NYC Bike City? Not Quite

In theory New York City should be one of the best places in America to be a bike rider. No unduly severe hills, because of the population density things tend to be close enough together to make bike commuting realistic for most people, there are bridges with dedicated bike paths connecting most of the boroughs, and you can take your bike on trains and ferries when there aren't.

There are two big factors mitigating against the city being a biker's paradise, however, the first being the weather, which makes bicycling downright unpleasant if not completely impractical for several months of the year, and the second being the ungodly car traffic, bad enough in its own right, but even worse when frustrated drivers react to the constant snarl-ups by bending, breaking and shattering not only the highway code but the basic premises of civilized decorum.

Despite New York's much-vaunted and mostly merited reputation as one of the most pleasant and polite cities of its size, most of this civility goes straight out the window when people get behind the wheels of their cars and try to navigate them through streets that were already overcrowded back in the days of horses and buggies. It's always puzzled me why Giuliani's zero-tolerance campaign was never extended to include automobile drivers, who are among the most anti-social and dangerous offenders still at large in this city.

But it wasn't, and while a culture of tolerance and patience has in large measure replaced the culture of aggression and hostility that used to characterize pedestrian and public transit life, the culture of the horn-honking, corner-cutting, red light-ignoring motorist seems as strong as ever. True, cars usually will wait for pedestrians if they have the right of way - albeit grudgingly and IF they see them - whereas they used to aim for them, but even that measure of patience vanishes when it comes to bicyclists.

It's sometimes hard to have sympathy for bicyclists, since their own arrogant disregard for traffic laws or even common sense often makes them as big a threat to pedestrians as cars are, but based on the few times I've ridden in Manhattan and the many times in Brooklyn, I understand why bicyclists might have a mindset so defensive that it threatens to spill over into the offensive at times. This NY Times article illustrates just one of the problems; another, that keeps me constantly in terror when riding busy streets, is that of parked drivers obliviously opening car doors, leaving me the choice of crashing headlong into them or veering wildly into the traffic lane without having had the opportunity to check whether it's already occupied.

The ideal solution would of course be dedicated bicycle lanes all over the city, separated Dutch-style by barriers that keep cars from impinging on them. And given my feelings about cars in the city, I wouldn't mind closing off all sorts of streets to cars altogether and putting in a round-the-clock congestion charge that would REALLY discourage suburbanite/outer borough people from needlessly driving into town.

But the unfortunate reality is that because of the weather, bike lanes, no matter how well and safely constructed, would be woefully under-utilized during the winter months, and I could hardly blame car drivers for being angry and frustrated at the sight of so much concrete going to waste while they sit in horrendous traffic. I suppose the only equitable solution would involve removable barriers that could allow cars to use the bike lanes during the winter or a dome over the city that would provide us with perfect bike-riding weather all year round. Personally, I'd vote for the latter, and if any of you have the ear of the Mayor, I'd appreciate you giving this plan a mention.

Private Splendor, Public Squalor

I don't have many complaints about New York, and in general, I think it's headed in the right direction. I know, I know, people assure me that if I stick around long enough I'll have plenty to complain about, but so far so good.

For the most part. However, when I went for a swim at Brighton Beach last week, followed by a walk up the boardwalk to Coney Island, I couldn't help feeling this was an area where the city could do better. Lots better.

Many people don't know it, but New York City has some pretty spectacular beaches. Maybe not the equal of Ipanema or Bondi, but there are miles of beautiful sand, water that's just about the perfect temperature for swimming (well, for a couple months of the year, anyway), and when the heat of mid-summer descends upon us, you'd need only a few palm trees to complete the illusion of a subtropical paradise.

Well, except for a few minor details. The Parks Department (assuming they're the ones in charge) does a creditable job of cleaning the sands, but cigarette butts and broken glass still get dumped there faster than it can get picked up. But what are you going to do? Millions of people use the beaches, and it's probably too much to expect them all to be civilized.

But what's really missing are the most basic facilities. I haven't been to Rio, but at any fair-sized beach in Sydney, there'll be at the very least a changing room and a concession stand; about the best New York has to offer is some truly rank public toilets.

I discovered this when I decided to change back into my street clothes for the trip back to town (I'd worn my swim suit under my clothes when I came to the beach). I walked over a mile and a half without finding a single place to do so. If worse came to worst, I thought, at least I could change inside one of the toilets, but many of them had "No Undressing" signs, and the others were so tiny and so squalid that you wouldn't want to remain inside of them any longer than absolutely necessary.

I finally found one large public toilet near Coney Island that people were using as a changing room, but it clearly wasn't designed to be one, even though there was plenty of space if it had only been laid out sensibly. What was even more ridiculous was that New Yorkers (who knew?) are apparently an extraordinarily modest lot: whereas in Sydney, people would have simply dropped their drawers and got on with dressing or undressing (hell, in many cases they'd do it right out in the beaches, about half of which are clothing optional anyway); here they stood around grimly and shamefacedly waiting for the handful of toilet cubicles to open up.

And what a grim experience it proved to be when you finally got inside one: nowhere to set your things down except on a filthy toilet or on a floor awash in liquids of indeterminate origin, and barely enough room to move, let alone wriggle one leg at a time out of your trunks and into your jeans. Next time I think I'll just ride back to the city in a wet swim suit rather than face that prospect again.

And on an only slightly related note: what's up with the museums? $20 "suggested donation" to get into the Metropolitan, and the MOMA doesn't even bother with suggestions: it's just plain $20 or get lost.

Now we all know that New York is an expensive city, but those kind of fees necessarily preclude all but tourists and the middle and upper classes from experiencing one of the greatest cultural resources in the world. When I was a kid, our family had very little money, but several times a year my dad would pile the whole family into whatever old jalopy he could keep running at the time and haul us down to the Detroit Art Institute or Historical Museum. The cost? Zilch, nothing, nada. It was totally free, and I don't think it's overstating the case to say that that fact helped change my life.

Those visits helped establish a lifelong habit, but more importantly, gave me the first inkling that there was another world possible beyond the grim belching smokestacks that might otherwise have circumscribed my Detroit existence. After I left home, no matter if I was dead broke or even homeless, I'd still stop in at the museums, sometimes to immerse myself in culture, sometimes because it was the only place that was warm. Sometimes I'd spend the day; other times I'd walk in for a quick 10 or 15 minute breather, a refresher course in what it meant to be human.

All that changed when the authorities in their wisdom decided that society could no longer afford free museums. There were discount plans, sure, and one or two days a month when the great unwashed were still allowed in free, but they were missing the point: that the people who often needed museums most were those who couldn't or wouldn't rustle up fifty or a hundred bucks to take the family on an outing, and who might never set foot in one unless it was there and available for free on a regular basis.

I can safely say that if museums had been charging the 1950s and 60s equivalent of $20 a head when I was a kid, I might have visited them once or twice if I was lucky, rather than the literally hundreds of times I did. And my life would have been infinitely poorer for it.

It's worth mentioning that one of the few unmitigated triumphs of New Labour in Britain has been to do away with all admission fees to state museums. All it took was a relatively minor redirection of tax money, and suddenly kids from families like mine were again able to wander at will among the treasures of the ages. And if Britain can afford to do this, how is it possible that New York and other American cities can not? At a time when New York City is growing richer by the minute, possibly richer than any city in the entire history of humankind has ever been, it's not just ridiculous, it's practically obscene that we can't afford such simple amenities.

Biking To Gilman

So there I was in Berkeley for the first time in a few years without access to a car. True, I never drove all that much when I did have a car, but there were certain destinations - and especially certain times of night - when using public transportation was a miserable and/or impossible prospect.

Remind me, while I'm on the subject, never ever to complain about the New York City subway again. After a couple days of depending on the Bay Area Toonerville Trolley, misleadingly known as Bay Area "Rapid Transit," it was easy to see why the streets of Berkeley and Frisco are largely deserted at night. It's just not worth the hassle of going out.

It used to be that while you had to wait a long time between trains (but hey, what's your hurry, there's nowhere to go anyway, so you might as well just kick back, smoke another joint and munch on some sautéed bean sprouts), but at least BART kept to a schedule, which, if you weren't too stoned to figure it out, meant you could generally show up at the station just in time for a train. No longer, though; in its ongoing crusade to punish the people of the Bay Area for being such gullible dupes, BART has now taken to canceling trains without notice and leaving people hanging out on the station platform for up to half an hour, by which time many of them could have walked where they were going. Except of course that they've already paid to get in the station and there are no refunds.

It used to be that you could take a train straight to San Francisco Airport, just like many real cities, but that made too much sense and was too easy. Now you've got to take three trains, including an 11 minute wait on the platform while other trains that are going almost but not quite to SFO pass you by. Brilliant transit planning, BART guys. Let me guess: you never actually ride the thing, do you?

At least I could get to my mom's and brother's houses in El Cerrito pretty easily. Six minutes on the train and a 10 minute walk at either end made it almost as quick as driving. But even that got a little tedious, so I decided to follow my other brother's example and ride a bike there. The last time - years ago, I must admit - I tried riding to El Cerrito I followed the same route I'd normally use if driving a car, and it was harsh: up and down some very stroppy hills. I was completely exhausted by the time I got there and ended up bringing my bike back on the BART.

But this time I thought things out a little more carefully and on doing so realized that the bicycle freeway - aka the bike path or the Ohlone Greenway - that passed near my mom's house was the same one that passed very near my Berkeley HQ, and that it was pretty much a level run all the way there.

I'd ridden the path many times before, but only as far as Gilman Street, which is what, for old times' sake, I'd done on Friday night. I was hoping to run into Jesse Luscious there, being that he'd posted on the PPMB that he might be stopping in to see Social Unrest. He didn't show up, as it turned out, but quite a few other old-timers did, including, of course, SU guitarist James Brogan, who I also knew from his days with Samiam.

Then there was Gary Gutfeld, formerly of the Hi-Fives, who seemed a semi-unlikely candidate to be playing drums for such a proto/über-punk outfit like Social Unrest, but who acquitted himself masterfully (I shouldn't be surprised, really; Luis Illades, best known for his efforts on behalf of the poppier Pansy Division and Plus ones, turned out to be a totally solid punk rock drummer when he linked up with SF's re-united Avengers).

I was thinking it must have been nearly 20 years since I'd last seen Social Unrest, and if it wasn't quite that long, it's got to have been at least 15 or 18. And while I was remarking to someone on how remarkable it was that a band could still have so much youthful punk rock energy after 25 years, it suddenly occurred to me that they've been around even longer than that, more like 27-28 years. Wow.

I was especially impressed by singer Creetin K-os, who looked and carried himself like the kind of half-glam/half-gritty rock stars who used to front punk bands back in the glory days, and of whom Operation Ivy singer Jesse Michaels once said, "Basically, I ripped off his vocal style to a major degree. If people hear Creetin K-os sing, they'll be like, 'Oh, I see where he got all his shit.'" The guy's obviously a few years older than he was when he first fronted SU, but without getting right up front and examining him closely, you'd be hard pressed to tell.

It being "punk" night at Gilman, the troglodyte element was a little more evident among the audience. Actually, there was no more than a handful of serious old-fashioned moshers trying their best to make a circle pit while simultaneously trying to slam into and knock down as many innocent bystanders as possible. One particular goombah, who couldn't have been more than 5'4" but was built like the proverbial brick shithouse, especially delighted in blindsiding and sending sprawling anyone unwise enough to let his or her eyes stray toward the stage instead of the pit.

Forgetting momentarily how old and comparatively scrawny I am, I briefly mulled over stepping into the pit and sorting him out, but fortunately sanity returned before I took any such action. Back in 1987 or 88, when I was skinnier and crazier, but also 20 years younger, I single-handedly muscled a large obstreperous skinhead out of the pit and out the front door before he or anyone else realized what was happening. I've never understood how I got away with that, unless it was simply a matter of the guy simply being in shock that he was being manhandled by a guy half his size.

Gilman being Gilman, nobody did anything about the homicidal slam dancers except grumble to themselves or surreptitiously shove back when no one was looking. It kind of reminded me of the club's attitude toward smoking: it's one of the last public places in California where people are allowed to smoke indoors, even though smokers are now a tiny minority.

It wasn't always that way: a few years back, the joint reeked with great clouds of cigarette smoke as mobs of teenagers declared their freedom from mom and dad by puffing up a storm. But for some reason, that's no longer the case, which makes it all the more obvious how one single smoker can stink up the air for a couple dozen other people nearby.

But no one would dream of telling Mr. Smoker to take it outdoors, because that wouldn't be "punk." Ah well. I had to move a few times because some clueless dink parked himself right next to me with a slow-burning and especially stinky cigarette which he then used to strike elaborate poses meant apparently to illustrate just how cool he was but, um, failed miserably. Hey, that's Gilman. You take the tacky with the ultra-cool.

Anyway, the bike ride there and back was so pleasant and easy that the next day I high-tailed it over to El Cerrito over an as yet unexplored (except on foot) stretch of the Greenway. I thought it was especially cute how at Eureka Street in EC they even had an on ramp just like car freeways, complete with a mini-sized Yield sign. Again, the ride took me about the same amount of time it would have taken if I'd traveled by BART or automobile.

Had a nice time walking around EC with my mom, but when it came time to zip back to Berkeley and then on to BART for the trip to the airport, a great foul and chilly wind had sprung up, one of those winds Frisco and the near East Bay often get this time of year that makes it feel almost worse than midwinter. It was also blowing straight in my face all the way to Berkeley, and tearing right through my flimsy little jacket that by all normal logic should have been more than adequate for the last days of May. It didn't help, either, that I'd just checked the weather back home in New York and learned that it was a sunny 88 degrees there.

I wish I could have figured out a way to pack my bike up and ship it out to NYC for something less than the $75 it originally cost me back in 1993. An amazing bike it is, too: I've done virtually nothing to maintain it, it's sat outside through over a dozen Bay Area winters, and yet with little more than some air in the tires and a smattering of oil for the gears, it ran like a charm. I can't imagine what sort of additional comfort people who spend a couple grand on a bike are getting for their money.

Unfortunately, I probably won't be able to figure out any economical way of getting the bike here to NY short of hiring a big truck to drive it and all my remaining California possessions across the country, so in the interim I guess I'll have to look for its $75 equivalent on this side of the country, because after braving the wintry gales of a Frisco "spring," the idea of cruising the hot summer streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan suddenly seems a lot more appealing.

Oh yeah, while I've always enjoyed arriving in New York after a lengthy airplane ride, it's about a hundred times better when you know you're coming home and not just for a visit. It being sunny, warm and the start of what looks to be a long and lovely summer is that much more icing on the cake.

So I Wasn't Just Imagining There Were More Dumbasses Around These Days

But really, it's no joking matter: the Chronicle reports that California's high school graduation rate has dropped to a ten year low, and that only two thirds of the state's students manage to muddle through the minimal requirements for a diploma. The picture looks much worse in major urban areas: in Los Angeles and Oakland not even half the students manage to graduate (41% and 46%, respectively). San Francisco surprisingly manages to beat the odds, with a 73% pass rate, and I say surprisingly because over the years I've come to expect any and all public institutions run by The City That Used To Know How to be corrupt and incompetent.

Frankly, I'm still inclined to suspect chicanery on the part of SFUSD: could it be that they're using dubious means to help students to beat the new state exit exam? Considering that the city routinely declares itself exempt from federal immigration laws and state laws barring racial quotas, it would hardly be shocking.

The usual suspects can be found proclaiming from their ivory towers in Backwards Land that the problem lies not in poor teachers, lousy administration, screwy curricula or sloppy/nonexistent discipline, but in the exit exam itself. Attorney John Affeldt, who's spent nearly a decade lobbying if favor of high school diplomas for illiterates, argues, "The state has not yet earned the right to impose this exit exam penalty on [students]."

Having to take a test to prove you've acquired the (very) basic skills conferred by a modern high school education is a "penalty?" The state has to "earn" the right to impose standards for a diploma? By that logic how has the state "earned" the right to require people to know how to drive (well, in theory, anyway) before they're awarded a driver's license? Isn't it horribly oppressive to expect idealistic young people to jump through years of hoops and state-mandated exams before being allowed to practice as brain surgeons?

The "all must have prizes" school of educational theory maintains that students are more or less entitled to a high school diploma if they hang around long enough on the grounds that it might damage their self-esteem if they don't receive the same recognition as students who've actually done some work. Never mind that as a result a high school diploma becomes about as significant as the gold stars awarded to kindergarteners for being quiet during nap time, and that students now have to spend four more years and tens of thousands of dollars for a college degree proving essentially what a high school diploma used to, i.e., literacy and numeracy.

New York City doesn't do any better, by the way, with a graduation rate similar to that of Oakland or LA. Considering the steadily dwindling demand for unskilled labor in this country, investors looking for growth opportunities might be well advised to consider the prison sector. California, always a national trendsetter, has already announced its own $7.4 billion expansion.

Urban Renewal

"Big Plans For Making Downtown Berkeley A Cultural Hub," says the Chronicle, which has been running a similarly headlined story semi-annually for at least 25 years now. You might question why a town with a distinguished history as "The Athens of the West," home to one of the world's great universities, and located smack in the middle of what is alleged to be a major American cosmopolis, would need to be "planning" to become a cultural hub? Shouldn't it be one by default?

Berkeley is forever coming up with plans to "restore" or "revive" or "beautify" downtown; its last stroke of genius was to cut down all the trees and replace them with saplings which, if they're lucky enough to survive 20 years of being backed into cars and being broken off by mentally deranged ferals, just might make downtown look as pleasantly shady as it was before they cut down all the old trees. That bit of "beautification" cost the city over a million bucks (they got some new paving and park benches out of it too, I think), and guess what: downtown is just as unpleasant, unlovely as ever. Vacant storefronts abound, and begging and mugging remain major industries (after 9 or 10 pm, the only ones).

What Berkeley's planners seem never to comprehend is that you can't design or plan or build your way out of a social problem. Nearly all of downtown's problems can be laid at the door of Berkeley's willingness - eagerness, even - to tolerate levels of criminal and antisocial behavior that will turn any neighborhood, no matter how nicely built or designed into an instant slum.

I'm reminded of that by The Devil's Playground: A Century Of Pleasure And Profit In Times Square, which recounts the rise, fall, and rebirth of America's crossroads. When Times Square was it its worst in the 70s and 80s, city officials private foundations argued and agonized over a plethora of urban renewal programs, none of which were to do any good at all until the city finally, under Mayor Giuliani, did what a police commander had pleaded for back in the 1980s: "Go back to the old style of police work, when men on the beat could enforce standards of public decency and order."

The author, James Traub, goes on to suggest that the degree of public and private expenditure that finally went into remaking Times Square may have been unnecessary. Based on what has happened in other neighborhoods which flourished of their own accord once Giuliani made the city livable again, I'm inclined to agree. Make downtown Berkeley a pleasant and inviting place by removing or at least restraining the deranged, demented and hostile individuals who currently dominate its streets, and a similar result would obtain. Or, alternatively, spend millions of tax dollars creating yet another "civic/cultural hub," aka bum magnet.

New York Then And Now

A couple times a week I walk the mile or so from my place to Greenpoint, and no matter which route I take, I seldom fail to marvel at the number and size of new buildings going up. Who do they think is going to live in all these new apartments, I wonder, knowing all the while that they'll be quickly filled, and at astronomical rents no less.

It's not just my neighborhood; a similar story is unfolding over large parts of Brooklyn, not to mention Queens, the Bronx and anywhere someone can find a sliver of buildable space in Manhattan. It's predicted that a million new people will soon be living in New York; during the 1970s, when many people believed the city to have entered an irreversible decline, the population dropped by nearly that much.

Movies like Warriors and Escape From New York painted the city as a nightmarish dystopia, a viewpoint shared by many Americans and more than a few New Yorkers. People left in droves, with some neighborhoods being more or less abandoned. In 1968 some squatter friends and I had our pick of dozens of empty buildings on the Lower East Side; on the site of one we occupied there now stands a block of new condos starting in the million dollar range.

If you want a clue to what changed, here's one: I noticed on my walk yesterday that many of the new apartments are being built without bars on the windows, not even at street level, something that would have been unheard of in the New York of old. I passed one window where a young man had left his curtains open: I could see him sitting placidly in front of about 20 grand's worth of computer and musical equipment. On warm nights people sit out on their stoops with expensive laptops on streets where once only the very brave or foolish would have risked walking.

There may be be many reasons for New York's booming population and economy, but it's hard not to believe that its having become the safest big city in America isn't one of the most vital. Which begs the question: what happens if things turn bad again, if a new mayor drops the ball, if an economic downturn takes us back to the era of ruined neighborhoods and endemic crime?

Optimists like to believe that couldn't happen; that the city's turnaround is so complete that whatever it was that went wrong before is a sheer impossibility. These days you'll find more people worrying about gentrification than its opposite, for which there isn't a universally recognized word, but which I'm prone to call - only slightly flippantly - slumification.

Many people, especially those who can no longer afford New York's skyrocketing rents, or who fear being displaced from neighborhoods where they've lived for years, view gentrification as some unholy plot hatched by the mayor in collusion with property developers and the artsy-fartsy white hipsters who act as their shock troops. But gentrification is not purely a white issue; this afternoon, Mary Pattillo, author of Black On The Block: The Politics Of Race And Class In The City, was on WNYC talking about how the black middle class has had a similar effect on formerly depressed black neighborhoods.

In a perhaps unguarded aside, she said there was a general sense that the affected neighborhoods, while going upscale, should "remain black," and I couldn't help wondering what sort of outcry would result if another community leader expressed the notion that his or her neighborhood should "remain white." It also put me in mind of what might be seen as a deliberate act of "slumification," which it could be argued helped precipitate the decline of many New York neighborhoods in the 1960s and 70s: Mayor John Lindsay's policy of plunking down huge housing projects, heavily populated by African-American welfare recipients, in what had previously been stable white working or middle class areas.

The resulting friction, exacerbated by soaring crime rates, was dismissed by Lindsay and his brain trust of elitist Manhattanites, as atavistic racism which had to be confronted and rooted out by any means necessary. But as Jim Sleeper points out in his excellent The Closest Of Strangers: Liberalism And The Politics Of Race In New York, the conflict was not so much about race as about class. Lindsay's quest for social justice (or, if you prefer, his desire to pander to minorities) led him to make the classic racist mistake: seeing people only in terms of their skin color.

In the rarefied ideological realms where he dwelt, Lindsay was unable to see the difference between the gradual integration of a neighborhood by blacks whose educational, professional and social values more or less matched those already present, and effectively dropping a bomb on it by introducing thousands of new residents who had little or nothing in common with the existing residents, and were essentially being shifted about by a program of social engineering not wholly unlike South Africa's creation of little Bantustans during the apartheid era.

Is it over-simplifying to blame Lindsay not only for New York's decline, but also for the racial and political balkanization that ensued? Certainly the mayors that followed, especially the hopeless Abe Beame and the not much better Ed Koch, have to shoulder their share of the blame. The economic and energy crises of the 1970s couldn't have helped either. Similarly, those who want to credit Rudy Giuliani for New York's recovery or Mike Bloomberg for building upon it have to admit they were greatly assisted by the booming national economy beginning in the 1990s.

But New York's decline as well as its recovery were so dramatic, and so clearly linked to certain mayoral policies like Lindsay's failed liberalism and Giuliani's take-back-the-streets initiative, that it seems foolish to argue that it makes no difference who is mayor. And if that's the case, there's always the possibility, even likelihood, that some day we'll again see a mayor who's willing to tolerate high rates of crime and disorder in the belief that there's a constituency for that sort of thing.

Freddy Ferrer or Mark Green would, in my opinion, have been just that kind of mayor: like Lindsay, they see people primarily in terms of race, and because there's a certain portion of the minority community that does have a vested interest in a New York that soft on crime, politicians like these jump to what I see as the racist conclusion that minorities in general want less law enforcement and more tolerance for the intolerable.

On a more hopeful note, New York has changed so much that people now have come to expect safe streets and an honest, well-functioning city government. The politics of divisiveness and class envy that powered Lindsay and his successors into office may have trouble gaining a toehold again. In his review of Vincent Cannato's The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay And His Struggle To Save New York, Jim Sleeper points out that the ostensibly conservative Rudy Giuliani, in many ways the "anti-Lindsay," had helped bring many of Lindsay's liberal ideals to fruition while Lindsay himself left little more than ruin, despair and destruction in his wake.