I’m a New Yorker, and I run. I get bored doing laps around the park or running up and down the Hudson River path. Instead, I use my long-distance runs to explore the neighborhoods in my city, especially in the outer boroughs. I’ve decided to take a cheap digital camera with me on some of my runs to document the city and its changes as seen when crossing on foot.


Friday, February 5, 2010

Flatbush Avenue run... all the way down to the Rockaways, ending on Broad Channel Island, Queens

To best view the slideshow, click on the black border first, then the blue play button. If you click the green play button or the photo first, you will be redirected to my Picasa page. It's a bug I hope Google fixes soon.

As far as I can tell, only four Brooklyn streets cross the borough from end to end. Metropolitan and Greenpoint slice the narrow northern tip, and Atlantic runs east-west through the thick upper-middle. Flatbush is the only one that runs north-south, or from bridge to bridge.

The street is named for the Town of Flatbush, or Vlackebos ("level forest"), founded as part of Nieuw-Nederland in 1652. Today the neighborhood of Central Flatbush is home to a large Caribbean community, but there are remnants of the old Dutch settlement all along this run. Flatbush runs into the Marine Parkway-Gil Hodges Bridge, which crosses Jamaica Bay to the Rockaways in Queens. I reached the beach and then headed east for the Cross Bay Bridge, which took me to Broad Channel--perhaps the oddest neighborhood in all New York City. You'll see.

This run was 17.9 miles.

Posted by Pat Regnier at 2:07 AM

2 comments:

  1. bethanyFebruary 6, 2010 at 9:30 PM

    what a great run! so cool to see the progression ... I'm curious, did you stop to take pics or were most on the fly? Neither my legs nor psyche do well when I pause! Also curious how much you mapped that beforehand, I'd never find my way from memory.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Pat RegnierMarch 1, 2010 at 10:21 AM

    I map it out before I go, using Google Maps, mostly.

    I do stop to take the shots. Yes, it is hard on the legs. I'd say it takes a mile off of what I can achieve in any given run. On the other hand, it gets me motivated to go out for these long runs.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)