Take It to the Bridge

On Sunday in the early evening I ran across the Brooklyn Bridge. I had never been to the bridge before. I realized it is not such a far run; the approach up Clinton Street through Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights is lovely, past all those brownstones. The approach to the bridge itself is less nice; downtown Brooklyn is as bombed-out and desolate on the weekends, besides being pedestrian-unfriendly in general, as any other ratty urban American downtown.

But the bridge!

Notes to self about the Brooklyn Bridge:

1. Glad I did not take my mother there (is not for the afraid-of-heights, un-fond-of-crowds/cars-rushing-below kind of scene).

2. Must return next time it is snowing, I bet it's magical.

3. The bridge looks medieval. It resembles a cathedral, with its arches and keystones and its magnificent heights and dips. Down below, but above the car traffic, there is a wooden pedestrian walkway that also reminds me of the middle ages, but in another way; as I was running across I was thinking about London Bridge and how when I was little I read somewhere that there were houses on it. I was taken with that, and developed a vision of medieval or early-modern urban life as a sublime teeming anarchy, with religion and commerce and tradition and the very beginnings of mass-society craziness all jumbled together. As I ran I remembered London Bridge, and I thought that the Brooklyn Bridge reminded me of it (I could almost imagine it with houses on it, even, if they got rid of the cars), and then I continuted to think about history. It's funny for me, having grown up near Washington, D.C., where everything is built to look and feel like classical Greece -- well-spaced, orderly, monumental, lots of smooth white stone -- to arrive in New York, where things are so the opposite. If Washington is America's version of Athenian-Classical, then I like to think of New York as our, I dunno, crazy early-modern London or...Antwerp, or something. Like down there you have government, law and order, smooth marble surfaces; and up here you have capitalism, crowds, extremely jagged and intricate skylines. This schizo combination of high-minded systematic (even kind of utopian in its origins) government, and balls-out mercantile free-for-all, I was thinking, pretty much sums up American as well as anything else does, right?

Thoughts from a runner's high on the Brooklyn Bridge. It really was beautiful, the East River and the sun going down, Statue of Liberty to the left, Manhattan Bridge and DUMBO to the right, warehouses far down below on both shores. I got two-thirds of the way across, and then looped back for home.