Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn

The view from the Gerritsen Beach branch of the Brooklyn Library

With so much development going on all over Brooklyn, it's nice to every now and then find myself in a section that's kept some older-Brooklyn character. Gerritsen Beach filled that bill nicely last weekend.

I'd been hoping to get out for a paddle, but looking at the forecast around mid-week, it was pretty clear that that wasn't happening, way too cold and windy, so when my Sebago friend Shari mentioned that there was a quilt exhibit at the Gerritsen Beach branch of the Brooklyn Library, I said "Sure!"

She actually grew up in this area, so after the exhibit (which was pretty cool, I'll show some pictures from that in my next post), she took us for a tour of the neighborhood, which started out in the 1920's as a summer bungalow colony and still retains some of that feel, although these days most of the bungalows have been winterized and expanded and now serve as year-round houses. An arm of Gerritsen Creek run through the neighborhood, the library is beautiful and there's the nicest view out of the back windows of a canal that runs down to the creek, with boats and docks. The neighborhood did get hammered during Sandy, of course -- in fact one of the women at the quilting exhibit was saying she still hadn't gotten back into her house yet. I'm not sure I would have the stamina to still be trying, but this seems like a place where people's roots are pretty deep.

It was great getting the tour from Shari, and among other things she brought us to the Tamaqua Bar & Marina, which was just about as salty a bar as you'd ever care to see (great stuff on the walls!), and which we're thinking might be a fun destination for a paddle in the summer. Unfortunately, they don't have food any more - they do have a full kitchen there and when we saw that, we were thinking lunch paddle, but when we asked the bartender she said they'd never been able to make a go of the food. However, she said we'd be welcome to pack lunch or order out and have it there. Could be fun!

Fun bit of trivia from the Wikipedia page for the neighborhood: the neighborhood was and still is popular among Brooklynites of Irish descent, and "A few long-standing residents...refer to the community as being cois farraige, which is an Irish language phrase meaning 'by the sea'". I thought that was pretty interesting.

We tried to finish up with a visit to the Salt Marsh Nature Center, on the other arm of Gerritsen Creek, but that turns out to be open by appointment only in the wintertime. Another time, then. We finished off our afternoon with a delicious early dinner at Randazzo's, in neighboring Sheepshead Bay. It was a fine way to spend a cold and blustery day.

Click on any photo for a better view! 

Honoring International Women's Day with red from my grandmothers

Grandma J. (my maternal grandmother) and Mrs. Ernst (my Uncle Bob's mother) in Egypt

So March is not a month in which I can really take a day off from work, too many deadlines, but I packed breakfast, lunch, and snacks so I won't need to spend any money during the work day. I am having dinner out with friends tonight but I found a place that's owned by a woman for us to dine at (looks like a good place, too!) - and I'm wearing a little red in honor of International Women's Day. 

There's a nice extra thing about my red today - it's from both of my grandmothers, and I like that. Red is not my color, I prefer the cooler end of the spectrum, so I really don't have any red business attire, but I have a scarf from my Grandma J. (white with a bright red border and a drawing of Giussepe Garibaldi in the middle, she must have picked it up in her travels - that's her on the camel next to the horse, she was traveling with my Uncle Bob's mom so my Ernst relations should especially enjoy this!), and then my "granddaughter necklace" with the rubies from my Grandma A's chandelier of a cocktail ring. So it's a tribute not just to women in general, but to my two Grandmas, wonderful women who I love and miss very much.

Sunday Fun Part 2 - Touring the Brooklyn Navy Yard

Atlantic Salvor of Dry Dock 1

Sunday Fun part 2 - but not Part 2 of Friday's "Sunday Fun". Nope, this goes much further back!

Early February in fact.  Part 1 was the Brooklyn Bridge walk and dimsum at Jing Fong. Remember? After brunch, Laurie and Rosa and I set out to walk back to Brooklyn, this time across the Manhattan Bridge. As we walked up the section of the bridge that extends into Manhattan, we saw a little knot of people looking down into the street below, and it turned out that the Lunar New Year Parade was just coming into view, heading for the bridge! Laurie and Rosa stopped to watch, and under ordinary circumstances I would've stayed (and in fact I'm going to keep that in mind for next year, I think some overhead shots of the parade could be fun), but earlier in the week, I had run across a Facebook post from Turnstile Tours talking about a tour of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, with "a special spotlight on the experience of African-American sailors and workers for Black History Month. Learn about how the struggle for racial justice played out on the ships and in the shipyards of the US Navy, and how the Yard's 70,000 sailors, shipfitters, caulkers, and chippers of all backgrounds transformed it into the world's busiest shipyard". I wasn't able to talk any friends into joining me, but I'd gone ahead and signed up for it, because it sounded interesting.

That was starting at 2, and we'd already stopped to look at a few things that caught our attention on the way to the bridge, so I needed to head on.

It ended up being a very good tour - and private! That's right, I  turned out to be the only person in the entire city who decided that touring the Brooklyn Navy Yard was a good way to spend the afternoon of Super Bowl Sunday. As I said on Facebook afterwards, I figure I have now genuinely earned my boat nerd card, if I hadn't had it before!

It took me a while to do this post because I had a bit of a writer's block problem - aside from posts on waterfront politics (which I stopped doing as much after I left the Hudson River, in very discouraging circumstances) and boating safety, most of what I post here is pretty fluffy, and talking about a tour where I learned about how the foundations of the civil rights movement were being laid amidst the building frenzy in the leadup to and during WWII...well, that's not fluffy at all, and I just don't really know how to write about it. Apologies for that; for what it's worth, here are a couple of thoughts -- then I will send you off to the Flickr album from the day, where I'll talk more about the tour itself.

It was a very well-done tour. My guide, Andrew, was one of the owners of the company; he was extremely knowledgeable, presented the day's information in an interesting and logical fashion, and answered all of my questions easily and thoroughly. In fact, my main regret in not having other people along was that I think other people's questions and perspectives would've added more dimension to the tour.

The way the tour was tailored to Black History Month was by working specific stories into an overall framework, and I could see how the presentation could be similarly tailored to a wide range of subjects (as Turnstile advertises on their website). Andrew went through a general overall history of the base, talking as we rode from building to building. At certain points, he would focus on how and where African-Americans fit into the story, either telling the history as part of his talk, or in a couple of cases, showing photos and playing recordings of people who actually worked at the yard during WWII telling their own stories. Some of the stories were hopeful, some horrifying, and (as already mentioned), I do feel like maybe a few of the many gaps in my knowledge of the history of the civil rights movement got filled in over the course of the day. We did also get a little window into women's history, as the yard was one of the places where "Rosie the Riveter" went to work.  

The tour actually dovetailed well with a couple of books I've read recently, one on Plessy vs. Ferguson, one on the history of the fight for civil rights in Mississippi - the latter actually started in the 1940's, so resonated very well with what I learned from the tour; before those books and this tour, I would say that most my awareness of the Civil Rights movement was mostly focused on Dr. Martin Luther King; I was still in the 1940's section of the Mississippi book at the time that I took the tour, and although the situation in Mississippi sounded much more brutal than that in Brooklyn, the same groundswell of people standing up and demanding equal treatment was working in both.

Fascinating getting to know more of our history this way - and I thought it was very relevant to where we stand now. I'm glad I went - wouldn't have spent Super Bowl Sunday any way other than the way I did. I might have to take my folks for a tour next time they're here, and if you live in NYC and have visitors who are interested in history, I can definitely recommend Turnstile Tours. In fact I may join them on another tour even without visitors, they have a wide range of places and topics that sound interesting.

Click here for the day's Flickr album.

Sunday Fun for a Good Cause - Sanctuary Sessions for the ACLU

Kicking off the St. Patrick's season with some great music for a good cause! I'm looking forward to the NYC one, which will be held from 1 to 4 in the afternoon at the Four-Faced Liar pub in the Village, at 165 West 4th St, between 6th and 7th avenues.

You can read more about the sessions in The Irish Echo, and you can find a complete list of locations on their Sanctuary Sessions Facebook page.  

Hudson River Park User Survey

Today I would just like to share a link to a user survey that the Hudson River Park Trust has put up for the public. I filled this out a while ago after hearing about it from both the NYC Watertrail Association and PortSide NewYork on the very same afternoon; I meant to share it here but it slipped my mind until it appeared again today on the Lilac Preservation Project Facebook page. There's still time to fill it out, last day is March 6th. I of course went for historic ships and water access everywhere I could! Click here to visit the survey. Thanks!  

Back to Sheepshead Bay

I went to back Sheepshead Bay on Sunday, this time with a camera, hoping the loon and the mergansers would still be around. No loon, but I did find the mergansers hanging out in a mixed crowd of ducks and geese and swans and gulls. Someday I may have to treat myself to the next-up zoom lens from the one I had-- I thought I might have had a nice merganser photo when I was reviewing my shots from the day on the little camera screen on the way home, but not quite. Same for the bufflehead. The gull with the ruffled feathers came out well, though. Current zoom lens is excellent for those guys!

Here are some pix from the day, including the bridge, for my friend Bob H. who was telling me stories about jumping off of it and swimming when he was a kid (not in February though, I would guess), and the old Lundy's building - a couple of truly local friends have told me stories of Lundy's heyday, people have such fond memories of this place!

February 25th Urban hike, unplanned variety

Great unplanned walk today - just got it into my head to go out to Sheepshead Bay; walked past the fishing fleet, then back to the bridge, then out toward the community college, then back along the shore past Manhattan Beach and on to Brighton Beach and then Coney Island, taking the subway home from Stillwell. It was so foggy that the trees were collecting water and when the wind blew (and it was a bit breezy) it was like a mini-rainstorm underneath them. It was actually fun going out - it was actually a beautiful sunny day in Midwood when I left, but you could see a line of white off in the distance, and there were low-flying wisps of mist flying by overhead - and sure enough the train went right into the fogbank that was hanging over the water. 

The scaup and bufflehead ducks I've seen in Sheepshead Bay when I've gone at this time of year were there, and I also spotted a few mergansers plus a loon (plus of course the usual swans, Canada geese, mallard ducks and assorted gulls). Nice afternoon, just under 4.5 miles. It started to drizzle as I was on the train on the way back to Midwood, then lightning started flashing in the distance, and then the sky opened up just as I was getting to TQ's place - I sprinted for the door and got inside just in time! We'd been planning to try a new Chinese place in Windsor terrace, but instead we had the rest of the kalua pig and cabbage I'd brought over for dinner last night (had cooked that on Wednesday night, made for a late night but it's delicious). Sorry no pix, this one wasn't planned at all so I didn't have a camera along.

Back to the Seals - another paddle to visit the seals at Swinburne!

I can hardly believe that it's been a month since I got to help organize a paddle with friends from Sebago and the North Brooklyn Boat Club to go see the seals who've chosen Swinburne Island in the lower harbor as their winter home. It ended up being a truly amazing paddle, there was no wind at all and shortly after we set out, snow began to fall heavily enough that compasses came in very handy. When we got to Swinburne, curious seals were popping their heads up out of the glassy calm water to check us out all over the place! Sealwatching paddles are funny that way, they wouldn't be nearly as much fun if the seals weren't evidently nearly as interested in watching paddlers as the paddlers are in watching seals.

The North Brooklyn folks were the ones to first suggest that trip, and in addition to seeing the seals,they were interested in seeing Coney Island Creek (specifically the Yellow Submarine) and getting in a little mileage, so we launched from Kaiser Park at the western end of Coney. This meant crossing the lower harbor from Coney Island to Staten Island a little ways below the Verrazano Narrows, which makes for a trip requiring rock-solid intermediate skills under good conditions. You are crossing a major shipping channel, the tidal currents can be very strong, and if the wind kicks up, you can get some very large chop building up very quickly while you're out there. Our forecast in January was for pretty much no wind, which was great (and part of why I was so eager to make it happen); our main weather problem was the low visibility caused by the snow, which we were able to handle. The other main challenge with that version of the paddle was that Swinburne and Hoffman are not takeout friendly, so anyone who wanted to go along had to be sure that they would be comfortable in their boat for the duration of the trip. With all of that, the group that ended up coming along was limited to more experienced paddlers.

Fortunately for those who would've liked to come but didn't feel comfortable with that day's float plan, Steve H. (Sebago's "Paddling Chef", I've blogged about many great paddles with him, love paddling with him!) decided that it would be fun to run a quieter version of the same trip, launching from Staten Island and cutting out the whole channel-crossing ringmarole. He'd first tried to do it the day after the longer one in January (I was fine with that, I kind of liked the idea of two levels of paddle going on the same weekend) but he'd decided to try just a day or two before the weekend, and I guess people already had plans, because it didn't go off. I was hoping he would give it another try, and when the weather forecast starting showing some really nice weather for the President's Day weekend, he did! This time he got the notice out much earlier in the week, and we had a great crew go out today. It was a special treat to paddle with Sebago commodore emeritus Phil G again - he and his wife moved out of NYC a few years back and he now primarily paddles with the excellent Yonkers Paddling and Rowing Club, and we all miss him at Sebago - and he brought his signature Fig Newtons to share, just like the good old days! So much fun.

The weather was amazing, the sky was a glorious blue with wispy clouds, the sun sparkled on the surface, the water wasn't quite glassy this time but I don't think the winds even got up to the low end of the 7 to 11 kts I'd seen when I checked the forecast last night, and yes, the seals were as inquisitive about us as they'd been in January. In fact when we rafted up for an on-water lunch break, they seemed to get especially curious - we don't know if they were more comfortable with us when we were all sitting still in one place, or if the noise of our hulls bumping together got their attention, but it seemed like all through that break, there were always at least two or three little round heads in sight, and they got a little closer than they'd been when we were underway. We paddled about 5 miles all told and were on the water for about 2 and a half hours - with the cruising speed of a trained kayaker generally being about 3 knots per hour, that will tell you how much time we spent just sitting and looking! What a wonderful day.

Here are a few of my favorite pictures from the day. Click any picture for a slideshow view. For more, click here to visit my Flickr album. 

Shared Waterways Report

A snowy day in NY Harbor, heading back to Coney Island after visiting the seals at Swinburne Island. Visibility was limited, but we knew where the channel was, we made a securite call before crossing, and we weren't about to play chicken with the big guys 'cause we know they can't stop. Everything went fine and it ended up being an amazing paddle.

With both commercial and recreational boating traffic growing across the country's waterways, though, interactions don't always go this smoothly. The National Transportation Safety Board has recently come out with some recommendations, and I thought I would take a break from the pretty pictures that I've mostly been posting of late and share a link to the NTSB's press release, which includes a link to the full report (80+ pages but much of that is appendices). Interesting read - one thing that I did notice about the full report is that lack of training actually wasn't a factor in the ferry-kayak incident that's mentioned at the beginning of the report, but it did draw attention to the general issues caused by increasing numbers of boaters in the harbor, which have been the subject of many a lively debate among New York harbor users for pretty much the entire time I have counted myself among that group.

Thank you to both Nancy Brouse at the New York City and Hudson River Watertrail Associations, and Carolina Salguero at PortSide NewYork for sharing the information - I think I saw the information from both of them within about ten minutes of each other!

Added note later - excellent suggestion from an engineer friend for low-vis situations like the one we were in in the photo above, received after I shared this on Facebook: "Some advice, there are a couple of vessel tracking app's the can be run on smart phone. All though larger vessels choose to avoid low visibility conditions,they are often caught by closing weather while underway. These app's will show you who your sharing the channel with. You also have a bette chance of radio contact since you can now call the vessel by name. I use "vesselfinder". I did know you can look at ship locations online but not having a smart phone myself, I never would've thought of using an app as an on-board tool when out in murky conditions. Good stuff, thanks Tim!

Happy Valentine's Day (aaaaah summer)

Snowy Commute

Ti Grows in Brooklyn says, "And why is it again that we never moved back to da 'aina?" Brrrr. I went to work anyways and here are some scenes from the morning commute - Brooklyn, Manhattan Bridge, SoHo. Click for a slideshow view.

Sunday Fun Part 1 - Brooklyn Bridge, and LIONS at Jing Fong (yay!)

Busy week at work (and that's even assuming that tomorrow isn't a snow day 'cause of the snowstorm), but I did squeeze a lot of fun into last Sunday! Part 1 was the morning up to the first hour of the afternoon, when I joined my old Sebago friend Laurie for another walk across the Brooklyn Bridge followed by dim sum at NY's biggest Chinese restaurant, Jing Fong (the food's good too)! She likes to get friends together to do this on a pretty regular basis, and I'm so glad she's gotten me into the loop! It wasn't quite as shiny a day as last month's hike/brunch/hike morning, so I didn't take as many outside pix as I did last month, but I did like the picture above.

It did occur to me that I hadn't taken any pictures of the restaurant, which is impressive, or the food, which is delicious, last time, so here's the restaurant, viewed from the stage at one end of the enormous room and looking down to the far end. 

Here are a couple of the ladies with the carts full of more deliciousness than you can possible try in one sitting. I've stuffed myself both times, the walking back to Brooklyn across the Manhattan bridge works out really well. Both time there's been that last cart that goes by with something that looks really onolicious, but we're all too full - nice to have something to look forward to, I guess!

First round here, just getting started. We've got sticky rice, and tofu with ginger sauce (Laurie's favorite; I'm actually not a big fan of tofu but the ginger sauce is so good that I actually  kind of liked it), and chocolate bao, and, uh, some other bao (I think it was vegetable), and of course tea all around. I think one of the chocolate bao was the first thing I tried here - both times Laurie and I were the only ones up for the bridge walk (she said more people would start doing that as it warmed up, last month especially was SO cold!) and with the early start got to the restaurant first. We were mostly letting the ladies with the carts go by, because we didn't want to start filling up before everybody else got there, but when the bao cart lady stopped and told us about the chocolate bao, this was new to both of us and we had to try. VERY yummy! 

This was another thing I'd never had before Jing Fong - this time we named them "notcarrots" after one of the gang bit into one expecting a carrot and exclaimed, "That's not a carrot!" They're actually more like the sweet sesame balls, only with cilantro stems (actually kind of a good taste with the sweet, if you like cilantro, and if you don't it's really easy to pull them out and leave 'em on your plate)

And after that my intention of doing a good dim sum post fell apart because it was the end of Lunar New Year and the lions showed up and I got distracted, because lions are distracting. They just are, you know? :D And SO much fun. 

Last food picture - I don't know what they call this at Jing Fong but the snack truck (not sure whether it was a full-fledged manapua van or not but they definitely had a lot of yummy things!) that used to park outside the gate at 'Iolani, my high school in Hawai'i, called them "honey twists" and this was my favorite after-school snack! This was the cart that went by after I was too stuffed for one more last time, so this time I made sure to get one! Far from Hawaii, but took me back. In the background - tofu again, plus a really yummy beef and rice noodle dish with (I think) black bean sauce, plus the last of a plate of seafood balls wrapped in bacon. I wasn't even sure what the bacon was wrapped around when I asked for one, "wrapped in bacon" was enough for me, and it worked out fine!

Want to read more about Jing Fong? Click here! 

And that's pretty much it for Part 1. Part 2 as soon as I can - and this is where I announced over on Facebook that I'd earned my boat nerd card (in case there was any doubt that I deserved one)!