Patience.org

A few hours before I depart for icy NYC

There’s some pictures here (you’ll need a password) of the little man venturing out on Sunday after we got a dump of 13 inches on through Saturday night. Fortunately the city had all day Sunday to clear it up.

Here we are in Union Square:

New York makes a great deal about being a city of the world, with almost all the world’s ethnicities represented. London’s similar, and the Guardian‘s done a great job of mapping it. There’s an overall map here (PDF) and a key. There’s also a series of articles of various groups talking about their experiences in places as diverse as Hammersmith (Poles), Wembley (Somalis) and New Malden (Koreans) and a series of maps, showing spread by religion and ethnicity, plus some statistics that the maps don’t show, including that “1% of Londoners described themselves as Jedi. They have been included in the No Religion figures.”

The British Post Office’s plans to close down 2,500 local post office branches has led to huge outcry in the UK, understandably enough, given the important role they play in defining what a local community is. But an interesting piece in the Guardian got me thinking about where we live and the differences between urban, suburban and truly rural life. I’ve only ever experienced urban life, in that the area of south London I lived in was close to all public transport and you could walk to school and local shops (although many of those have closed since I lived there and been turned into flats, some of them very ugly). It might be seen as the suburbs, but you didn’t need a car to get everywhere, which seems to me to be a sort of defining suburban quality, although perhaps that’s American suburbs, which are much more spread out. Still, if it was suburbia, rather that than exurbs, that’s for sure.

But in Manhattan, the archetype of an urban metropolis, the juxtaposition between skyscrapers and ‘Mom n Pop’ stores is striking. You still have local shops serving local people, to paraphrase the League of Gentlemen. We are soon to move apartment, to an area that is very similar to many here, in that there is a hardware store, a dry cleaner, a deli, a video rental place and bakers, all within a one block radius of our apartment building, i.e. all within 50 yards of our door. And none are chains or ‘box stores.’

Sure, they also serve people who pass through, given it’s only about a 10 minute walk from 42nd Street. But it makes you think about the reasons people give for moving to suburbia from big cities and I don’t think local shopping really is one of them. I’d sooner make the leap from big city to rural than to suburbia and have to drive everywhere to get the simplest thing done, but that’s just me.

Here, an independent watchdog body tries to get to grips with the Post Office’s definitions of what it is to be urban or rural in regards to a post office near Chichester in West Sussex (rural post office stay open, urban are more likely to be closed, to oversimplify it):

“This is where it does all get rather bizarre,” says Postwatch’s Helen Maunder. “I mean, I realise we’re not surrounded here by sheep and cows in fields, but by four of the Post Office’s own five criteria, this is a rural branch.” The Post Office disagrees: it argues that the area ought to be counted as part of the urban sprawl of Chichester, and since that urban sprawl contains more than 10,000 people, it follows that the office must be urban.

The role of the Post Office is definitely changing – our experiences sending Christmas presents recently to and from the US and UK means we probably won’t bother again. But just in case, where we’re moving to, the nearest US Post Office is 4 blocks south of us, i.e. about a 5 minute walk, surrounded by small shops and restaurants.

Crumbs, it’s taken me me far too long to get these together – and there’s still more to come – but here (password required) are some pictures of Christmas in Erie, including some sled action….

and one picture of a frozen Presque Isle, so I’ll stick that one up here so you can see it easily….

In Grandma’s snow as he liked to describe it, the little man got his first experience of deep snow and loved it from the outset.

It was of the crunchy type and so when you threw snowballs they broke apart. But nevertheless he loved doing it and shouted “snow fight!” each time, which we think was a personalized version of Spongebob’s “Snowballs Away!” cry, but couldn’t be sure. At least he has his own mind.

There will be more from Christmas up soon in the album area – we’ll let you know.

I cycled round the edge of Manhattan on Dec 30 which is something I’d been meaning to do before the end of the year (I rarely get to write about anything on the day it actually happens). I used my old Raleigh Highlander, which was given to me in England by my brother in law about 10 years ago and is still going strong, although the gears & brakes have been replaced. But it got me round the 32-odd miles.

One of the best books I read this year (admittedly not a particularly long list) called London Orbital by Ian Sinclair, which is more or less about his walk around the M25, the notorious motorway that encircles London. It prompted the title of this post and also drove me to want to do a circuit of Manhattan, albeit by bike.

Over the past five years or so the city has done a great job constructing the Manhattan Greenway development that has added many miles of cycle paths, some reclaimed from other paths, some entirely new. Cycling around Manhattan is something that some people do every weekend – or even more often. But this was my first time and it took me longer than I thought, about four hours. But if I hadn’t stopped to take so many of these pictures, I could have cut out 45 minutes, even at my relatively slow pace. The pictures highlighted here and a lot more besides can be found here.

I started at 16th Street and the West Side Highway and went clockwise. Despite living on the east side, it’s a force of habit to start there because when I used to have time to cycle a lot more than I do now, I lived much closer to the West Side Highway and the Hudson River Park (although back then that was when I first got here it didn’t really exist). The run up to George Washington Bridge was simple enough and I allowed myself what turned out to be the longest rest of the whole trip in Riverside Park.

But the ride is not quite circumnavigational – you still have to go on streets for part of the way, including going through Harlem, which was straightforward and well sign posted – the renovations going on along 120th Street in the Mount Morris Park area were quite something to see.

But after a fairly smooth ride down to about 80th street I got off the Greenway too early at 79th Street – I could have stayed on to 59th street and it meant I had to go right down to 23rd street on the streets, which was a pain. But I got back on after that and made my way down past the soon-to-be-closed Fulton Fish Market and the tourists at the South Street Seaport and Battery Park and back up the West Side to 16th Street, which while painful on my legs, was a pleasant ride along pretty much empty Hudson River Park.