Having stayed in the Village or Tribeca many times the last few years I always try to include the Brooklyn Bridge on runs, it is beautiful and has a wonderful raised wooden deck above the cars. Until last year this was shared by bikes and pedestrians but in his one good move as mayor, Deblasio converted one of the car lanes to a safe, fenced bike dedicated lane and the upper deck is for pedestrians only now, so no 20mph e-bikes swerving around walkers, joggers, tourists looking up and at skyline. I look forward to biking across it on my next visit, didn’t have time for my usual citi-bike ride up to GW bridge on this visit.
I chose my Billy Joel playlist for the run and while I was on the bridge I heard the line “we held a concert out in Brooklyn and watched the island’s bridges blow”, I also ran past Allen street as Allentown played.
It was a great run, listening to Billy Joel and remembering growing up in Great Neck, just a 25 minute LIRR ride into Penn Station. I just finished listening to Deborah Harry (Blondie) autobiography that she reads in her sandpapery NY accent. She was born in 1945 and lived in NYC from the age of 18 until now. She was one of the first punk musicians, along with the Ramones at CBGBs and came back from London to teach the NY punks the POGO popular with the Brit skinhead fans of the Sex Pistols, etc. She was close to Andy Warhol and all his projects and there is a famous portrait of her by him. It is so weird that I was a teen during these amazing years but all I listened to was the Beatles and Stones and “classic rock” music while all this insanity was so close by. Of course she and her crowd also was into heroin for decades and that probably would have interfered with me getting into Johns Hopkins and then Medical School 🙂