Urban Gadabout: A lovely post-snowstorm gad about the formerly marshy nether region of Brooklyn's Park Slope

The Carroll Street Bridge over Brooklyn's super-toxic, Superfund-designated Gowanus Canal (seen on a very different day from today's post-snowstorm one), is one of the country's few remaining "retractile" bridges -- the bridge actually retracts on the rare occasions nowadays when it's opened. (I note in the official NYC Dept. of Transportation caption for this photo that the bridge "opened to traffic in 1889.")

by Ken

It was good to get out on the pavement again. I'd been carrying around the voucher for a free Municipal Art Society walking tour which I got with my membership renewal. It's only good for "walk-up" tours -- i.e., those where everyone pays at the tour, as opposed to the ones where everyone has to preregister. Which is fine with me, because while I'd grown to love preregistering, I've also taken plenty of walk-up tours. (People always thought the "preregister"-type tours were "better," but as I understood it from the now-departed director of tours, Tamara Coombs, that wasn't the case -- the idea was to balance the needs of different types of tour-takers.)

Several times I'd arrived at a tour prepared to use the voucher, but found such a crowd that I walked away. For example, Francis Morrone was doing a tour of Forest Hills Gardens which sounded really interesting, and I managed to get there on time that Sunday directly from a cruise up Newtown Creek which left me at South Street Seaport, on a day when I had to get to and from the seaport without the services of the Fulton Street station of the A subway (closed, as it frequently is on weekends, for construction work on the already way-over-budget and way-behind-schedule Fulton Street transit hub). As I say, I actually made it there on time, but held back turning in my voucher as a crowd assembled, and when the crowd grew large enough, I simply headed back toward the subway station, counting the day a "win" for (a) the very satisfying Newtown Creek cruise (not to mention getting there on time, no easy feat on a Sunday coming from Washington Heights in way-northern Manhattan without the benefit of the A train), and (b) then making it out to Forest Hills, with even enough time to get a some interesting buns at an Asian bakery-type shop.

I'd only just had the experience of doing a tour in Francis's ongoing East Village series (he had, for professional reasons, done some heavy-duty lot-by-lot research on the area, and has been trying to make use of all that acquired knowledge in the form of MAS tours), which was by preregistration only, but which in the transition between MAS tour directors had been severely oversold, making for an unmanageable group trying to snake around the narrow streets around the Bowery. Before the end of that tour, between the ongoing struggle to keep close enough to hear and some really painful complaining from my legs (about which a bit more in a moment), as we walked down Second Avenue and I realized just a couple of blocks ahead, at Houston Street, lay my version of an oasis at that moment, the F train subway station, I headed, or rather hobbled, for daylight.

Then there was another tour of Francis's, one focusing on Antonin Dvořák's New York -- whatever there is left to find remaining from the great Czech composer's several years as director of the newly established National Conservatory of Music in the city. This is something I've never really looked into, and as Sunday Classics readers are aware, the music of Dvořák is one of the great loves of my life. Another reason I bestirred myself for that tour was my fear that, with a classical composer as the tour subject, I was afraid Francis would find himself nearly alone, and I figured the least I could do was make it nearly-alone-plus-one. But not hardly. By the time I got there, there was already a huge crowd waiting, so again I turned around and headed in the opposite direction. An excellent instinct. The next time I saw Francis, at the December rescheduling of another of his East Village tours, the one that had been wiped out the weekend of Hurricane Irene, he mentioned that the Dvořák in New York tour had drawn 72 people!

Clearly part of what was at work in the crowds was making those tours "walk-up" with Francis's reputation deservedly so strong that people who felt they'd always been shut out of his usually preregistered tours that they all flocked to these. In fact, in the November-December MAS schedule, I didn't find anything to preregister for, and became so gun-shy about the crowds I was encountering at walk-up-type tours that I gave a pass even to a few in December that might have interested me.

I can't exclude the personal factor. My knees are in really bad shape, and while I think that all the walking I've done in the last year helped me retain and even to an extent regain function, it's become increasingly difficult to get myself to tip in the "awright, let's do it" direction anytime I've been faced with an optional activity. In fact, in November and December the only walking tours I did were several that were prepaid, like the one I did do with Francis. Even though the prepayment was only the MAS member price of $10, that may be enough to motivate me. Then there were a couple of New York Transit Museum tours, also preregistered, and at a considerably steeper tariff, even at their member price.

I actually formulated a "plan" for MAS tours that might wind up so heavily attended: I would arm myself with a self-guided tour, ideally in the same vicinity -- for example from Michelle and James Nevius's wonderful book Inside the Apple. (As I wrote, I had a wonderful time on a tour that James led of what can be pieced together in lower Manhattan of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam.) I haven't actually done it yet, but it still seems to me a pretty good plan.

Yesterday I had really meant to bestir myself to an MAS tour exploring the past, present, and future of "South Hell's Kitchen," led by Laurence Frommer, with whom I've done several tours devoted to the two present and one possibly future NYC-designated "cultural districts." But it was snowing yesterday, and as I mentioned, it doesn't take much to tip me the "not doing" way in a choice between doing and not doing. I just stayed shut in my underheated apartment.

Today, however, I figured that the whopping 2-4 inches of snow we got yesterday could work on my favor, holding down the crowd for another tour of Francis Morrone's -- the first of a three-part series devoted to Brooklyn's Park Slope, the area sloping down from what's now Prospect Park to the bottomland where the Gowanus Canal was built. This was a near-must for me, because I had missed this first part, devoted to the poor lower, northwestern part of the Slope, the last time Francis offered this series. I was actually registered for it, and if I'd taken it, that would have been my first tour with Francis. However, I brazenly left town (which I do maybe once a year), kissing that $10 good-by, something I don't do easily, and so the second tour in the series, devoted to the northeastern section of Park Slope, the ritzy part, what Francis calls "the gold coast," from Seventh Avenue to the park, from the northern edge of the park down to about 10th Street.

That can't have been much more than a year ago, and in that time I can't count the number of tours I've done with Francis -- lots of tours with other guides too, but about a zillion with Francis. And now finally I got to catch up on the first part of the Park Slope series, and now that I've seen so much more of the city, I may try to do the second and third parts again, when they're offered in the spring, according to Francis.

Sure enough, the cold presumably kept the group to manageable size, and I had a great time, not least because Francis is such a jolly companion on a post-snowstorm Sunday. Along with this enormous store of knowledge, he's got a special style of humor that I can only describe as "laugh-out-loud droll," as when he observed, well into the tour, that it seemed to have turned into "My 31 Years in Park Slope," because much of what he was describing to us in the economically less favored lower reaches of the Slope had changed so much since he moved into the neighborhood (you guessed it) 31 years ago. He recalled, for example, how desolate the thoroughfare of Fifth Avenue had been back then, having never been part of the "quality" part of Park Slope, which had never extended much below Seventh Avenue. Now, he noted, Fifth Avenue is the hottest part of what is probably still Brooklyn's hottest neighborhood.

It was also fun having Francis speculate, at the site on the eastern shore of the Gowanus Canal, where Whole Foods has been threatening since, like, 2005 to build one of its larger NYC stores, whether shoppers -- assuming the company gets the latest variance it's requesting at a hearing this coming Tuesday, and assuming the store gets built on the new announced schedule of 2013 -- are going to be eager to buy produce at a store standing on that scenic bank.

It was also fun recovering ground I've covered on previous tours. For example, we crossed the Gowanus Canal first on the Carroll Street Bridge and then back on the Union Street Bridge, which I'd done on a canal-focused tour with Matt Postal on a brutally hot day -- I remember how we tried to find shelter from the sun. The canal was notably more pungent in the heat, but even in the dead of winter that strange shade of green that the water is looks mighty eerie. (I don't suppose the canal water, with all the fearful stuff lodged in it, freezes easily.) To the west of the canal lies Carroll Gardens, which I'd visited both on that tour with Matt and on one with Francis devoted to Carroll Gardens. (That one was special because it had somehow been scheduled at some hour like 11am, although, as Francis explained, his tours are always scheduled for 2pm -- as indeed today's was. He kept apologizing for his disoriented state that day, telling us he kept starting sentence and didn't know where they were going. I thought it was wonderful in a special way.)

It was a really fine afternoon, and a nice reminder of what a sensational year I've had with MAS. I'm glad I actually had a chance to tell Tamara how those tours had changed my life. We don't always, or even often, get to thank people who've done that for us. I was pleased and not surprised to learn that that wasn't the first time she'd heard that.

I'm hearing that MAS may be returning to a heavier concentration of preregistered tours, I'm gathering with price increases that are probably long overdue. I mean, $10 for members and $15 nonmembers -- what is that? Still, I can't begin to recount the extraordinary things I've seen because they were only $10.

I might add that my legs held up okay too. Like I said, it was a fine afternoon.

[For information about MAS tour offerings, go to mas.org.tours.]

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