Transit Limbo: Car Service Waiting Rooms

I need a car . . . “Five minutes”
no matter what
it is always five minutes


The car service thrives on door-to-door business. The walk-in passenger is like a stepchild, tolerated but never coddled.


The moment you take a seat in a car service waiting room, you enter transit limbo—hovering between stasis and mobility.


The occasional attempt to enliven the space, by adding plants or pictures, is well-intentioned but wrong. It yields the opposite effect. In this setting art and nature sadly remind you of the world outside, driving home the truism that waiting is the hardest part.


If you’re lucky, though, during your time in limbo you might see a few Greek drivers playing backgammon in a way that’s so loud and animated as to change your view of what you had always thought was a tedious game. Or maybe you’ll get to hear the strains of Arab music filtering in from a sleek Town Car parked outside, as the Jewish owner of the car service proudly shows you the Muslim prayer room in the back of the office.


At any rate, it’s never long until your car pulls up and sets you in motion, toward your destination, which if you’re really lucky, is back where you started: home.

One of the Most Dangerous Jobs in New York: Gypsy Cab Driver

SLIDESHOW – Castles of Limbo: Car Service Waiting Rooms (Flickr)

Intoxicating Variety: Anatomy of a DrunkWalk

Big Sky Brooklyn is less an attempt to document or “capture” the elusive richness of real-life than an effort to communicate the intoxicating variety endemic to Brooklyn. And “intoxicating variety,” as I have found, is best appreciated when one is intoxicated. This is only fitting since the blog grew out of a series of “DrunkWalks,” which started as random wanderings and steadily became more rigorous, through the use of maps, satellite imagery, and other research.


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The well-planned, dutifully executed DrunkWalk™ succeeds as a narrative and fulfills a personal quest to create a poetic map of the terrain. Last year, for example, at the height of Indian summer (an 85-degree day in early October), I set out early to walk the entire length of Stillwell Ave. and a large chunk of Bath Beach. The day was gorgeous, the route was scenic, and more than once I found just what I was looking for: communion with the sublime. It turned out to be an epic DrunkWalk. Following are some images and impressions from that memorable day.


Weekdays in obscure Brooklyn parks and playgrounds, among children, mothers, and retirees: another layer of reality, outside the realm of the working world.



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Calvert Vaux Park






Calvert Vaux Park, on the other side of Shore Parkway (pedestrians have to cross a footbridge to get there), was a strange experience all around. The 73-acre park, also known as Dreier-Offerman Park, is in the early stages of a $40 million renovation. It’s still open to the public, though it’s all but empty, save for workmen (not many, though), some baseball players (practicing in uniform—in October), and some fishermen scattered along the bank facing Coney Island. A thick, sloping underbrush shields the pathway from the water’s edge, so you can’t see the fishermen unless you climb through the bushes, and then it feels like you’re spying on them. Odd.


Crossing back to civilization: end of the footbridge, looking east.


The exceedingly comfortable van seat where I sat at Cropsey Ave. & Bay 46th. When you're planted in a spot like this, the cheapest beer tastes like elixer.


The view looking west.


The view looking east.

School’s out: Late afternoon, the streets and delis are pulsating with juvenile energy.



Shaba grocery, beneath the tracks, at Ave. X and Stillwell (right next to a section of the sprawling, heavily fortified Gravesend trainyard)—an unwittingly iconic juncture. Notice the play of clouds and sky in the interstices between train and tracks. Appreciation of such a tableau is what DrunkWalks were made for.


Deep in the heart of Brooklyn.



Concrete factory/high rise at Stillwell & Z.


Stillwell Avenue Terminus. I couldn’t go this far without hitting the beach—it was October but it felt like a summer day at Coney Island (without all the people).


Every DrunkWalk is an indolence excursion and a true glimpse of the contemplative life. The epic DrunkWalk is one of new vistas and new terrain, and ultimately new ways of seeing the familiar. Discovery is the watchword and pleasure is the spur; the exhilaration of feeling that I’m part of something bigger, immersed in a microcosm of an intricate world, is what gives me wings when I’ve had more than a few. My Brooklyn DrunkWalks have led to a mytho-cosmic wellspring, an endless source of inspiration—in a realm beyond the local.

SLIDESHOW – Coney Island/Coney Island Creek (Flickr)

Perches

Being idle while surrounded by activity can be quite calming. Here are a couple of my favorite spots to relax and refresh.

Laundro-Zen: True Clean

If laundry is the task most mundane, then the laundromat is the temple of tedium. That’s if you’re waiting on your wash, though, not necessarily when you’re just passing through. It was late October and there was a subdued chill in the air. In the midst of my wanderings the need for rest (oh, my aching bones) and a powerful thirst converged in a serendipitous spot. So I took a seat (third from the left) in front of True Clean and all was right. Yes, there in the bodega-laundromat corridor of Fourth Avenue my immediate needs were sated easily. Moreover, the view, or I should say the whole environment, had an extremely calming effect on me. Really, I could have sat there for hours. It was dense with traffic, but the hurly-burly was more than offset by the view across the street, dominated by the scrappy charm of the church/used appliance store on one corner and the stately Catholic school/church on the other corner. And all was complemented by the human element—lots of people walking by, mostly normal types coming home from work or school. To this day, whenever I’m in the area I grab a drink and make a beeline for my spot at True Clean. So, one “temple of tedium” has become for me another outlet of repose, a place to enjoy some refreshment and gaze upon one of Brooklyn’s unwittingly perfect landscapes.

Third Avenue Flea Market

The Third Avenue Flea Market is located in the middle of a remote stretch of Gowanus. It’s as if the owners intentionally set out to find a location almost devoid of foot traffic. But that’s a plus for the consumer as there’s ample room to browse undisturbed; you’ll never have to contend with other bargain hunters for the choicest goods. The place makes up for its lack of human vitality with a certain hysterical plenitude that suggests unlimited possibilities. It’s a colorful, cluttered cemetery of commercial failure, a bonanza of surplus uselessness that never fails to give me frissons whenever I visit. I often imagine I could be a regular there, not unlike the people you see hanging out at delis and garages—drinking coffee, kibitzing, and basking in the warm glow of stimulating, familiar surroundings.

Vest Pocket Parks (Found Poetry)

New York's “vest pocket parks,” with their iconic vantages of highways and skylines, permeated by the calming drone of traffic noise, are perches of introspection. Sitting in Van Voorhees Park , during rush hour on a hot June day, I see before me arteries of the city in full flow, with a backdrop of buildings staired and serried against the sky.

A Flash in Time (Photo Reenactment)

This light, this spot, this buzz on which I’m working: a perfect combination, “it doesn’t get any better,” it’s almost sublime . . . never again will this moment repeat. (A cliché, maybe, but a perpetually arresting idea.)

Degraw St. & Court St., 8/24/06 (Thursday) at 6:59 pm

Convenience Store Across From Scrap Yard

Pouring coffee at Mobil Mart

looking out the window

the scrap yard is hypnotic

Bumming in Bay Ridge

4/21/07 (Saturday), 2 pm - 9 pm

A vigorous trek up the eastern slope of Owl’s Head Park, a placid 27 acres next to the Belt Parkway, which is next to a sewage treatment plant, although nothing outside the park’s verdant hills can intrude; it’s a near-perfect symmetry of (engineered) nature and industry . . . A brief respite at the bustling pier off Bay Ridge Ave., then a long stroll through Shore Road Park, busy with ball fields, playgrounds, benches, and grass—all the amenities fit for a perfect April afternoon . . . Idyll from the start of a spring delayed, languorous and dream-like; the sun on the bay and Saturday in the air—that all-encompassing feeling of possibility, a pleasant, hopeful aura—sky and light and children at play conjure a mirage of simple pleasures and harmony all around . . . The houses on Shore Road, alongside which the long, narrow park runs, range from handsome to majestic . . . And looming always, over the whole neighborhood and other swaths of south Brooklyn, visible from spots in all five boroughs: The Bridge—Verrazano Narrows, that freak of engineering, the largest suspension bridge in the U.S., and perhaps Robert Moses’ most imposing statement.



The bartender at Irish Haven said that at one time Bay Ridge was nothing but churches and bars. There’s still plenty of churches and bars in Bay Ridge, but now it boasts many large chain stores, and it’s safe to assume one could probably find a yoga center or two and some other contemporary trappings there. Also, Bay Ridge has become home to a large Arab community. Hookah cafés and Middle Eastern restaurants line Fourth and Fifth Avenues for miles, and the pale, Christian throngs of what had once been an archetypal working class Brooklyn neighborhood (Saturday Night Fever was set there) have been altered considerably. There’s always the Irish Haven, though, whose jukebox is like no other, packed with the most Irish of tunes, from the likes of Christy Moore, The Chieftains, and The Clancy Brothers; everything from “Dunmore Lassies” and “Dear Old Donegal” to “Imis Dhun Ramba” and “Come Out Ye Black and Tans.” It’s a fine place for a soon-to-be-minority to cry in his beer or dream of reels and jigs past, back home on the Ould Sod.