A bike ride through Brooklyn

The weather was clear and cold yesterday, so I bundled up, hopped on the bicycle at 8 a.m. and took a ride through Brooklyn. I’m finding that the way to discover Brooklyn – even more so than Manhattan – is on a bicycle. And in the process, I’m starting to develop a deeper love of the borough. For one thing, more people live in Brooklyn (1.8 million) than on the island (1.3 million), and these are people of all stripes.

My neighborhood, for example is pretty heavily West Indian. About a quarter mile to the south, Hasidic Jews take over. Two miles to the northwest, the hipsters have the helm. To the southwest about three miles, the yuppies have taken over my old neighborhood. You’ve got the Irish to my east and five miles south it’s Russian. The list goes on. There are pockets of ethnicity and class with blurred lines between.

I don’t know Queens yet, so I can’t do a compare and contrast … yet. I’ve made a couple of contacts and have heard the stories though. I will get there one day. I do know that the bicycle has stripped away the physical restriction of convenient transportation and opened all these neighborhoods in Brooklyn up for me.

That’s not to say mass transit fails in Brooklyn. The system works. The job is just different. In Manhattan, the subway is designed to get people around the island. In Brooklyn the subway is designed to get people to the island. This is a critical difference for a wanderer. And Brooklyn is not really a walking town … too residential and sprawling for that.

But the bicycle is the right tool for the job. Yesterday, I used it.

I rode from my flat in Bed-Sty to Cobble Hill, then down to the Gowanus Canal on the fringe of Red Hook and up 9th Street to Park Slope for breakfast. The trip took me through dirt poverty to industrial waste to big money in about two hours.

Can you think of a better way to spend a crisp Saturday morning? I can, but not flying solo.