroughs), was explaining that when settlement began pushing north across the Harlem River into the neighborhood that became known as Mott Haven, where we were, notably once the Third Avenue El began offering service over the river and into the northlands, in the 1890s, the area was often referred to as Northside, since it was north of New York City proper -- of which it had been a part, you'll see from the Wikipedia note, even before Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island were merged into the city in 1898.

As you'll also see in the Wikipedia note, this area, being well west of the Bronx River, is classically "West" Bronx -- and yet, as Jack pointed out, if you look at the street signs for the numbered streets in the neighborhood, you see that they're "East," the north-south dividing line being well to the west, at Jerome Avenue. So the area can be thought of as "north," or as "east," or as "west" -- but is best known to the outside world as part of the South Bronx.

Dealing with similar challenges of urban disinvestment and blight, the neighborhoods of Mott Haven, Melrose, Morrisania were often referred to dismissively as simply ‘the South Bronx’. In recent decades, planning and new buildings have begun to restore their livability. This walking tours stresses renewal in response to basic urban geography.

I've written a number of times about Jack and his unusual perspective as a tour leader a number of times. The unusual perspective is that he is an academic and practical georgrapher. (His website, called "The Georgraphy of New York City with Jack Eichenbaum," can be found at geognyc.com), And his overall description of the three Bronx walking tours he's doing for MAS, which began Saturday with "Mott Haven: From the Harlem River to the Bronx Hub," reads:

Dealing with similar challenges of urban disinvestment and blight, the neighborhoods of Mott Haven, Melrose, Morrisania were often referred to dismissively as simply ‘the South Bronx’. In recent decades, planning and new buildings have begun to restore their livability. This walking tours stresses renewal in response to basic urban geography. Please be prepared to walk two miles and at a brisk pace.

And sure enough, by walking across the Harlem River to Mott Haven, we got to see how Jordan Mott came to locate his iron works there -- on the Bronx side of the river, where the amount of land he needed could be had less expensively, with that easy access to the Harlem and East Rivers for shipping materials in and goods out in the era before railroads. Later we got to see the development boom that came with the coming of the Third Avenue El, and then some of the factors that caused the neighborhood to go into decline in the 1920s. And then how the decline of the area made it an obvious place to locate some of the city's largest public-housing projects in the '50s and '60s boom of such projects.

At the tour's northern end, 149th Street, the area known as "the Hub," still an important shopping district but no longer, as it once was, the central commercial district of the Bronx, we even got a glimpse of the next tour in the series: Melrose. As it turned out, Jack had been so efficient about keeping the unexpectedly large group -- thanks apparently to a mention in the Times -- moving (his tours tend to cover a lot of ground, so he tends to keep his people moving smartly) that we arrived well ahead of schedule, and the "add-on" walk that Jack had planned for those interested in continuing, across 149th Street from Third Avenue to the Grand Concourse, wound up fitting comfortably into the tour's scheduled two hours.

FROM THE BRONX TO BROOKLYN, ON THE CLOCK

Which was great for me, because I had scheduled myself, probably foolishly, for a tour in Brooklyn scheduled to start a mere hour after the official finish of the Mott Haven walk. I'd done it partly because I know Jack is good about keeping to schedule times, and partly because I'd worked out that I really could get from Third Avenue and 149th Street in the Bronx to Park Slope in Brooklyn in the allotted time via the IRT no. 2 train, provided I made the right connection.

And so I peeled off of the group en route to the Grand Concourse and headed back to Third Avenue, which showed my ignorance of Bronx geography. I was so conscious of needing to head south, and not wanting to be diverted in the westward diversion of the tour "supplement," that I remained blissfully unaware, until I got to the train platform, that the no. 2 train in fact heads westward from Third Avenue. The next stop, in fact, is 149th and Grand Concourse!

Nevertheless, I made my train connection and made it to the sidewalk in front of the Montauk Club, once the social haunt of the cream of the cream of Brooklyn society, which was as prosperous as any in the country, comfortably in time for the second part of a three-part series led by another MAS stalwart, Francis Morrone, "Three Ways of Looking at Park Slope, Part 2: Park Slope Northeast."

It was a heavily sentimental day for me, because both Jack and Francis have been so important to my late-dawning fascination with and budding awareness of how the city has developed. As I've written before, I was lucky enough to do a tour that Jack did for the New York Transit Museum back in the fall of 2010 focusing on three subway nodes (Times Square in Manhattan and Queens Plaza and Jackson Heights in Queens), where the crossing of two or more different subway lines played such a vital role in the area's development.

It was Jack that day who turned me on to MAS, and it's no exaggeration to say that the MAS tours have changed my life. (As I think I've mentioned, I was lucky enough to have a chance to say just this to the outgoing MAS tour director, Tamara Coombs. I was pleased and unsurprised to hear that it wasn't the first time she'd heard this.) Since then I've done a huge number of tours with Jack, both for MAS and under other auspices, including tours of his own, notably what he calls is "signature" tour, "The World of the #7 Train" (of which he's announced a 2012 edition, scheduled for April 28; see below).

PARK SLOPE AND DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN

And among my early MAS tours, which became my first with Francis, was the last incarnation of this very tour: of the "gold coast," the northeast, of Brooklyn's Park Slope. Actually, it should have been my second tour with Francis, because I'd signed up for the first tour in the series, which covered the low-rent, still-developing northwest part of Park Slope. But I wound up going out of town and missing that tour.

So I pounced when the Park Slope series was announced to begin again with Part 1, the one I'd missed, in January. By the time Part 2 was slipped into the schedule, on a preregistration basis (for the last several months most of Francis's tours have been scheduled on a walk-up, pay-at-tour basis, and he draws such crowds that I've just been passing on them), I had done so many walking tours in Park Slope and surrounding areas of Brooklyn, many of them with Francis (I've now done so many tours with him, and many of them have remained cherished memories), that I couldn't resist signing up to do Part 2 again, even with the potential scheduling nightmare of the time-sensitive Bronx-to-Brooklyn trek. I certainly wasn't going to miss the Mott Haven walk -- anytime MAS has asked what kinds of tours we might like to see happen, my first answer has always been the Bronx, the borough I know least well.

As it turned out, my legs didn't hold out (I won't bore you with that story) for the whole of the Park Slope Northeast walk, but it jogged a lot of memories and filled in a number of points. One point that Francis made fit in with Jack's point about directionality in Mott Haven: that a number of the neighborhoods in the southern part of the part of Brooklyn that lies west of Prospect Park are still called "South Brooklyn," even though anyone who looks at a map can see that they're fairly far north in the modern-day borough of Brooklyn, as it has existed since shortly before the combined Brooklyn merged with NYC in 1898, they are in the southern part of the original town, then city, of Brooklyn, as established under Dutch and English rule -- consisting basically of that area to the west and a bit to the north of what's now Prospect Park.

I was happy to find my legs back in condition Sunday for another tour with Francis that seemed to have been slipped onto the schedule, again by preregistration, "Downtown Brooklyn Now." It's an area I've wanted to be exposed to for some time now, and I can't imagine it being done better than Francis did it, giving us not only a picture of the area's odd development patterns and the visible changes, but a sense of how it was in older times. I haven't mentioned it yet this time out, but Francis (a bona fide architectural historian), in addition to being vastly knowledgeable over a remarkably wide range of subjects, is very funny, in an ingratiatingly quiet, droll way. In lovely sunny pre-spring weather, it was a grand outing (though I've been on tours with him in ghastly weather, and that worked out just as well). Advice: The next time Francis schedules the Downtown Brooklyn walk, don't miss it.

AS NOTED, JACK HAS SCHEDULED A NEW OUTING
OF HIS DAYLONG "WORLD OF THE #7 TRAIN" TOUR

I wrote a lot about this tour along the Flushing line last year, when I was excited out of my mind for months before it actually happened -- and lived up to all my expectations. It's scheduled for Saturday, April 28, from 10am to 5:30pm, and I'm all but sure I'm going to do it again. Here's Jack's description:

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 by check to Jack Eichenbaum, 36-20 Bowne St. #6C, Flushing, NY 11354 (include name, phone and email address) The full day’s program and other info is available by email jaconet@aol.com The tour is limited to 25 people. Don’t get left out!

Last year the pace of registration was pretty slow for a long time after Jack announced the date, but as it approached, that pace picked up rapidly, and he wound up having to turn a number of people away.

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