Globetrotters February Travel Writing Prompt

Everybody Loves the Brooklyn Bridge

So I took the Williamsburg instead

(This article is based on a writing prompt in Globetrotters)

New York City. A million thoughts quickly leap to mind. Before the first time I went, fifteen years ago, I wondered if I was ready for it. I was and I wasn’t. I still wonder about that every time I go, and the same result happens. What a town.

I’d spent plenty of time in Manhattan, over the course of five or six trips. I still haven’t been to Ground Zero or the Statue of Liberty, but I did my tourist-level best in hitting most of the guidebook highlights the first few times.

The last time though, I didn’t want any of that stuff. That time would be different because I wanted to focus on just one neighbourhood. I’d never been to Brooklyn and because a good friend of mine had recently moved there, it seemed like as good a place as any to stop for a bit as I moved my life from Jamaica, where I had been living for the last year and a bit, to Vancouver, where I am from and subsequently returned after seven years away.

That, and the fact that New Order and the Pet Shop Boys were playing at Madison Square Garden that same month. That was a hell of a show and as good a reason as any to stop in NYC for a few nights.

But there are many neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, as it happens. I’m not the first one to choose Williamsburg and I am glad that I did, because life happens on the street there. I like that. I think it may be that way as a function of a combination of things: people having to live in really small apartments, the wealth of eating and drinking options available and a desire to live socially with one another.

And because that’s just what you do when you live in Brooklyn.

As a traveller on a brief stop, there was enough going on around me that I realised that it didn’t matter that there was not all that much to see and check off the list, in comparison with Manhattan, the skyline of which is always visible, just across the East River.

But one of the key things that bring the masses to the borough from Manhattan is the heavily foot-trafficked and Instagrammed Brooklyn Bridge. No question it is highly photographable and iconic and allows for sweeping views of lower Manhattan. If it’s a sunny Sunday and you really like people — a lot of people — then that’s your spot.

It is for exactly that reason that I chose to walk over the Williamsburg Bridge instead. Monday morning, fewer people with cameras, more real, less bullshit, more grit, more New York. “Check Your Head” by the Beastie Boys pumped through my ear pods.

There were several highlights that stuck out then and still do now.

The first thing that grabs your attention is the sheer length of the construction; it’s not going to be a short walk. It is an engineering marvel at 2.27 kilometres (1.41 miles) and most of it is not over the river itself. The first ramp off of Driggs Avenue stretches out and up and you can’t really see the end of it. And when you get to the top of it, you realise that is just the beginning and after a short flat spot, another ramp appears that leads to the high point.

There are a few runners and walkers, but not many, and bikes and other two-wheeled vehicles are on the other side. Graffiti, some of it even worth reading, covers the bridge deck underfoot. I think they gave up on dealing with it a long time ago. We’re all better for it. Fences abound, keeping people from the river to the left and vehicle deck to the right. There are cars passing above at first and as you climb higher, eventually below. The train rumbles by the same way, intermittently but always insistently announcing itself. There are plenty of workers on the bridge, since the thing obviously needs constant maintenance.

The bridge itself was built between 1896 and 1903 and things were certainly built differently in those days. Hulking, muscular, industrial and with a feel of unshakeable permanence, reflecting the way New York City wanted to present itself to the world then, and still does now.

The view of Manhattan from it is sweeping and incomparable. In front of you is everything from Pier 42 in Corlears Park, which is still not quite the southern tip of Manhattan, and the Manhattan Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge rise up in the distance. In the other direction, also rising up is the Lower East Side, then past the United Nations Headquarters to the Queensborough Bridge that connects Long Island City to Midtown Manhattan.

The western downhill slope of the bridge emptied me out onto Delancey Street and closeby to the Tenement Museum, which I can also highly recommend, if you have any interest in how the city handled the teeming influx of newcomers into the city in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The circumstances in which people lived their lives, maintaining their cultures from the old country, while adopting those of their new home is a key part of the shaping of the city, then as now. An earlier generation of the inhabitants of the area would have worked on the construction of the bridge.

I was in no rush, so I walked slowly. It was a beautiful day anyway, the last remnants of the summer, with the smell of fall already in the air. My pace though, was not the pace of the average person in the city. Everybody is going somewhere, everyone has someplace they need to be, everyone has something they are doing.

That’s New York City to me, a swirling energy teetering on the edge of chaos but never quite falling into it. My flaneur energy did not distract from this in any way. From the tranquility of the top of the bridge, you can hear it humming and as you approach the Lower East Side, you can certainly see and feel it. This is unmistakably the place where things happen and you are standing in the middle of it, while it revolves around you, completely indifferent to your existence. Energy, that’s what it has and a belief that if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

Frank Sinatra said so.

And there went two hours of my life on a bridge that I won’t ever need to get back. The next day, I thought about running across that bridge and onto Delancey Street in the Lower East Side and then back again. I’m still thinking about it. Maybe next time I’m there.

If you liked this, you might also enjoy these yarns about other bridges around the world:

Some are rickety and some sturdy. Joel R. Dennstedt finds himself on both types around the world:

Adrienne Beaumont tells us about her moments on the tallest bridge in the world in France:

Many thanks, as always to Jillian Amatt - Artistic Voyages, Anne Bonfert, Michele Maize, Adrienne Beaumont and JoAnn Ryan for doing the immense work necessary so that our travel articles can find a great place to land!