Route with a view

Thanks to John Augustus Roebling and his son Washington, I didn't mind the rain at all today.

Living in New York City is often trying, to say the least. I'm a native, and sometimes I wonder how--or why--people from less chaotic places put up with life here. A colleague remarked that New Yorkers probably face more decisions in one daily commute than most people do in a week. Can I make it across Fifth Avenue before that UPS truck flattens me? Will the doors of the train snap shut on my nose as I make a dash for it? Do I go left or right around the jogger with a stroller speeding toward me? It's like being in a perpetual game of Frogger. And yet, I love living here--at least for now.

Outside the Ninth Street station today I heard the hiss of an air brake and flew down the stairs to find a waiting N train. Snagging a train on a weekend is like capturing the mythical snark. On weekends the N usually runs local in Brooklyn, so it was not unusual to see one there. The train sat...and sat... and sat. It was 12:30, and I wanted to be at the gym by 1:00. My commute to lower Manhattan usually takes no more than 15 minutes. After 10 minutes the doors closed, and the train lurched forward 100 feet before stopping again. "There's train traffic up ahead," the conductor said.

A rider who looked like she had been in New York for 10 seconds said, "These trains are the worst!" Time out, hon. Let's put the word "worst" in context.

Flashback to the 1970s and 1980s, when a coin flip between walking and subway riding as the safest mode of travel was pointless. Watch period movies like The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3 or French Connection to witness the filth, graffiti, and dangers of the system. Public address systems were nonfunctional, trains stopped on the Manhattan Bridge or in tunnels, lights were turned off, brakes squealed deafeningly along the rails, and windows and doors didn't open. People often stood between cars to get air, and tensions ran high. There was nothing you could do about it, no one who would listen if you complained. If you weren't rich and the subway was your only mode of transport, you sucked it up. Especially if you were a college student.

So the train sat and crawled and sat and edged 20 minutes later into Pacific Street, two stations from where I got on. The conductor announced that the N was going express, and I wasn't going that way, so I got off and went upstairs to take the 4 train. No 4 or 5 trains were running in Brooklyn. A 1 train pulled in on the 4 platform, but the 1 doesn't ever go to Brooklyn. Confused, I went to the 2 and 3 platform and took a 3 train. It took me almost an hour to take a trip that usually takes me a quarter of that time.

Two hours later, after the gym, I went to the Cortlandt Street station, where people stood four or five deep waiting for an R. Apparently no train had come for quite some time, and the platform was a madhouse. I dreaded the thought of another lurching, airless commute packed with soggy riders. And then I remembered another path. Although it was dark and rainy and chilly, I went to my happy place: the Brooklyn Bridge.

If terrorists ever take out the Brooklyn Bridge, I will support any punishment of them. I walk over it every chance I get. The bridge means a lot more to me than just a great photo op. As a kid I got excited whenever we drove over it to Manhattan, awed by the tall steel and brick structures, which were even bigger when I saw them up close, especially since I was lower to the ground. I had my first driving lesson over the bridge. My junior prom date and I strolled over it after a ride on the Staten Island Ferry. In college I was drunk in the back of my friend Mark's VW bug when it broke down in the left lane at 2 a.m. in the pouring rain with no spare. And frigid January day in 1986 before I moved to Washington, D.C., I stood on the bridge and cried and said goodbye to the New York City I'd grown to hate.

Its soaring towers and delicately arranged cables at one time loomed over the New York skyline, before skyscrapers dwarfed it. From a distance it looks like a nice bridge, but to appreciate its solidness, majesty, and beauty you have to get onto the main span, where water, earth, and sky meet and you feel like you're floating. If I don't think too hard about the tenuous relationship between me and the East River, I thoroughly enjoy the mile-long stroll.

Plugged into my iPod, I bounced along the wood-slatted pedestrian walkway, amid a sea of mostly tourists walking on the boardwalk wide-eyed. Invariably I have to stop to let the family/couple/gaggle of friends take a photo in a particular spot as if they are the first to think of that angle. I imagine how exciting it must be to return home to Marseilles or Mumbai or Manalapan and recount your big trip to New York to friends and family. Of course, I rarely see someone take a photo of the Brooklyn side of the river. I guess the new federal prison doesn't exactly inspire art. Aside from Fulton Ferry Landing or the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, the Brooklyn Bridge is the best place to get a picturesque view of the isle of Manhattan.

Even in the rain, or maybe especially in the rain, the bridge has an aura of romance and adventure, a welcoming gateway that attracted a new wave immigrants to Brooklyn when the bridge opened in 1883. Until then, ferries were the only means of transport between Brooklyn and Manhattan. There were no subways and no bridges.

As I got to the Brooklyn side of the bridge about 20 minutes later, I saw the familiar green sign, bearing the words uttered by Brooklyn bus driver Ralph Kramden, that signaled I was home: "How Sweet It Is!" Let the subway riders suffer in an airless underground. I've got a route with a view.