The walled city is what they called Brooklyn. All the red brick warehouses on the water from redhook to greenpoint looking more like a fortress than a harbor. What happens when even that amount of industrialized waterfront isn't enough? Just keep expanding south.
Yesterday I biked enough Brooklyn Waterfront neighborhoods to cover the entirety of Manhattan. This either proves how big Brooklyn is...or exactly how small Manhattan is. Anyway, my journey today brought me from the Gowanus canal, around the Bay Ridge bikeway through the Narrows and all the way out to Gravesend Bay.
I suppose the only spot of note for most people would be the Verrazano Bridge, and maybe the American Veteran's Memorial Pier off of Bay Ridge Ave....but you know me. I'd rather spend time hanging out near the run-down warehouses. So I did. Most of the west side of Brooklyn by the water is taken up by the Bush Terminal Warehouses. It's impossible to get on the water here, but if you want to see some very interesting stuff, take your bike on a ride down 1st ave.
1st ave? There is no 1st ave. in Brooklyn you say? Well there is...on the other side of the Gowanus Expressway and past any remnants of a residential neighborhood. 39th st. to 58th st. This stretch of old road is all broken cobblestone, criss-crossed by more rusty train tracks than anywhere you have seen. This is where all the old shipping companies unloaded and sent their goods by train to everywhere else on Long Island. There are more than a dozen overgrown, but still-used piers that still have the original but unused train terminals on them.
This would be a great place to film a zombie movie!
After a few hours checking out every crevice I could and getting eyeballed by all the dock security all day, i moved on toward Bay Ridge. I used to live in Bay Ridge. It was a great apartment for pretty cheap...but it was an hour and a half commute to the upper west side.
sidenote: i have become increasingly suspicious of neighborhoods without grafitti.
I speed through the old neighborhood and a take a quick ride up Shore Road (great houses) to get to the water. From Owl's Head park, you can pretty much ride along the water all the way to queens. The bad part about this is for most of it you are huffing fumes from all the cars on the Belt Parkway. However in Bay Ridge it is a great public path underneath the Verrazano Bridge. This was, when it was built in 1959, the first bridge that was big enough that the design needed to take into the consideration the curvature of the earth. At 13,700 feet (4,260 main span) it was for decades the largest suspension bridge in the world.
It is still massive, impressive and without a pedestrian walk or bike path. Although i did try once to walk across it before coming to my senses.
Long story short, the sunset was great and i headed inland to get some of that famous Bay Ridge Pizza. Now, like i said, i lived there. I knew my favorite pizza places, but none of them were the best in NY. So before i went out i did some online research and came up with 3 names.
Rocco's Pizza
Grandma's Pizza
Elegante's Pizza
Boy, what a great job of self promotion. Their names came up everywhere on the internet. But when i went there, they were holes-in-the wall and nothing special. They all had good pizza, but c'mon...best in NY? I will say that place for place, Bay Ridge probably is the best neighborhood for pizza, only because that all 35 pizza places have good quality new york style pizza. But as far as I'm concerned none of them stand out in any meaningful way.
From now on, i am getting all my food recommendations word of mouth from people i trust.
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