Too much else that I might speak to for tonight....

Cheers,
Tom

The PATH has advertising on the same principle in the tunnel between 14th and 23rd, going north. Currently running a dull Snapple ad, but the ad for the Discovery Channel's cavemen special was pretty cool -- you got to see an enormous caveman gazing into your train.

D

The Forgotten New York site doesn't do full justice to the Ballardian weirdness of Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. It was NYC's first municipal airport. Now it's nearly deserted. I've ridden my bicycle through its hangars, in one end and out the other, in one of them pausing to loop around the huge disassembled airplane engine lying on the ground. Even stranger are the runways themselves, which are now pathways through stands of sumac and other beachfront vegetation. There are dunes on some of them. It's a very odd place.

Just to top off the weirdness, for some years now it's been the site of the Kings County Fair. I don't know whose idea it was to teach Brooklynites about holding county fairs, but last time I went to one, the Intro to Line Dancing seemed to be going over pretty well. I thought it was a shame that the organizers hadn't gone for genuinely regional events -- awards for raising the biggest cockroach, say, or for the best tomatoes grown in a window box.

I'll calm down now.

I'm not crazy! I'm not crazy! It was there! Yay!

I have doubted my sanity for years after glimpsing that on a pass through that station... and was too afraid that I really was nuts to go back until just recently, and of course that whole area is refurbished.

Bless you! You have restored my faith in my poor little overtaxed brain.

The light rail line that links Portland with the airport has a station, Mt. Hood Avenue, that's been complete (drop-off area, landscaping, neat-clean platform and shelters) for at least the year I've lived in the area. The trains STOP there, but the doors don't open. There are no businesses or residences nearby, and no obvious roads to the site.

Rumor has it that the contractor that built the line -- some outfit named, awww what was it, Halliburton -- owns the land in the area around the stop. Someday Portland's sprawl will reach it.

In the mean-time . . . wouldn't it give Halloween-night Red Line riders a thrill to look out the windows on at lonely, desolate Mt. Hood Avenue station and see a lone commuter -- dressed in a business suit, carrying a brief case -- standing at the platform? One with no face?

The sub-sub-basement of the NY Public Library is the bottom of the old Reservoir. For instance.

Tappan's novel Downtown has more true things in it than many people know.

For shame.

www.straphangers.org

Home to the worlds largest mass transit advocacy campaign, up to date information, and continually updating evaluations of everything mass transit in NYC.

And besides - we sued the MTA over that bullshit fare hike.

Thats gotta count for something, right?

I am peased to be able to link to you at City Comforts Blog.

Beth, I've always assumed there was a lot of true stuff in Tappan's book. I think you told me as much not long after I started working at Tor.

Robert, I think the man just plain didn't like people and cities and street life; thus the elevated freeways. My favorite weird fact about him is that he never learned to drive.

Keith, Straphangers was one of the links I was staring at blearily when I said I had to stop. Like the city itself, websites about NYC don't quite go on forever, they just feel like they do; and if you have the stamina to hack your way through to the end, you'll find that all sorts of new stuff has sprung up behind you.

I have to show this to my father...

The PATH has advertising on the same principle in the tunnel between 14th and 23rd, going north. Currently running a dull Snapple ad

Hey, *I* thought it was cool. Of course, I was sleep-deprived. :->

Thats better I guess.

Straphangers may be non partisan, but I'm partisan about the Straphangers.

Why, as any player of Mornington Crescent can tell you, it's a Foetal Ghost.

What's that? Mornington Crescent? Oh, you don't want to know...

In our quaint subculture, of course, we play a variant known as The Number of the Beast.

(A particularly masterful round of Mornington Crescent may be found in a certain chapter of China Mieville's King Rat. Speaking of the undersides of great cities.)

At least it makes a change from the "Couplings" theme song.

Mitch "perhaps perhaps perhaps" Wagner

Not to mention all the discussion of London's secret underground tunnels in the case of war.

Thanks!

A couple small addendums:

In Paris on Friday evenings at 10, thousands of rollerbladers meet up in Montparnasse and cruise the city. They roll quietly by, with the buzzing and whirring of wheels, the occasional shout from a skater, and traffic at a standstill. Now *that's* owning the city.

Here in New York, note the existence of Critical Ass, the underwear-only bicycle ride based upon the critical mass bicycling movement, in turn based upon natural human self-herding among Chinese pedallers.

If we get a stadium on the West side, we may also get the 7 train extended. If we get the 2012 Olympics, they will both happen, as will a LaGuardia subway link, and the extension which will bring Long Island trains into Grand Central.

Second Avenue Subway, LIRR access to Grand Central Terminal, a Cross-Harbor rail freight tunnel, and a second commuter rail tunnel connecting New Jersey and Manhattan

I have an idea. How about we extend the 7 train, link the subway system to La Guardia and Kennedy, give the LIRR access to Grand Central, build the Second Avenue line and a couple of new harbor tunnels, rebuild the Gowanus as a limited-access underground freeway, and skip hosting the Olympics?

The proposal to have NYC host the games is just demented. I can't believe anyone honestly thinks it's a good idea. The only reason I can see to dishonestly push it is that it would force the city to create a lot more surface-traffic vascular capacity in an area where big-money developers want to do big things.

What the TSTC says is true: adding that many parking spaces to the city would mean more people would drive instead of taking mass transit, increasing the traffic load throughout the city. Freeways and parking spaces are the original "If you build it, they will come."

This is a crowded city. We don't need to spend all that space putting in a huge egotistical sports arena that won't interact with the neighborhoods around it. We need small-scale housing and retail, and schools and parks for the population thereof, and businesses that generate jobs.

Did you ever hear of someone wanting to build a giant sports arena right next door to the place where he lives?

Kevin, we're going to have to replace the monstrosity sooner or later, and it's going to be massively expensive no matter what. We might as well get something decent out of it.

TNH: Vicki, we tend to forget that that disease turns up here, too.

I don't know about you, Teresa, but to my eye and ear, the thing that stands out like a sore thumb as different is "prostitution," not "bubonic plague."

The streets were built up first, so pedestrians had to climb ladders - in some places twenty or so feet tall - to cross streets. There's an anecdote about a horse stepping from the street to the sidewalk and breaking its neck.

Teresa, thanks for the fascinating material! I only visited NY once, back in 1976, for a few hours between planes. I spent most of it walking around and marveling at how many ethnicities were packed into so few blocks.

(c) was the only intended side-effect, of course.