Walking Is Transportation

Full Disclosure

St. Marks Place at Westervelt Avenue, St. George, Staten Island, Thanksgiving Day, 2007.

Welcome to WALKING IS TRANSPORTATION

When I launched this blog nine months ago, its focus was almost solely on walking and transportation issues. In time, I found that focus too confining. So I'm now re-launching WALKING IS TRANSPORTATION.com as a journal. Transportation will be a continuing interest, but so will art, architecture, planning, urban life, literature, gardening, cooking and the rest of life.

I'm Dan Icolari, keeper of the journal, formerly an advertising copywriter and now the resident owner/manager of a small rental property, pictured above, that my wife Ellen and I share with several tenants. We were both born and raised in Manhattan, have lived in every borough but Queens, and now live in St. George, where the ferry docks on Staten Island.

Though the name 'Walking is Transportation' no longer reflects the expanded content of this blog, I've decided it stays. Not only because the blog already has an identity, a sensibility and a small group of readers, but because the name suggests a way of operating in the world that promotes personal autonomy and freedom.

Welcome. Again.--Dan Icolari

Sign of the Times in The Times

Wall of masks in the hallway outside my office.

HIGH GAS PRICES SPUR CHANGES IN DRIVER BEHAVIOR

Weird weather couldn't make drivers cut down on their gas consumption. Nor could stern lectures or hand-wringing or despairing newspaper editorials. And unbelievably, only weeks ago, the New York State Assembly turned its back on $354 million in mass transit (congestion pricing pilot program) funding because it couldn't face the hard work of legislative negotiation and compromise required to secure the funding from the Feds.

But all that seems to have changed, and overnight. In front page stories dated May 10, both the New York Times and the Staten Island Advance reported that drivers they'd interviewed said high prices--low, $3.81; high $3.93 on Staten Island--were forcing them to change their driving patterns and behavior, including the choice of nearby vacation destinations over those farther away.

Some said they were doing more walking. Some described buying just enough gas to get them over the bridge to New Jersey, where prices at the pump are lower. Others reported they now thought twice about making even relatively short local trips because of the need to conserve fuel. And some were even taking the bus.

The problem is that these changes in behavior are driven by market forces, not policy or legislation. So that if oil prices were suddenly to moderate their seemingly inexorable rise or even decline, there's little reason to believe that drivers wouldn't revert to their old profligate ways.

I was pleased to see that, after Hillary Clinton jumped on John McCain's gas tax holiday bandwagon, Barack Obama rightly called the proposal a gimmick and a distraction from the need to craft an energy policy that works.

Staten Island Botanical Garden: Worth the Walk From the Ferry

Today I received an e-mail from Ace, a regular reader, too late to respond to him at work. So, at his suggestion, I'm responding here, in hope that he'll read my response in time to plan his second exploration of Staten Island's north shore this weekend; in this case, the Staten Island Botanical Garden at Snug Harbor Cultural Center.

Hi, Ace,

Since I'm sending this at 6:06 pm on a Friday night, I'm going to post it on the blog as well, just in case you were planning an excursion this weekend (tho' I hear it's supposed to rain).

SIBG is a constituent organization within Snug Harbor Cultural Center, which has been established since the 1970s-1980s, an 80-acre landmark with the largest collection of early 19th century Greek Revival architecture in the United States. Because of the garden's relatively recent vintage, it's not remotely as large or as spectacular in its plantings and facilities as either the Brooklyn or Bronx gardens.

But that's not to say it doesn't have its charms. In addition to an open greenhouse, there are a variety of theme gardens, including a white garden, a scent garden, a really beautiful allee, the Chinese Scholars Garden ($5 admission--boo, hiss), and the memory garden (I think that's what it's called--re 9/11), a hillside pathway with rustic benches that winds down to a large pond.

While you're at Snug Harbor, you can also visit the gallery of the Art Lab, another constituent facility; the Newhouse Gallery, which used to be for contemporary art but is now having its mission redefined; and the John Noble Collection, which is devoted to a local artist who specialized in very strong paintings with maritime themes. There's also the Staten Island Children's Museum, so if you have pre-adolescents in your household, bring 'em!

Directions: Exiting the ferry terminal on Richmond Terrace, turn right and continue for 1 1/2-2 miles (not sure, but it'll be a snap for you, believe me) to the Snug Harbor gate--open daily, dawn to dusk. Or take the S40 bus and tell the driver to let you off at the gate. While you're here, check out the Snug Harbor ferry landing and adjacent shoreline path (funky but charming, even romantic).

Need help? Directions? A glass of water? Call me at 718-442-7846.

Buona fortuna!

Dan Icolari

THE VERTICAL LIFE, or Hill-Walking on Staten Island, Part 9

PRECARIOUSLY PERCHED

. . . Or so these hillside houses on Van Duzer Street in Stapleton Heights--just south of the point at which it meets the last stretch of St. Paul's Avenue--seemed to me when I photographed them not long ago on one of my first extended walks of the 2008 spring/summer season.

About a 15-minute bus ride from the ferry and about an hour from downtown Manhattan, this group of houses appears to have been assembled randomly during the mid- to late 19th century and into the early 20th. The question is why, at the turn of the last century, when there was hardly a shortage of buildable land in Richmond County, a group of families chose to settle in this steep hillside cluster, some of which was accessible only via a steep and irregular hillside stair.

Several among this group of modest hillside are well cared for, as here:

While the appearance of this sorry hillside hanger-on gives new meaning to the term 'deferred maintenance.'

SHOULD-READING, or, OH, ALL RIGHT, I'LL READ THE DAMN POEM

EXFOLIATING MY RESISTANCE

When I encounter those familiar flush-left stacks of lines occupying, on average, about half the width of the page or column in a magazine, I feel a momentary unease. I should be reading those lines, I tell myself, hesitating to turn the page. I once, after all, called myself a poet (but always checked the surrounding area for naysayers, expecting at least one).

No, I'm not about to explore the reasons for the unease. I know they're principally an unwillingness to focus, to settle down, to engage. But when I can let go of my own impatience, when I can meet those lines on their own terms, which to me are the only terms, I may come away moved or amused or dazzled, but also speechless. The language and experience of poems is so private, beyond thumbs up or down, beyond technique or form or topic, there's really nothing to say.

Sometimes there is such stillness inside a poem, trying to downshift into its sensibility isn't enough. It feels as though you have to take a hot bath, exfoliating layers, opening pores, before you can enter it. As here, in a poem from Sleeping and Waking, Michael O'Brien's latest collection:

UPSTATE

First raindrops, a
cat's footprints, the
wiper
opens its fan.

•

In a broken
dream I have
just met Lord
Byron, '30s suit,
cocktail lounge, Graham
Greene's opaque, intelligent
face, eyes that have
seen everything, a
spider's eyes, a
kind of banked
fury. What is
dark mops up
the light. I
reach for my
watch to see
where we are
in night's program.

•

In the night
bear climbs onto
the porch, a
clumsy sound, later
I hear him
come back but
it was thunder.

•

Stirred by the
least wind the
wintry, carrot-
colored willow.

•

A pickup
full of snow,
a crow's rau-
cous laugh, the
rapids comb-
ing its hair.

The satisfactions in this and poems like it are wisps of shared experience, rendered in a novel language we pick up as we read it, nodding in places and not in others, getting it and not. Sometimes--as in, "the rapids coming its hair"--getting only five words is enough.

I usually don't allow myself the time to remember that.

OBAMA AND INNOCENCE

Or, DISCERNMENT AND RESPONSIBILITY

I'm thinking that maybe I should have reversed the order. Maybe I should have started with Barack Obama's second book, The Audacity of Hope, rather than with Dreams for My Father, his first. Perhaps it would have been better just to dive into Audacity, which seems more clearly a campaign book and then, if I wanted to probe more deeply, move on, or back, to Dreams.

Except that's not what I've done. Instead, I've taken the opposite, more linear route. In part, because Obama's candidacy is so unprecedented in so many ways and seems to demand more background information and greater scrutiny. But I've also chosen the linear path because my decision to support Obama has been a matter of strategy (backing him vs. the fatally flawed Hillary Clinton) rather than because I'm inspired by his personal story, or what I know of it; or because I'm enthused about his policy ideas, which seem cautious and rather conventional. I want to be able to explain, even defend my position, if only to myself.

My linear route seems to have been the right one. For on Page 16, in Obama's profile of his maternal grandfather, I find this knowing observation about American political character, an assessment made too early in his career (13 years ago) to have been the product of presidential ambition.

Referring to his grandfather, Obama writes,

His was an American character, one typical of men of his generation, men who embraced the notion of freedom and individualism and the open road without always knowing its price, and whose enthusiasms could as easily lead to the cowardice of McCarthyism as to the heroics of World War II. Men who were both dangerous and promising precisely because of their fundamental innocence; men prone, in the end, to disappointment.

Clearly, Obama has thought about the dangers of this national innocence, the product of our long-standing isolation, our belief in the myth of American exceptionalism and our preference for personality over policy. This innocence, as Obama knows, promotes the rise of demagogues in our national political life--most recently in the eight-year global disaster of the Bush II presidency. This innocence is also an enduring theme of our literature, in a novel like Elmer Gantry, from the 1920s; or a screenplay such as Budd Schulberg's A Face in the Crowd, from the 1950s.

What struck me in Obama's description of American political character, the one contained in the italicized quote above, was not simply its discernment. What also struck me was the powerful responsibility this observation places on Obama's shoulders. Because the truth is that innocence--and not simply the innocence of the young--is a large part of what has propelled and sustained his campaign, and by design.

As he gets closer and closer to being the Democratic nominee, I hope he's thinking about what comes later, when political innocence collides with political reality.

Careful––You Might Like It

NOT HOT: Postcard view (dated 1910) looking south on Westervelt Avenue from Richmond Terrace, St. George, Staten Island. Because this hasn't been a hot neighborhood for slightly more than a century, every building shown in this image is still intact and in a moderately good state of preservation. A portion of our house is shown in the upper left section of the image (notice the double-windowed gable and the spire to its right).

LIVING WHERE THEY WOULDN'T BE CAUGHT DEAD

Despite the sneering disdain of metro journalists who pay two grand a month for a closet in a renovated tenement on Avenue C and Houston Street, it's possible to live where they wouldn't be caught dead and actually like it. On Staten Island, I mean. Specifically, in one of the older neighborhoods on the north shore, near the ferry.

After a while, the plucked-from-the-Midwest streetscapes of Staten Island's north shore stop looking quite as foreign as they did. It starts to seem normal to be able to see the sky without craning your neck. Or to be the only person walking down the street, utterly alone with your thoughts, and not feeling in the least unsafe. You even get used to the quiet.

What You Give Up and What You Get

Don't get me wrong now. Staten Island is hardly Valhalla. We live in a place everybody's heard of but very few actually know--a place routinely overlooked, underserved and dismissed. But there are times when going unnoticed, unacknowledged and underrepresented pays off.

Leaving Manhattan for places like New Brighton, St. George, Tompkinsville and Stapleton gets you twice the space for half the price, give or take a hundred or two. And maybe a view, a garden or a fireplace as well. There's always a seat on the FREE Staten Island Ferry. Always a chair at the barber's. Always a table at a decent restaurant; no reservations required. At public parks, even on the weekend, it can often seem like everybody's left town. Though the north shore's hilly streets are challenging for cyclists, they're one of the best non-park environments I've found so far as a walker.

My neighbor Martha, who moved to St. George from Battery Park City with her husband and two children, is hyper-alert for signs of gentrification hereabouts. She winces whenever she sees positive media coverage of our area, which she's certain can mean only one thing: She and her family, having found a pleasant place to live they can afford, will be forced out by high rents once again.

Given the national economic downturn and the shaky state of real estate everywhere, including Manhattan, I don't think Martha has a lot to worry about for the forseeable.

NYSDOT Public Forum: Beating the Drums for Funds

TOO MUCH SUNSHINE?

Maybe we've taken the Sunshine Law a little too much to heart. Perhaps there are meetings of various agencies of government that it's pointless for someone outside of government to attend. The New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) public forum held Wednesday, March 5 at the College of Staten Island was that kind of assembly.

The topical, uh, springboard for the forum--which included a roundtable discussion among a panel of government officials, transportation professionals, and civic leaders--was a presentation entitled "Multimodal Investment Needs & Goals for the Future" in print and Power Point formats.

Basically, the presentation is a pitch for additional transportation funding from the Feds. The goals are to accommodate significant projected local population growth, and to respond more aggressively to seriously deteriorated infrastructure and inadequate public transit services statewide.

PA? MTA?––NOT!

The presentation, delivered by NYSDOT commissioner Astrid C. Glynn and New York Metropolitan Transportation Council Executive Director Joel Ettinger, included the rather startling announcement that the presentation did not include consideration of the services, facilities or operations of either the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, or the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA).

Huh? Why invite the public, when the transportation services we use most are outside the bounds of consideration and, thus, discussion?

Following the presentation there was a completely unfocused and inconclusive roundtable which kept returning to the possible impacts, pro and con, of Congestion Pricing; and the public health disaster that is the Cross Bronx Expressway. If not for the commentary of Jonathan Peters, College of Staten Island Associate Professor of Finance--probably the most informed spokesperson for progressive transportation policy in the borough--the forum could as easily have been held in Far Rockaway or Spuyten Duyvil.

ABSTRACTIONS PREFERRED

And when it came time for the public to speak at this public forum, we were instructed not to address specific projects or policy matters but to speak only in the sort of broad, abstract terms--think 'multi-modal,' 'regional' and 'statewide'--NYSDOT used in its presentation. I spoke of the need for a truly functional Staten Island transportation system--adding that such a system can come about only if we stop thinking of Staten Island mass transit as a commuter service.

One panelist checked her watch. Another barely stifled a yawn. I know there's a lesson here, somewhere . . .

The Walker, Out of Hibernation At Last

WHEN IT'S MORE LIKE FLYING

That's the critical difference warm(er) weather makes. The distance you bridge on foot, the time you take to get there, the destination itself--all are secondary to the delight you feel as you take to the streets and peel them back, one by one, until you achieve a pace and a rhythm that seem like preparations for lift-off. In the end, you're almost disappointed to get where, after all, you were going.

That's what happened last night. I was off to a dance class, fully prepared to steel myself against the wind and the cold, et voila!: no wind, no cold. Instead, warmer temperatures and a soft breeze whose effects I didn't have to hunker down to ward off. I passed through the same dark and utterly deserted streets as I do every Monday night, but last night the streets weren't bleak and depressing, somehow. In any case, they didn't matter; I was flying.

Today, in intermittent rain, I walked about six miles, some of it fairly hilly, and the experience was the same. Joyous. On this gray, damp day, my walk felt at one point like dance and at another, like flight.

State DOT Public Forum on Staten Island Transportation Needs Tomorrow (Wednesday) Night

DON'T BLAME ME

If you're exasperated, as I am, at having to scramble your schedule, with one day's notice, in order to attend what could be an important public hearing, let me assure you, I know the feeling well. Happens all the time.

It's 6:10 p.m. as I write this; the announcement e-mail was received here only hours earlier, at 3:15 p.m. I'm grateful to the Campaign for New York for informing me; I would have heard nothing otherwise.

Here's the e-mail message in its entirety. I will attend and hope as many Staten Islanders as possible will join me.

------------------------------------

NYSDOT TO HOLD PUBLIC FORUM
ON TRANSPORTATION NEEDS IN NEW YORK CITY

Public Meeting and Roundtable Discussion to Focus on Traffic Congestion

New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) Commissioner Astrid C. Glynn will host a forum Wednesday, March 5, in [sic] Staten Island to focus attention on transportation needs in New York City over the next 20 years.

The forum will bve held in the Williamson Theatre at the Center for the Arts, College of Staten Island, 2800 Victory Boulevard. The public meeting will be from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

The forum will focus attention on the next authorization of Federal Transportation programs that fund almost half of New York's transportation investments in highways and transit. Commissioner Glynn will oen the public session with a presentation on NYSDOT's 20-Year Needs Assessment and 5-Year Capital Program.

New York Metropolitan Transportation Council Executive Director Joel Ettinger will then follow with an assessment of local impacts. A roundtable discussion by New York transportation experts will then expand on these issues, with a spotlight on the subject of traffic congestion. The panel will be moderated by NYSDOT Chief Engineer Robert Dennison.

Participants include:

•Daniel Albert, President, Queens Independent Living Center; •Linda Baran, President and CEO, Staten Island Chamber of Commerce; •Majora Carter, Executive Director, Sustainable South Bronx; •Cate Contino, Campaign Coordinator, NYPIRG Straphangers Campaign; •Allison de Cerreno, Director, NYU-Wagner Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management; •David Ewing, Eastern Regional Conference, Council of State Governments; •John Galgano, President, CommuterLink ride-matching service; •Josephine Infante, Executive Director, Hunts Point Economic Development Corporation; •Gary LaBarbara, President, Teamsters Joint Council 16; •James McGowan, Honorary Director, New York State division, Automobile Association of America; •Jonathan Peters, Associate Professor of Finance, College of Staten Island; •Sam Schwartz, NY Daily News columnist and president and CEO, Sam Schwartz PLLC.

The roundtable will be followed by a public comment session, giving attendees an opportunity to have a dialogue with the panlists, have questions answered, and raise locally significant transportation issues.

The campus can be reached via several MTA bus routes, including the S62/S92, S61/S91, S44/S94 and S59.

For Barack Obama: The Part I Left Out

WHY OBAMA AND NOT CLINTON

In the preceding entry, I explained my decision to support Barack Obama as a strategic one. But I didn't bother to explain the strategy or describe how it came about. Sorry about that.

That strategy--a decision, really--solidified after I watched a group of video interviews conducted among voters of both parties following the maverick Florida primaries. I'd read and heard negative comments about Hillary before, but nothing like the venom spewed by a number of the male Republicans interviewed.

I concluded the depth of Hillary hatred isn't something Democrats should waste our time pondering or countering. I determined then that I would support Hillary Clinton if she won the nomination but would cast my primary vote for another candidate.

That 'other' candidate, originally John Edwards, was Barack Obama.