WELCOME TO BROOKLYN

So I did not win the Newton Running route art contest.  Did not even get to be one of the three finalists having a shot at winning shoes for life plus a GPS watch.  After a short time feeling unhappy about it, I decided to start a new, very ambitious project: create a map of all the Brooklyn neighborhoods through run art.  It is ambitious indeed as I don't know all the neighborhoods.  Sure I can start with my own area and adjacent ones, but the thought of driving elsewhere just to run a route sure is not appealing to me.  The thing is once I am done, whenever that is, I'll know a lot more about Brooklyn.

I belong to a NextDoor.com neighborhood made for Bath Beach residents so the first nabe I ran was Bath Beach.  I made two separate runs and stitched the two pieces together.  I am not that happy with the B in Bath and may re-run the route one of these days.  Next I thought I would cover my own turf and ran "Grave"  for Gravesend.  I did feel something odd when I started to create the V, sure enough once I got back I discovered that the "r" and the "a" are stuck together.  It was good that I decided early on to make Gravesend in two separate runs.  No point of putting a lot of time into a run only to find out that it's no good.  These days I run in the evening any way and dinner seems to come too soon each time, that is I have time constraint.

Today I was supposed to re-run Grave but I happened to be near Bensonhurst so I made "Benson".  While "Benson" itself came out perfect, I made it too close to the border of Bath Beach and Bensonhurst such that when stitched Bensonhurst to the bigger map, the letters overlaps, rats!

Here is the work-in-progress map, warts and all.  Slowly and surely I will have the entire Brooklyn represented as route arts.