Broadway and Steinway

That’s where I’ll soon be living. Rachel, Andrea and I have just signed a lease on an apartment in Astoria, Queens (Broadway and Steinway is a nearby intersection). Close to Manhattan, and lovely and diverse. Huzzah!

Just now, as every Saturday night, there’s a lovely salsa party going on in front of one of the buildings on my street, the one that has three beautiful trees framing its stoop. It always looks like tremendous fun, and the salsa is my Saturday evening lullabye.

On Wednesday, when I left for work, people were streaming out of the subway stop at Prospect Avenue and Fourth Avenue and one man looked at me pointedly, shaking his head and saying “No trains, no trains.” The thunderstorm the night before had been loud (particularly loud bursts thunder set off car alarms on my block) and it had loosed a flood on the tracks below. I joined the stream of walkers slogging through the steamy morning sun, hoping to catch a train further on, and quickly estimating that if I didn’t, it would only be about three miles—an hour or so to work instead of the usual half. As we headed toward the solitary mountain of the Williamsburg Bank (my favorite building in Brooklyn), the flow of people grew heavier at every block. At every subway entrance the refrain came from self-appointed criers: “No trains, no trains.”

The closer to Flatbush Avenue (and the Manhattan Bridge) we got, the thicker the traffic. Twelve-person vans appeared out of nowhere flagging down pedestrians to ferry them across the river (”Thirty fourth street! Thirty fourth street!” “Midtown! Grand Central!” “Waaaaaaaaall Street! Waaaaaaaall Street!”), and a few private cars flung open their doors inviting others to fill their seats. At the intersection of Fourth and Flatbush, the traffic changed; instead of the single mass of people moving downtown it had been, parts of the crowd now folded back on itself, phones to ears: “I can’t make it in, I’m sorry. There aren’t any trains. Do you know how hot it is out here?” I kept an eye on a brown twelve-passenger van, the one that had declared itself for Thirty Fourth Street. We kept pace with each other for several blocks, the road full of cars making little more progress than the now-rivulets of people at its sides. I stayed on Flatbush as it angled up to become the bridge, walking around workers from the transportation authority as they scurried around pumps and manholes.

As I started across the bridge, the Statue of Liberty peeked out from around the corner of a DUMBO tower, and I could see a matching stream of foot traffic traversing the Brooklyn Bridge across the water. I go across this bridge nearly every day on the subway, and yet I’m seeing for the first time its metal girders (the same color as the faraway statue) and art nouveau canopies. I hadn’t before appreciated its length (the full span is nearly one and a half miles) and I was beginning to suspect that my hasty estimate was wrong (or, at least, I was hoping I was wrong: I’d already been walking for over an hour).

By the time I made it into Greenwich Village, having slowed considerably as I passed the tables of bitter melon and mushrooms in Chinatown, I realized that I wasn’t able to go any further without some sort of stop. I was disgusting: my hair, my clothes, even my bag felt gross. I slipped into a coffee shop and bought myself a key lime sugar cookie and a diet soda, which, had I been asked, I would have declared to be the preeminent examples of their respective forms before making the final push up, through Union Square.

I entered the office slowly at 11:20 (by now, everything about me was slow), and mazed around mostly-empty cubicles and through hallways towards my destination. “Ah, you made it!” said my boss as I came into his office. “I’ll be over in a minute to give you something to do.” I deposited myself in the next room, and brought up a map to see how far I’d gone.

I’d just walked six miles. Knowing that, I slumped a little in my chair, relieved that I was hardier than I’d begun to suspect.