Now that the weather is getting nicer, Kamran and I have been actually getting up before noon on Sundays and taking walks around his neighborhood. You can kind of get the gist of any given neighborhood by walking a few streets, and at this point, we’ve been walking those streets for the five years Kamran’s lived in Midtown East, so we kind of thought we’d seen it all.
But walking down 1st Avenue, we decided to try out 52nd Street on a whim and found ourselves in a microcosm entirely different from the one Kamran lives in, with a tiny unnamed café, a gated garden area surrounded by balconied buildings, and a culdesac overlooking the East River. Doormen peered at us from under their caps and men out walking their oversized and undersized dogs turned around to watch us pass, as if they all knew we didn’t belong there.
We could see a little bridge leading down to a riverfront park one block down, so we headed back over to 1st Avenue and down to 51st Street, which deadended into a decaying stone staircase that led to this bridge:
And when we looked over the sides of the bridge, we saw this glorious dog park–Peter Detmold Park, it’s called–so huge it still looked empty even while teeming with puppies:
The last few feet of the bridge are covered by a metal fence as it crosses over FDR Drive, which is kind of exhilarating to stand over:
At the end of the bridge, you take a left and walk down another staircase, which leads you to a tiny strip of park sitting right on the river, with sights of the 100-year-old Queensboro Bridge:
some fancy ruins on Roosevelt Island no doubt being torn down to make way for condos:
two lovebirds:
the famous Pepsi-Cola sign on the other side of the river in Queens:
and the whisper-thin United Nations headquarters down the street on 42nd:
Having read Phillip Lopate’s wonderful but sad Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan, I’ve come to realize how important access to the river is to the community, and for the community to have spent so much money on this one-block chunk of park, you figure someone special must be living there.
Looking behind you, you realize how special. The buildings are towering behemoths:
with bay windows on every corner and balconies that have been closed off to become another room in the apartment:
There are long stretches of beautiful outdoor patios that can only be accessed through the buildings:
And look! When you try to Google Street View it, there’s no data available! FISHY!
We walked down Beekman Place between 49th and 51st Streets, and while the blocks were eerily quiet, what was weirder were the surveillance cameras conspicuously placed outside of every building to let you know you were being watched. It’s at once the scariest and safest street in NYC, I guess.
On the way back home, we were greeted with the familiar sight of the Chrysler Building, which shines in through Kamran’s windows every night, peeking through between some buildings off in the distance:
and of course the “Good Defeats Evil” monument of St. George fighting the “dragon” of nuclear war that used to be soooooo beautiful until the UN decided to build some awful structure behind it:
And that was that. Secret neighborhood microcosm de-secretized!
