The Five Borough Bike Tour

 I awoke bright and early Sunday morning, having slept surprisingly well in yet another whatever-is-lower-than-one-star Brooklyn AirBnB experiences. My accommodations were a couple of nearly windowless basement rooms with bare bulbs for illumination, a semi-finished bathroom and a kitchen area with a countertop supported by raw 2x4’s, but it was clean and the bed wasn’t bad – except for the lack of a top sheet. Brooklyn AirBnBs are always an adventure. But it didn't matter - after last year's last-minute cancellation (due to weather, not COVID), the Five Borough Bike Tour was on and I was raring to go!

After a quick breakfast and final decisions about layering for the day’s weather I struggled out the door with my bike and gear – to get the bike out I had to open the apartment door and wheel the bike into the barely-large enough-for-a-bike vestibule, close and lock the apartment door behind me, go up a very steep and narrow stairway to open the outside door, come back down, carry the bike up the stairs and out the door, close the door behind me, go and open the side gate, wheel the bike through the side gate, close the side gate, go down three steps and open the front gate, carry the bike down and through the front gate, close the front gate.

The Five Borough Bike Tour starts in lower Manhattan and ends in Staten Island. Riders are on their own to get home from the end point. For many people that means waiting on a really long line and then taking the Staten Island Ferry to Manhattan, which leaves you close to the starting point. I was going to be in a hurry at the end of the ride and my next destination was Brooklyn rather than Manhattan, so I decided to drive to Staten Island early and take the ferry over in the morning so that I’d have my car right there at the end of the ride. It turned out I was not alone in this idea. When I got there around 7 AM the parking garages were already full, though on-street parking was readily available. There was a long line to get onto the ferry (which cost 25¢ in the old days but is now free!), but I made it to Manhattan in plenty of time for my 9:15 AM start wave and amazingly, easily found Gail and Chris among the 30,000 riders gathering in lower Manhattan.

Waiting for the ferry to Manhattan

Boarding the ferry

Statue of Liberty through the ferry's grimy windows

Meeting up with Gail and Chris

Riders waiting at the start

The group of riders spent some time bunching up and inching forward with other cyclists at the start. Once we got the official go ahead, everyone started rolling. I had my phone mounted on my handlebars and, thanks to the poor paving of NY streets, almost immediately hit a bump which made my phone fly out of its holder and hit the pavement. The screen protector over the camera lenses cracked, but the phone seems to be OK. Also, I almost immediately got separated from Gail and Chris, who I never saw again the whole day – I did the ride by myself (well, by myself among 30,000 people).

The cool thing about the ride is that they close the streets along the route and you get to ride places which would ordinarily be off limits (or suicide) for cyclists. The ride goes up the length of Manhattan  up 6th Avenue from bottom to top, crosses into the Bronx and then almost immediately crosses back into Manhattan – this quirk of the route is a legacy of the bad old days of the 70’s-80’s when you wouldn’t want to be in the South Bronx any longer than you absolutely had to (my brother tells me that crime is up in New York, and it’s starting to feel a little like those bad old days again).

Official Photo

In addition to my phone I had a GoPro camera mounted on my handlebars. GoPros are made for filming action. People use them for whitewater kayaking, skiing, etc., and so they're designed with very secure mounts. However, the streets of New York are bad enough that somehow the GoPro, which is designed to be used in action conditions and had been securely mounted to the bars, bounced off and hit the street. I was not doing well with electronics.

The ride continued down the FDR Drive and then over the 59^th Street Bridge (also known as the Queensborough Bridge, and now apparently officially known as the Ed Koch Queensborough Bridge – though no one calls it by that name). On my first attempt of the Five Borough Bike Tour in 1987 my bike broke down on this bridge, but this time I had no problems. I learned later on that Gail had a bad experience on the bridge this time around – more on that later. The bridge is something of a chokepoint. People bunched up and everyone wound up walking their bikes across the bridge.

Bunched up at the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge

In Queens the route funnels you into the first rest area (a dumb idea which again bunches everyone up and slows everyone down - the other rest stops along the way are off to the side, like highway rest stops) and then you ride through the streets for a while. At one point we passed a familiar looking waterfront park. When I spotted the adjacent Costco I realized it’s the park where you pull ashore and wait for the tide to turn when you’re circumnavigating Manhattan by kayak. Five boroughs by bike, circumnavigation by kayak – I really need to learn to just take the subway around the city like a normal person 😊

A rest area in Queens

Passing through Greenpoint and DUMBO in Brooklyn I was amazed at how those neighborhoods had changed over the years – what had been rundown industrial neighborhoods were now chic, the boulevards lined with trendy shops and the streets packed with people. Further along I saw that even Industry City, formerly a decrepit warehouse complex, now houses a West Elm, a vinyl record shop and a chocolatier, a distillery, and … well, you get the idea.

Finally, we got to my favorite part of the ride – the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (BQE). It’s mind-boggling to me that they close off this major highway for the better part of a day. The ride enters onto the part of the BQE known as the Gowanus Expressway – a 1930’s Robert Moses project which, as Robert Moses projects tended to do, provided a valuable piece of infrastructure but wantonly destroyed neighborhoods in the process. The Gowanus runs in an open cut (which split the pre-existing neighborhood in two) for a while before rising to run elevated above the Sunset Park and Gowanus neighborhoods. As an aside I’ll say that New York City is pretty flat and it was amusing to see many cyclists, unaccustomed to hills, struggle on the uphill from the below ground portion of the Gowanus to the elevated portion.

Brooklyn Navy Yard

On the BQE

Signage along the BQE

The BQE led us to the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, a 2 ½ mile long crossing of New York harbor between Brooklyn and Staten Island. When I was a kid the Verrazano was the longest suspension bridge in the world – a record which held until 1981. As of this writing it is the 18^th longest in the world and still the longest suspension bridge in the Americas. I mentioned above that New York cyclists aren’t used to riding hills. I saw quite a few people – some much younger than me – walking their bikes up the mile+ uphill side of the bridge. Heh – wimps.

Up until this point the ride had been a marvel of organization – New York does an amazing job with mass events like this. The start was smooth, and the rest stops (save for that first one just over the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge) were well organized and well stocked with water refill stations and snacks. The weather was perfect, and all told it was just super fun. Then the end of the ride funneled into the Finish Festival, which was held at an outdoorish shopping mall. The event itself wasn’t bad. I browsed at the logo gear store and (contrary to my usual practice) bought a FBBT t-shirt and a hat. I listened to music from a mediocre band (there had been much better bands along the route) and ate a decent BBQ pulled chicken sandwich. I even discovered that Pocari Sweat, a rather ickily named Japanese sports drink I became familiar with when I made some business trips to Korea in 2005, is now being marketed in America – they were giving out free bottles at the festival. All was good.

But then I tried to leave.

All riders in the bike tour were issued two identifying items – a race “bib”, which you wear as sort of a personal license plate pinned to your chest, and a plate to attach to the handlebars of your bike. As you entered the mall’s parking garage you were told that upon exit your bib and plate would be checked to make sure the numbers matched – that you left with your own bike and not someone else’s. This security measure would have been easy enough to defeat, and in practice all did was create a huge line to exit, since it turns out there was only one person at the exit checking the numbers. I didn’t time it, but it took a good 20-30 minutes to get out of the garage.

Once out of the garage, there was metal fencing up with only one possible path forward – to the ferry. I explained to the staff that I didn’t want to go to the ferry and that I. along with lots of others, would want to get out to the street to return to our cars. The staff remained firmly opposed to letting anyone out, saying I’d have to wait on the whole ferry line then exit to the street from the ferry terminal. This was ridiculous, as it would have meant probably an hour or more wait for a ferry I wasn't even taking. Finally, a cop standing nearby said I should go around the building and go out the other side. Well, it takes a while to walk around a whole shopping mall, and when I got to the other side I discovered that there was no way to exit there. In search of a way out I ducked into the parking garage, figuring maybe there was a ramp to the street there, but the only exit ramp was the one leading me right back to where I had started except, lo and behold, the same staff and the same cop had moved one of the fences and were now letting people out to the street there. Another 20-30 minutes wasted.

By the time I got back to my car I was running late. I barely had time to make it back to my dingy little AirBnB and shower before heading out to meet a friend for dinner – in fact, I got there 15 minutes late – and then to see my brother’s latest show (a musical based on Sarah Silverman’s memoir).

Meanwhile, I wondered why I had never heard from Gail and Chris after we separated at the start. When we split up we said we’d try and meet up at the Finish Festival. Given my time constraints I would have skipped the festival, except I was expecting to reunite there with my “team mates”. Well, it turns out that they never made it. They were doing their ride together on a tandem bike, which turned out to have been a bad choice – tandems aren’t very maneuverable, which is a significant issue when there are 30,000 other riders weaving around you, and in fact they suffered a crash. It was low speed and no one was injured, but it was their first ever crash in 20 years of tandem riding and it rattled them. Still shaken, Gail had a full-blown panic attack when they reached the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge. As I mentioned earlier, the ride bunched up on that bridge; everyone had to walk their bikes and you wound up spending quite a while standing around and inching forward to get across the bridge. Somewhere on the bridge Gail had an acrophobia/agoraphobia panic, and when they finally made it across to Queens she dropped out and took the subway back to their hotel in Manhattan. Chris, ever the trooper, finished the ride solo on the tandem, but wound up skipping the Finish Festival.

All told, it was a great experience, marred slightly only by the Finish Festival. I would also recommend not having a tight deadline for evening plans after the ride as I did feel a little rushed through the experience, knowing I had to get the ride done somewhat quickly because of my evening plans. But I do recommend the approach of driving to Staten Island early – but maybe skip the Finish Festival.