At long last... The Tour

Distance Traveled: 54.43 miles


AAAAAMAZING!!!!! The Bike New York 5 Borough Bike Tour was phenomenal event that I would do again in a heartbeat, even with the deluge.

I woke up at 5AM after about 3 hours of sleep and left at 6AM. Several people I had run into during my travels the day before encouraged me to skip the starting lineup because of the congestion. I still wanted to get a sense of what 30,00 people looks like, so I headed down to Battery Park. On my way down, Broadway, more and more bikers started flowing onto the road around me, all of them with the same flappy green tour vest. The Park was a buzz with activity, but there certainly were not 30,00 people there. I was directed up to city hall where the starting line-up took place. The picture on the right is what I saw. The crazy thing was that this was early. The tour didn't start for another hour, and already thousands of people had arrived.

Afterward, I headed west to the downtown Marriott Hotel so I could meet Bruno Suraci...

Time for a quick tangent: Three weeks before the race, I realized i had not received my tour vest, so I called the Bike New York office to find out if they could resend it. while I was on the phone, the gentleman informed me that I had a cousin in the race. I went through the list in my head: Let's see, all of them are way to young, he would never do this, he's not into biking, and she wouldn't go down to the city alone... Who could this be? The man told me his name was Bruno Suraci. I frantically began demanding his information, which may have been slightly suspicious, but I knew he wouldn't be able to give me his info anyway. I had my mom look him up, and she found all of the contact information. Then on Friday I called him and set up a time to meet him and his friend Ralph at his hotel the following day. Turns out that our families are indeed from the same region in Italy. I also noted that he looks like my late grandfather, Anthony Suraci. In conclusion we're related somehow. On our way to the restaurant, we saw all of the bikes lined up for rental [depicted right].


Back to Sunday: Bruno, Ralph and I headed up the Hudson River Greenway about five or six blocks and then cut over to 6th. There we waited for the police motorcycles to role by. The entire route was blocked off by the NYPD, all the way down to Staten Island. It was really impressive. We weren't the only one's who chose to join the tour slightly ahead of the mass. There were a ton of other people waiting up where we were. Actually, all the way up to Central Park I saw people on the sidewalk who merged in with the tour. Once the cops rode by I shot off like a bullet, eager to experience New York from a perspective that doesn''t come around very often. One of my major themes in this project is how cycling alters peoples' (both riders and observers) perceptions of the urban environment. How fitting that the race gives people a chance to experience New York without cars (along the route at least).

It was a phenomenal feeling, zooming through the middle of the street, worrying only about passing cyclists around me; not having to keeping my fingers firmly poised just above my break levers. Once we got to Central Park, we hit our first real down hills. For whatever reason the Marshals kept telling us (me in particular) to slow down. The rest of the ride north was pretty familiar to me until we got to the Madison Avenue Bridge. We were forced to stop here, so that the "VIP registrants" could catch up and move ahead. Hey, if you can't keep up, why pay $300 extra to be at the front of the line? While we waited I chatted with a bunch of people behind me about my project. Though from Connecticut, they found the idea really interesting. I also recommended some places for them to ride in the city. We exchanged cameras to take pictures and then the race began again (I have this weird habit of calling it a race; I'm not sure what that's about). As you may have noticed from the map above, we were in the Bronx for all of 10 minutes. I haven't had a chance to explore the Bronx in detail, but I have heard plenty of negative stereotypes. he question is whether or not the Race is perpetuating them or not, or if this was simply the best route for the tour. I'm not quite sure. I intend to ask the folks at Bike New York why they choose to bypass the Robert F. Kennedy (tribourough) bridge (which could have taken us straight from the Bronx to Queens... actually the bridge runs directly over Astoria Park where we had to stop). Once we were back in Manhattan we headed to the Queensbourough Bridge. This is a perfect example of altered perceptions. as you know from the day before, I took the QB Bridge walkway into Queens on my way to Roosevelt Island. Today however, we took the main Eastbound roadway on the upper deck [depicted left]. Now this was amazingly cool, not only because I like bridges, but also because I got to experience the same structure in two completely different ways. I was also cool to see the framework whizzing by. We took the same route up to Astoria that I had taken the day before. Since this was a mandatory stop I got a real sense of how many people were doing this. Bikers flowed in for the next half hour and it got crowded very quickly [depicted right]. There was all kinds of free food, including thousands of bananas, oranges, these really good energy water drink things, and some sort of unfried chip. I stocked up and then awaited the race to begin again. The photograph on the left was taken as we waited to leave. I actually submitted it for the Bike New York photo Contest with the title "Comradery Over the Handlebars."

We continued by heading south, back towards the QB Bridge and then farther south into Brooklyn. This is when the rain started to pick up. I liked it! I don't know what anybody else was thinking, but it was fun. The journey down through Brooklyn was kind of bland because we were on the Gowanus Expressway most of the time. There, again is another example of the difference between cycling and driving through a city. In a car, some of the infrastructure is designed to remove you from the urban environment in the interest of expedience. The trade off to this extra speed, however, is a loss in terms of what one perceives around them. Instead of tall buildings and diverse people, one is confined to concrete dividers and repetitious white dotted lines.


As the Verrazano Bridge faded into view, I new that the most challenging, yet rewarding part of the ride was coming. Completed in 1964, The Verrazano Narrows bridge was the longest suspension bridge in the world for 17 years. This bridge is so long, that the two towers are actually angled slightly to match the curvature of the Earth. Unfortunately it does not have any sort of pedestrian walkway or bike lane. This was the first time I was seeing it in person, which is kind of a big deal considering my feelings about bridges. This marks the last of New York's great bridges for me to see (I don't count the Bronx Whitestone and the Throngs neck just because they are no where near central New York and have never broken any records). Just before the entrance ramp was cannonball park [depicted right]. I hope I don't have to go over why it has that name. I began the ascent of the 4,260 foot span and shifted into a lower gear to make the ride a little easier. The tour ran on the westbound side of the lower deck. Occasionally water would spill down from the upper deck through cracks like a waterfall, and of course I would ride straight through them (I was already saturated, why not?).

When I made landfall in Staten Island, I headed directly for the celebratory festival. The ride was complete. At this point, I was pressed for time, so I could not stay very long. I wish I could have gotten one of those free massages, but oh well. Technically there was another three miles to ride for the ferry back to Manhattan. They let us load directly onto the ferry, which was crammed. I biked back to Union square after landing in Manhattan. I literally only had enough time to change my shirt and shorts (not the shoes though), grab the rest of my stuff and head to the train. luckily I caught a Q express to 34th and barley made the train. When I got back to my apartment in Philly I literally had to cut the shoes of my feet. I immediately took a shower and then went to work on a group project. What a crazy day!

I biked a total of 103.9 miles, and saw a wide diversity of places. I met a new family member, and learned things about the city which I never knew before. I went to those places which I had only previously read about. This was an extremley productive, fun trip, and I look forward to my next weekend adventure.