FORD!

This week in Route-Art: Ford!  Actually, it was last week, but with this self-quarantine thing going on it is difficult to tell time.  To be exact, it was this past Saturday.  On Facebook, I help run an alumni group for my high school and other than uploading pages from the few yearbooks I acquired over the years, I try to do something different every now and then.  I've been using Posterino to make photo-grid of the teachers' faces, word-cloud of the teachers' names, and on Saturday it was a favorite teacher's birthday so I decided to use my skill in route-art to enliven the group's Wall.

The teacher's last name is Ford and there is a street not too far from me by the same name.  I wanted to do my run there, so I can name the run FORD BY FORD, but it is not close enough to walk over and would require a bus ride or a car drive.  Social distancing was already announced then so I decide to do it in my own neighborhood.  Little did I know that run would be one of my last runs for the immediate future.  These days I do rope-skipping in the backyard in the morning, then some time after lunch it's yoga in the dining room, both activities are done with my son.  Last but not least, I would do a mile or three on the elliptical in the living room.

Hope you enjoy this little Relive video of my Ford run!  Relive now offer for free one music track to add, sorry that's the best I can do.  After the run, I regretted that I didn't use kerning to keep the rest of letters closer the F.  Oh well!

WELCOME TO GRAVESEND AND BENSONHURST

Welcome to Gravesend and Bensonhurst!  It took a few runs to have it done correctly but it is worthwhile.  The second e in "send" is not perfect, but that will do.  "Bensonhurst" was created from scratch, now a few blocks north of Bath Beach border.  I probably will re-do Bath Beach to move it westward toward 14th Avenue and away from Gravesend.

The next neighborhoods I'll put on the map, so to speak, will probably be those to the east and south of Gravesend, just to round things out.  Such as Coney Island and Sheepshead Bay.  Afterward I'll march northward to connect to Prospect Park, since I have many friends living up there, they may appreciate it.

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.

SCENES FROM A RUN: THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD OF BATH BEACH ETC

With my current work hours of 8 AM to 5 PM, I have a very small window to run early in the morning.  As such the runs are shorter and limited to the streets closer to home.  In recent weeks, I was away in Boston for work then just had a week in the Lincoln, New Hampshire area for leisure.  While I had a few runs in both places, I should have resumed running once I got back but I got lazy, until today.  I got up late, past 9 AM, the weather was already hot, but it had to be done.  I got to re-visit some old places in my neighborhood of Bath Beach to see what's up with them.

Contrary to what a neighbor and Facebook friend told me, the waterfront area of Calvert Vaux Park is not open to the public yet.  At one time the fence's gate was knocked down, supposedly large enough for pedestrians but unwelcome to vehicles.  The fence is up again and the sign reminds the reader that soil contamination is in progress, enter only if authorized.

If you really have to get into the waterfront area of Calvert Vaux Park, there is another breach in the fence.  There is a beaten path right inside the fence so others have trespassed.  I'll stick to iTrespassing, not the physical type.

More welcoming is the Brookyn Bay Center, that area around the upcoming B.J.'s Wholesale Club on Shore Road.  No one was around and there was no gate whatsoever so I took a stroll to the new waterfront area behind BJ.

Not much of a running route but it adds maybe a kilometer to the waterfront area.  I am sure the place will be packed once the wholesale club opens in a few weeks.

Front behind BJ, one can see the Verrazano Bridge in the distance, Staten Island on the left and Brooklyn on the right.  The tall buildings near the bridge on the Brooklyn side is the Veteran Administration Building near Fort Hamilton.  The white building on the right, close to the foreground, is the side of Kohl's in Caesar's Bay.

I thought of running to the foot-bridge near 17th Avenue but it got hot so I turned at Bay Parkway.  I noticed that Vitamin Shoppe will take place of the old HSBC building.  Somehow HSBC never made it back after Hurricane Sandy.

This gyro place used to be called Olive Garden when it first open.  The real Olive Garden probably had some lawyers visited them and now the name is different.  Note the different patches of green on the awning.

Greetings from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn - NOT!

For years, I've been living in this area of Brooklyn that up to recently I believe to be called Bensonhurst. Perhaps when I first moved in my wife told me so and whenever I told people where I lived no one ever corrected me, so far. Recently I saw an article in AM New York about the neighborhood and it had a small blurb about Bensonhurst's border. Lo and behold, I realized that all these years I really lived in the neighboring area called Bath Beach. Even when I was staying with the in-laws over near Scarangella Parks, that was not Bensonhurst either.

In the map above, courtesy of Google Earth, I've outlined in Green the streets that form Bensonhurst's border. You may want to click on the picture to zoom in for a better view of the street names. Start from the southern point at the intersection of Stillwell Avenue and 86th Street, it goes north to Kings Highway, then east to MacDonald Avenue. From there, it goes up to 60th Street, then West-ish to New Utrecht Avenue then go back southeast to 86th Street, and finally along 86th Street back to the starting point of 86 and Stillwell.

It is neither bad nor good to live in Bensonhurst. I don't have any special attachments to it that would now shatter because I don't live there. Maybe some years, if I ever move again, I will look back with fond memories, like how I look back at my high school years in Elmhust, Queens. It is just surprising how things in life can go by undisturbed if no one looks at it. Wikipedia does state that it is a common mistake many people make in thinking Bensonhurst to include neighboring streets. I will have to ask my neighbors to find out how many know what area of Brooklyn they really live.