The NYC subways' Brighton Line had its origins in the Brooklyn & Brighton Beach Railroad, one of the railroads that connected to Brooklyn's ocean beaches. The big news in summer gadding is that Jack Eichenbaum is devoting another of his day-long subway-line odysseys to the Brighton Line.

by Ken

Okay, I've been kind of grumpy about the fact that I'll be on the shelf for one of my favorite weekends of the year: that of Jane's Walks, in honor of pioneer urbanologist Jane Jacobs, who did so much to reorient the way we think about urban life and to empower urban folk to feel that we can claim a voice in shaping the life of our cities in the direction of design and scale optimized for heightened human interaction.

Jane spent as much of her time as she could out in the field observing -- watching the way real people live actual lives, and see what sorts of design configurations produce the most diverse and enriching experiences. If you don't know her work, one word that should give you a clue is neighborhood. She was a great believer in the richness of neighborhood life, at a time when her frequent nemesis Robert "Pave It and Run a Parkway Through It" Moses was destroying every neighborhood he could get his eminent-domain-empowered mitts on.

In New York City we now have the best imaginable situation, since the Municipal Art Society took over the planning and execution of Jane's Walk offerings, which are free and mind-bogglingly rich, diverse, and generally tantalizing. With some dedicated work I can winnow the list -- numbering 100-plus this year -- down to about 30 walks over the two days which I would really, really like to do. I hadn't even planned to look at this year's list, knowing the weekend would fall less than three weeks after my knee surgery. I finally sneaked a peek, and with enough work I think I could get it down to 30 again.

As it happens, although not formally part of the Jane's Walk festivities, on Saturday there's an open house at the 225-plus-year-old Dyckman Farmhouse, now a museum, which I can reach easily via a bus that passes right in front of my building, so I'm thinking I'll give that a shot -- plus I can't help noticing that just sticking to my home bailiwick of Northern Manhattan, between Jane's Walk offerings and those of NYC Parks there are a number of other outings Saturday and Sunday.

Note that most of the MAS-organized Jane's Walks don't require preregistration. If I were zeroing in on tour possibilities, I might incline to those that seem likely to be less crowd-drawing to enjoy a more intimate walk. That said, though, the offerings are awesome. And it's all free!

MAY AT MAS

As it happens, my knee is coming along well enough that I've gone ahead and signed up for two Municipal Art Society tours I've had in my sights for the following week ever since the March-April-May schedule was announced. I can get to both by bus, so I don't have to deal with subway steps yet.

On Saturday the 11th, my old pal Joe Svehlak is doing "Downtown's Lost Neighborhood," 11am-1pm, exploring "the diverse immigrant history of Manhattan's Lower West Side in conjunction with the Arab American National Museum's exhibit on 'Little Syria.' " Now "Lower West Side" isn't a geographic term you hear a lot in connection with Manhattan. The Manhattan end of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel -- a Robert Moses project -- wiped out the heart of the onetime neighborhood, and the various immigrant groups that once clustered there, including Joe's Czech parents, dispersed. I once almost did a version of this walk with Joe, but it was pouring that day and I didn't even have an umbrella.

Then on Sunday the 12th I'm going to try to do Laurence Frommer's "Bloomingdale Blocks" (2-4pm) -- "the quiet tre line streets from West 96th Street to West 110th Street that boast some of New York's finest remaining turn-of-the-century row-houses, apartment buildings, institutional structures and public monuments. I figure that will be easier on my legs than Eric Washington's "Uptown Trinity Church Cemetery Spring Tour,"

On Saturday the 11th baseball aficionado-historian Peter Laskowich is leading a tour called "Brooklyn and Jackie Robinson," 1-3pm. And the following weekend, if I felt more secure about those subway stairs, I might venture to Brooklyn for Matt Postal's "New to New York: Downtown Brooklyn," Saturday the 18th, 11am-1pm, and for Suzanne Spellen and Morgan Munsey's "Brooklyn's Automobile Row" (Bedford Avenue between Fulton Street and Empire Boulevard in Crown Heights), Sunday the 19th, 11am-1pm. It's looking as if my first subway venture may be for the rescheduled version of Snyder Schools scholar Jean Arrington's "Brownsville's Cache of C.B.J. Snyder Schools," Saturday the 25th, 11am-1pm.


NEW YORK TRANSIT MUSEUM SUMMER TOURS

Meanwhile, New York Transit Museum members have been early-registering for the newly announced summer schedule since Tuesday, with registration for nonmembers scheduled to begin this Saturday the 4th. Among the tours I signed up for is one I've been awaiting eagerly for months: a visit to the (now finally reopened) totally rebuilt Smith-9th Streets elevated subway station perched on the viaduct over Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal along with the neighboring 4th Avenue-9th Street station. There are more Grand Central Terminal-themed tours, food tours, visits to the 240th Street Maintenance Facility, and more, including the summer's three "Nostalgia Rides," to Coney Island (June 29), the Bronx's Orchard Beach (another Robert Moses legacy, July 13), and the Bronx's Van Cortlandt Park (August 25).


FINALLY, NEWS FROM JACK EICHENBAUM

First off, Jack is doing a Jane's Walk this Sunday the 5th, "Bowne Street, My Street," "a walk along the length of historic and multiethnic Bowne Street in Flushing where I have been living for 35 years." If I weren't mobility-impaired I would definitely do this. About a month ago Jack did a walk through the Bayside (Queens) neighborhood where he grew up that was notable both for personal and for regional history. Meet at the northwest corner of Main Street and 39th Avenue (St. George Episcopal Church), near the Main Street (Flushing) station of the no. 7 train.

Jack has a couple of walks scheduled in rapidly developing Long Island City in conjunction with the third Long Island City Arts Open (LICAO), May 15-19, and in May he'll be resuming the series of Wednesday evening walks (6-8pm) he's been doing in recent summers. Scheduled so far under the heading "Changing Cultures of Queens" are: On and Off Jamaica Avenue Avenue (May 22), Sunnyside to Jackson Heights (May 29), and Long Island City to Old Astoria (June 5).

The big news for those who have done or wish they had done Jack's daylong subway-line odysseys ("The World of the #7 Train" and "A Day on the J") is:

Brighton Line Memoirs: Meandering off the Q train
Sunday, July 21, 10am-5:30pm

This is a series of five walks and connecting rides along what was once the Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Island RR dating to 1878. Walks take place in Prospect Park, Brighton Beach, along Avenue U, in Ditmas Park and Central Flatbush. Lunch is in Brighton Beach where you can picnic on the Boardwalk. 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). Get the full day’s program and other info by email jaconet@aol.com The tour is limited to 25 people. Don’t get left out!

You better believe I've already sent my check in! (And not just because the Brighton Line was my subway lifeline to "the City" growing up in Brooklyn.)

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by Ken

One last reminder that the Municipal Art Society has coordinated a bumper crop of 70-plus walks (plus a few bike tours) in all five boroughs for Saturday and Sunday's annual celebration of Jane Jacobs's vision of the livable city. The complete list is here, with start and finish points, and presumably any changes will be noted on the website.

Without exaggeration I must have noted at least 40 walks I would be happy to do. I finally settled on one relatively remote destination for each day, in the two least-accessed boroughs: to Staten Island Saturday for "New Dorp: Possibilities for Walkability and Transit in a Railway 'New Village'" (10:30am-1pm), and to the Bronx Sunday for "The Unknown Riverdale" (12n-2pm). I'll be reporting on my travels, and would love to hear about readers'.

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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:

Mark Twain House and Hill-Stead House & Museum ( bus and walking tour, Sunday, May 13, all day; $115)

Morris-Jumel Mansion and the Hispanic Society in America (Saturday, May 26, 1-4:30pm; $25 with $3 early-registration discount, including all admissions)

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.

ONE OBVIOUS HIGHLIGHT: A WALK DOWN
THE WHOLE LENGTH OF BROADWAY (Sunday)

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.)

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"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

by Ken

Really, I'd be curious to know what people did and saw around the country in this weekend of free walks (yes, free! celebrating and keeping alive the memory of that pioneer of modern urban life Jane Jacobs (1916-2006), author most famously of The Death and LIfe of American Cities, timed to her birthday (which was Wednesday).

On the Jane's Walk USA website there's a list of 25 cities represented this year: Anchorage, Austin, Baton Rouge, Brunswick (ME), Boston, Chattanooga, Heber Valley (UT), Houston, Jackson (MS), Kansas City (MO), Mesa (AZ), New Orleaans, New York City, Oakland (CA), Orange (NJ), Philadelphia, Phoenix, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Scranton, Syracuse (NY), Tempe (AZ), Waterbury (CT).

On the actual birthday, the Municipal Arts Society has an annual tour, "Her Village," in which architectural historian Matt Postal leads participants through sites associated with Jane's life and causes in the neighborhood, and winding up in front of the modest little three-story house on Hudson Street (down the block from the White Horse Tavern) which she and her husband bought and in which they raised their two sons and a daughter until pulling up stakes for Toronto in 1968, unwilling to allow the coming-of-age Jacobs boys to be subject to the draft for the Vietnam War, which they vehemently opposed.

I think my very first MAS tour was one of Matt's, which remains one of my all-time favorites from a "concept" standpoint: a walkthrough of a project that never got built, thanks in part to the activism of Jane Jacobs. It was the legendary Robert Moses's first major defeats, planned as another of his slash-and-destroy neighborhood-killers, the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have provided a direct vehicular link between the Holland Tunnel on the west and the East River bridges to Brooklyn on the east, at the cost of a neighborhood filled with the kind of people that neither Moses nor the business community that supported him cared about.

Every time Moses was pushed back, he came back with an altered version of the plans, until finally community groups discovered -- with Jane Jacobs playing a major role -- that they really could fight City Hall. (Moses wore so many public hats that fighting him was in effect fighting a united wall of bureaucracies.) The strategic breakthroughs involved in the LME fight(s) involved organizing community resistance and finding ways, normally through the standard media, to make a "story" of that opposition.

It was a stark reminder of the gulf between Robert Moses's way of looking at cities and Jane Jacobs's. If you look at Moses's plans for the city of the future, you see high-rise building containing hermetically sealed dwellings that the dwellers left only to go to their cars to drive on Moses's highways to . . . well, destinations, including Moses's parks and other recreation facilities. Left out was any kind of human interaction, any kind of community -- the very thing that counted for so much in Jacobs's thinking, that and the idea that people living and working in neighborhoods are entitled to a say about the use made of their neighborhoods.

Jacobs famously loved low-rise buildings with stoops, which encouraged neighborhood interaction, and buildings with stairs rather than elevators. She was an obsessive observer, getting out "in the field," seeing what made neighborhoods work, what made them active and vital, and what made them work less well. She was correspondingly distrustful of top-down planning by people who didn't know, or often didn't care, how people actually live their lives.

My only regret about the Jane's Walk weekend was how many interesting-looking tours were scheduled in New York which I wasn't able to go on. I was out of commission Saturday because I wasn't going to be deterred from another Queens tour led by Jack Eichenbaum, with whom I've done both New York Transit Museum and Municipal Art Society tours and last week his own spectacular all-day "World of the #7 Train" tour (for which in the end he had to turn away eight would-be registrants). I didn't imagine I'd have another opportunity to walk "The Right-of-Way of the Flushing Central Rail Road" (under the auspices of the Queens Historical Society), which for some seven years in the 1870s connected Flushing to Hempstead, Long Island, and "lives on in a swath of parkland and streets," of which we walked the portion from Flushing to Fresh Meadows.

BY THE WAY, JACK EICHENBAUM HAS A WHOLE
SERIES OF QUEENS TOURS COMING UP

One of the things that makes Jack, as an "urban geographer," such an interesting tour leader (he's the current Queens borough historian, by the way) is his fascination with how and why areas and neighborhoods have developed and continue to develop, and one of his current fascinations is the incredibly rapid evolution of Long Island City in the wake of a major zoning overhauls by the city. He has five tours of the area coming up next weekend ("Daylight Loft Buildings in Long Island City," Saturday, May 14, and "Long Island City Shoreline to the Noguchi Museum," Sunday, May 15), the following Wednesday evening (" Queensboro Plaza to the Waterfront at Sunset," May 18), and the following weekend ("Long Island City Studio Strolls," Saturday and Sunday, May 21 and 22). The sunset walk to the waterfront is also part of an extensive series of Wednesday-evening tours Jack is doing from May through July under the heading "Changing Cultures of Queens: A Walking Anthology," including "Flushing's Chinatown" (this Wednesday, May 11) and "Sunnyside to Jackson Heights" (May 25).

They're all $15, and no advance reservations are required. For more information, check Jack's website.

THE JANE'S WALK I FINALLY CHOSE FOR TODAY


In addition to the Saturday Jane's Walks I couldn't take, but tried to keep track of in case maybe someday I can try to do them on my own, there were a number on Sunday I might have done, but in the end I opted for "The Draw of a Vibrant Waterfront," a tour organized by two New York Harbor-obsessed bloggers, Will Van Dorp (of Tugster, recently profiled in nytimes.com's City Room), an English professor by day who thinks of the vast working New York Harbor as the city's "sixth borough"; and Christina Sun (of Bowsprite), an artist whose passion is directed toward the people who work the harbor -- people who mostly from someplace else. On a picture-perfect day, with just enough clouds to add drama to the blue sky, our small but hardy band took the noon Staten Island Ferry (it was a difficult decision, knowing how unpunctual people are these days, to depart on time rather than wait the half-hour till the next ferry), then headed west from the St. George ferry terminal along the north shore of Staten Island, with spectacular views of the Upper Bay from the Kill van Kull (which separates Staten Island from New Jersey) on the west to the distant Brooklyn shore on the east.

As excited as I was by my recent Municipal Art Society outing to Staten Island's Snug Harbor Cultural Center, farther around the bend on the Kill van Kull, I had one regret: that of necessity, by taking the short bus ride from the ferry, we zoomed past that magnificent shoreline. So I couldn't resist returning in the company of people who could help point me at and explain what there was to see from that wonderful vantage point, and Will and Christina (and their tugboat-savvy friend Burke) were splendid guides, and our small group included terrifically interesting people. I had a grand time.

Thanks to Will and Christine. And thanks of course to Jane.

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