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.