If you’re ever in Brooklyn, why not take the Greenway? You can bike, walk, roll or run along the coast from Newtown Creek (opposite the UN building in Manhattan) right down to Coney Island and back up to John F. Kennedy Airport. It’s a great way to see some of the borough’s unique attractions: the bridges, the skyline, the parks, vibrant neighborhoods, wildlife (yes, it exists!) and the people. What’s more, everything you see suggests some aspect of local history. After a few miles, you see a picture that is variously inspiring, disturbing and just plain interesting.
In this post, I’ll take you most of the way along the East River and down to the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. To be honest, the Greenway is still incomplete. The map below shows the completed parts in green; the still-to-be finished parts are in red.
Greenpoint to Williamsburg Bridge
I start from Transmitter Park. One of the most striking things about this small park is the huge mural of a girl picking petals off a daisy, a frog at her side. The image was created by FAILE (Patrick McNeill and Patrick Miller), who wanted to dramatize the relationship we have with nature. As one of the first species to be affected by localized climate change and pollution, the frog’s life depends on the girl’s (i.e. our) decision.
The park is the former site of one of New York’s oldest radio stations, WNYC, whose AM signal was broadcast from here from 1937 to 1990. Fiorella La Guardia recorded his program Talk to the People here, and from 1940 to 1980 the station broadcast an annual American Music Festival featuring the likes of Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Benny Goodman.
Moving south along Kent Avenue, pass alongside Bushwick Inlet, which is currently a fenced-off no man’s land. After that I get to Williamsburg, another built-up area, with high-rises, shops and restaurants. The narrow sidewalks fill with dawdling sun-lovers and dog-walkers. As soon as possible, I take a road right, to the coast. This is North 5th Street Pier and Park, a landscaped area with plenty of seating for ferry passengers or those who want to get some fresh air.
Escaping from this park, you only need to run along a short stretch of River Street to get to Grand Ferry Park and Domino Park. This is named for an old sugar refinery and features two old port cranes, an elevated walkway, a playground, beach volleyball, bocce court, taco stand and dog run. It is a place where young people come to sunbathe, read, do hot yoga, shadow box, shoot the breeze and meditate.
Williamsburg Bridge to Dumbo
Once we get to Williamsburg Bridge, it’s time to leave the parkscape and get back onto Kent Avenue. This stretch is something of a slog as it involves careful negotiation along sidewalks narrowed by construction girders and garbage bags. Handpainted murals advertise Uber food delivery, Polo shirts, inclusive make-up brands and supportive underwear.
When I emerge from the commercial section into the Orthodox Jewish residential neighborhood, it’s a relief because now I know the Greenway is unbroken for a couple of miles. Besides, I find it interesting to look at the people and religious markers in the neighborhood: the Hebrew lettering on the schoolbuses, ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ playground and the big synagogue. It feels almost like I am drifting through a different country.
The costume is followed very strictly in these few blocks. The men wear long black trenchcoats over black trousers and white shirts and black vests. On their heads they either wear wide-brimmed black hats or giant fur hats called shtreimel. Incidentally, the black brimmed hat is often called a borsalino after a kind of felt hat formerly produced by the Borsalino family in the town of Alessandria in Piedmont. The women tend to wear long black skirts and long-sleeved blouses, or long dresses, with flat shoes. Married women cover their hair with scarves or hats or a sheitel, which is a kind of wig.
At this point I can’t see the river because there’s a big movie-studio fortress in the way. Steiner Studios is fenced around with shipping containers piled up three containers high. According to its website, it’s a giant production factory whose clients included Joker, Ninja Turtles and The Wolf of Wall Street. These studios occupy a part of what used to be the Brooklyn Navy Yard, America’s most important ship-building facility from 1801 to 1966.
Turning towards Flushing Avenue, there is an inviting green area on my right. This is the Naval Cemetery Landscape, a meadow-park intended to raise the number of native plants and pollinators in the area. It’s built on the site of the former Navy Hospital Cemetery, where more than 2,000 people were buried. Most of these were officers and enlisted men of the US Navy and Marine Corps. In 1926 about half of those interred here were transferred to Cypress Hills National Cemetery, but plenty of souls remain buried here. For that reason, the park’s creators have built raised wooden walkways so the hallowed ground won’t be unduly disturbed. One of the men buried here was the (headless) body of Roko Logavatu Veidovi (1802-1842), a Fijian chief brought to New York by Charles Wilkes. The story of Veidovi’s capture, voyage and death is worth reading and you can find it here.
Once I turn onto Flushing Avenue, I’m on a busy city street again. On my right is the huge Navy Yard, which has been repurposed for things even aside from the movie-production studio.
At Navy Street I turn right and go up past a Wegman’s and an NYPD towing yard. Yesterday a woman was standing outside the guard booth talking into her cellphone, “Get off the weed and get a job. I’ll call you later.” On other days I’ve seen impressive yelling matches and other scenes of frustration. If you want to hear a Brooklynite cursing and sputtering authentically like in the movies, then arrange to get his car towed.
Up the hill, there’s a big mural honoring the history of the Navy Yard, particularly the African American ship-builders whose labor powered the place for decades.
Around the corner from this is a funny little neighborhood called Vinegar Hill with cobbled streets and a closed-off feel. One daycare center on Hudson Avenue is run by people with an artsy bent. They’ve built an aesthetically pleasing garden fashioned from junk: a tennis racquet, a doll, a wooden chair, a raised sandpit and various other items. Today I noticed a new addition: a rubber ducky wearing the tiara of the Statue of Liberty.
DUMBO to Red Hook
Coming down off Vinegar Hill, I immediately find myself in DUMBO, an acronym meaning Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. This area has New York’s highest concentration of technology firms and is, not uncoincidentally, rather gentrified.
The jewel in Dumbo’s crown is, of course, the Manhattan Bridge. Underneath it is something called ‘The Archway’, just a cool area that’s become an event space for everything from flea markets to music concerts. On Water street is Gleason’s Gym, the oldest boxing gym in New York. Mohammed Ali and Mike Tyson both trained there.
From Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn Bridge it’s a five-minute jog through crowds of happy tourists. Past French bakeries, designer shoe stores, art installations and St. Anne’s Theater, past icecream parlors, food trucks, french bulldogs and (surprisingly) a Covid vaccination tent, it’s a trip through mini Manhattan.
Now I navigate the big, long green-space that stretches the length of five old piers. This is a beautiful area planted with all kinds of trees and flowers. Pier 2 has been converted into a kind of semi-outdoor sporting complex with basketball courts, a bocce court, kayak rental and a roller rink. Further on, around Pier 5 there’s even a barbecue area provided if you want to sit by the water looking at the Manhattan skyline and have a picnic lunch.
Just around the bend the Greenway continues along the Columbia Street Waterfront District, which is really just the bottom of Cobble Hill. A quick Google tells me Cobble Hill was a used as a fort during both the American War of Independence and the War of 1812. Other notable facts: Winston Churchill’s mother was born in a rented flat in this district, and Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz own a townhouse there. To me, as I move along Columbia Street, it seems like a pretty nice place, with an independent bookstore, several crafty shops and a distinctive sort of architecture consisting of old brown-brick houses.
Columbia street is soon interrupted by a big arterial cluster of roads (collectively Interstate 478) that head into Manhattan via the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel. As a result of this obstacle, I follow the horseshoe-shaped Woodhull street around to where Columbia street starts again. The curve takes me past Brooklyn Motor Inn, which has some interesting clientele–a woman with gold eyeshadow, a scrawny old couple with American-flag hats, a shady looking guy smoking a cigar. It was also the spot where I saw this ultra-stretch limo for sale. There was a spot of rust on the driver’s door.
At the big police station on the corner of Columbia, I turn right and so enter Red Hook. This is the land of “projects”–publically supported and administered housing for families on low incomes. It is the largest public housing complex in Brooklyn. Red Hook was formerly home to NBA star Carmelo Anthony, writer James McBride (The Good Lord Bird), director Matty Rich and Shabazz the Disciple.
A lot of the buildings and adjacent ball-playing fields were built on top of a former lead smelting site. These fields were only closed due to contamination in 2012 and clean-up operations (removal of topsoil) is still going on. Lead poisoning is not only a risk from the ground, though, it’s also a danger in the apartments themselves.
This is because the apartments were originally licked with lead paint and some of them still are. Despite long-standing laws requiring landlords to inspect apartments for lead levels, the New York City Housing Authority secretly stopped doing this in 2012 instead, they got officials to sign off on apartments they had not actually inspected. Sherron Paige is one of the victims of this shocking malpractice. Because a licensed supervisor for the New York City Housing Authority falsely declared her apartment was free of lead paint, she didn’t know her son was growing up in a dangerous environment. When a doctor told her her young son had extremely high levels of lead in his blood, it was too late to stop its effects on his development. At least 18 other children in the apartments have been lead poisoned, and no one has yet been prosecuted.
Sunset Park to Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge
When I reach the big IKEA at the southern end of Red Hook, I turn left and make for the mouth of Gowanus Canal. Now I’m Sunset Park, a neighborhood whose coastal zone is pretty much a concrete industrial blob, though with the beginnings of gentrification at the edges. There’s a big Fed Ex Facility, a Home Depot, a few warehouses, a concrete works. Then there are small establishments selling pet food, car washes, scrap metal. There are even a few antiquated places advertising ‘Peep Show’ booths and porno VCRS — something that will probably be obsolete in a few years.
After a mile I get to the Metropolitan Detention Center, a massive building that always awes and appalls me. Sometimes I hear shouting from inside and imagine it’s a riot, though it may just as well be a game of basketball. Over the years, the prison has become notorious as reports of wardens beating and raping prisoners have leaked out. In 2018 the electricity went off in mid-winter and inmates spent a week in freezing conditions. A former warden has said (in the cautious legalese peculiar to Americans speaking to the press) that, in his opinion, “the M.D.C. was one of the most troubled, if not the most troubled facility in the Bureau of Prisons.”
Opposite the prison is a construction site surrounded by a temporary wall. There, relatives of the inmates have pasted pathetic hand-made posters that made to assure their people that they are still loved.
Right next to the prison, by some diabolical logic, is a Prime Amazon facility where delivery drivers collect neat little paper bags. Ironically, or deliberately, the warehouse where these deliveries are prepared looks almost exactly like the prison.
Just a couple of blocks onwards I pass ‘Industrial City.’ This is a collection of old factory buildings that are in the process of being converted into hip new outlet stores, boutique industries, tech start-ups and the like. It has a bit of a grim feel despite the colorful paint.
From here, I travel along 2nd Avenue for several blocks. This is admittedly a chore because it’s usually hot and there are plenty of side-streets so you have to be alert for traffic, which sometimes roars down from the hill. Highlights on this stretch include the NYU Langone Hospital and the giant Army Terminal.
At Wakeman Place I turn right and descend down to Owl’s Head Park, interesting for its skateboarders, basketballers and dogs, and right down to the American Veteran’s Memorial Pier, which is right next to Owls Head Wastewater Treatment Plant. This is where one of my favorite parts begins, the Shore Road Promenade. On this scenic section you can see people fishing, brant geese, cormorants, container ships coming into the East River, and you can sea and smell the sea coming from the Lower Bay. The most spectacular part of this section is the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, which spans the gap between Fort Hamilton and Fort Wadsworth.
When it was finished in 1964, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world. Now it is the 17th longest. It was named for the explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine in the service of Francis I of France who was the first European to explore the Atlantic coast of America. On the first of three expeditions, he sailed into New York Bay and encountered the Lenape Indians. The bridge’s name was misspelled as ‘Verrazano-Narrows’ until Governor Cuomo officially amended the typo in 2018, a reflection perhaps of his relative obscurity. Until the 1950s, most people believed the first European to come nosing around was Henry Hudson in the employ of the Dutch.
After the bridge you start getting on towards Coney Island, but that’s a subject for another post. Meanwhile, I will leave you with a picture of these herring gulls looking out to the New York-New Jersey Bight.
