MARCH MEET-UP FOR BUY NOTHING BB/G BROOKLYN NY

 For those local to Brooklyn's Bath Beach / Gravesend area:

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.

AVENUE VITALE

My latest gwriting work is called "Vitale", for a friend in PPTC.  The area of Gravesend and Bath Beach is actually my preferred canvas.  I would run along the avenues and up and down the streets to generate the words.  If the writing goes east far enough it would have to deal with the diagonal Gravesend Neck Road, or if further up north there's King's Highway, but otherwise the roads are rectangular.  The really nice thing though is the words are pretty much upright, almost horizontal, not slanted like when I run along Bath Avenue or Benson Avenue.  The slanting is worst when I cross 86th Street and run along 20th Avenue etc.

I wanted to make the V in "Vitale" twice as big as the rest, i.e. make the word title case.  While I could easily virtually trespass two city blocks to make the sharp angle that forms the V, I prefer to make use of existing roads when possible.  I've always wanted to make use of the intersection of 86th Street and Stillwell Avenue but it turned for this project that won't work.  I can have the letters rise from Avenue U but I recalled that "Jason" didn't look that well when I had the letters rise from the middle line of the uppercase word.  It also helped that Lake Place ran through a few of the long blocks and would really help make a nice uppercase A.  Again, I can handle A even without a street running through a long block, but why not make use of what's already out there.

I tried to dot the i but the result is not as good as I hoped for.  I walked in circle a few times at the junction of 86th Street, Avenue U, and West 13th Street but did not get the circle that I hoped for.  While studying the map of the area, I planned to have the T's  horizontal line going from the dot all the way over to Avenue U and West 10th Street, to avoid having a line at the bottom connecting i and T.  But when it came time to actually do the work, I totally forgot and realized shortly later and connected T to A that way.  Whenever possible, avoid having the lines at the bottom of your words.  The few extraneous lines the better.

I got a call from my mother when I was midway through the middle of the A.  She had a doctor's appointment and I was going to drive her there, but she wanted to leave early and do some grocery shopping.  I had to speed up to finish the A, virtually crossing the track of the N subway line where Avenue V meets West 8th Street, and finish with L and E.  Perhaps because of the rush, I forgot to add a serif on the L's bottom.  The extra curve upward would tell the audience that the L ends there, that whatever beyond would be just the unfortunate need to connect the letters.  L still turned out OK, but could be better.  Note that by the time I got to E, Lake Place already goes too far south.  Luckily, Lama Court is another one of those alleys that cuts up a block.  Anyway, I think the map is wrong, that Lake Place does not go from West 5th Street to Van Sicklen, as I don't recall seeing such a street.

I usually run 8 km (5 miles) a day.  When I finished the E it was not 8 km yet so I ran some more.  Recall that one of the rules is that you don't want extra lines in the picture, so instead of running back along Avenue U, I used Avenue T.  I would have run all the way home to get my 8 km, but I had to reset the watch at Avenue T and West 13th Street because going further would have the extra line intersect the V's right section.  So no 8 km, but sometimes we have to sacrifice a little for the sake of arts.