Showing posts with label Jay Street. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jay Street. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 27, 2016
Thursday, July 14, 2016
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Sunday Morning in Downtown Brooklyn: Free Shuttle Bus MTA Sightseeing Tour for F/G Train Riders from MetroTech to Kensington
Every winter, the MTA offers G train riders free sightseeing tours of Brooklyn and sometimes Queens on weekends. Last year we greatly enjoyed trips from downtown Brooklyn through Fort Greene, Bed-Stuy and Williamsburg, and on another day, a trip from Williamsburg through Greenpoint to Long Island City and the Queensboro (Ed Koch) Bridge. This morning we again went on one of these shuttle bus tours that start outside the Jay Street-MetroTech subway station in downtown Brooklyn.
These G train shuttle bus tours have become so popular that they were expanded this weekend to include riders of the F and R trains, which also were not running normally. With a panoply of various tours offered outside, and with limited time, we opted for the nonstop trip to Kensington's Church Avenue subway station with great views of New York Harbor and the skyline.
The R train shuttle buses were elsewhere (only a month ago did the Lawrence Street R stop join the A/C/F Jay Street-Boro Hall stop to become the Jay Street-MetroTech stop with free transfers), and presumably the F/G shuttle buses making all the stops at subway stations were going down Smith Street, across 9th Street, by Prospect Park Southwest, Fort Hamilton Parkway and McDonald Avenue or something.
We went down Jay Street and turned right on Livingston Street, passing one of the old Board of Ed buildings and other stores
and onto Boerum Place, passing the New York Transit Museum
and then we quickly went across Atlantic Avenue to its end (we get carsick if we try to take pics while moving, at least if we're looking at the phone) by the piers.
The bus wasn't very crowded, and everyone seemed in a good mood despite what must have been an inconvenience for some. We were going to ride on the highway!
Except when we're in Arizona where our 2000 Chevy Cavalier is, we don't get to ride on highways much, so we were glad for the chance to get on Sufjan Stevens' favorite expressway, the BQE.
Lately we've only seen the road from Brooklyn Bridge Park or the Promenade, but we drove this stretch regularly in the 1970s in our '69 Pontiac Custom S and '73 Mercury Comet.
There were no traffic delays at all, so we whizzed by
and before we knew it we were high up on the elevated Gowanus roadway where you have to get over to the left to take the Prospect Expressway or the right to stay on I-278 and go to Staten Island or on the Belt. In the fall of 1979, when we had only about an hour to go from teaching at the fabulous School of Visual Arts (where we have been teaching again since 2006) to a class at the wonderful Kingsborough Community College, we used to hesitate here. Go with the Prospect and Ocean Parkway down to Brighton Beach or take the Belt? The next year, in his Kissinger-hating novel Good as Gold, Joseph Heller examined the same dilemma.
Of course today the bus was taking the Prospect Expressway and turning right on Church Avenue before the road turned into Ocean Parkway proper. But before we did, the tall overpass provided a nice view of the harbor, the Bayonne and Verrazzano Bridges, and the Statue of Liberty. On the other side, was the F/G track over the Gowanus Canal and the poor, high Smith-9th Street station, which won't be fit for humans for a while.
We also sped like wildfire on the short Prospect Expressway, which to us as a kid never seemed to get any respect (faring worse, in our adolescent imagination was only the Interboro -- now the Jackie Robinson -- which was reviled for its twists and turns and blinding spots of sun glare). We were stuck here on this highway in the summer of '77 ("summer of Sam" and the blackout) when the asphalt buckled in 100-degree heat. Today was a lot cooler.
We liked looking out from our dirty right-side window at Bishop Ford H.S. and the houses and stuff.
The bus was making incredible time, but we got slightly backed up at the first light at the end of the highway, at Church Avenue where Ocean Parkway begins. In the fall of '79, we looked at renting an apartment on this street, but eventually we took one in Rockaway.
We made the right turn onto Church Avenue by the landmark giant yeshiva or whatever it is. We were almost at our destination. Ocean Parkway is where East 6th Street should go
and McDonald Avenue is really East 1st Street and here, the end of the East nth Street grid and the start of the grid with numbered streets and avenues in western Brooklyn.
When we rode the B35 bus on Church Avenue three years ago from Brownsville to Sunset Park, we traveled this route in Kensington, and we've done it since. We like it around here.
We stopped just across McDonald, at Kabir's Bakery. It's one of three in Brooklyn, and the veggie samosas are to die for, and the little Bangla pastries are sweet sweet sweet.
Well, we had no business in Kensington, so we crossed Church when the light on McDonald turned red
and got on the express shuttle bus back downtown. We figure the ride here was maybe 17 minutes, not bad in comparison with the subway that would make eight stops.
We again got a seat on the right by the window. It's funny, but we lived in and drove around Brooklyn for years, but only in 2007 did we realize that Church Avenue breaks the grid and starts going diagonally southwest/northeast west of Flatbush Avenue and especially after Ocean Avenue. Here Church Avenue intersects the start of Beverly (or Beverley, take your pick) Road, which runs parallel to Church for several miles in Flatbush and East Flatbush.
We left McDonald and the subway station just at 9 a.m. There was more traffic going east on Church Avenue this time, but not much,
and we made the light for a left at Ocean Parkway to get on the Prospect Expressway again.
The bus driver seemed like he was trying to break his own record, because we just whizzed along until we were again on the high overpass. We exit the Prospect on the right, so it's easy to turn back onto the BQE.
We took some photos without looking at the phone to avoid carsickness on the BQE. We don't know why we have this problem; we are among the few that cannot read on the subway, either, without immediately getting queasy.
It's only one exit to Atlantic Avenue and with no traffic, we were at Long Island College Hospital before we knew it. Sometime in the late 1980s our grandmother spent a week or so in the psych unit here, where they got her started on the Prozac that quelled her depression for the rest of her life.
This time we were able to snap some pics on Atlantic Avenue. We spent tons of time in this neighborhood in the 1970s and in summers for much of the 1980s. Several of our friends lived here, as did one of our shrinks, a social worker we call Mrs. Ehrlich in our diary books, and we had lots of stores that we went to.
This is Hicks Street. Boerum Hill is to the south of Atlantic, Brooklyn Heights to the north. One store remember for some reason now is The Warlock Shop, run by Wiccans, we guess, between Hicks and Henry in the early 70s. We bought sandalwood here once from the warlocks, and when we left the store, our girlfriend said, "They were looking at your crotch the whole time." We guess we would have been flattered had we hadn't assumed she was mistaken or kidding.
We passed the new Barney's Co-op and the bank Trader Joe's and turned left on Boerum Place.
It was a straight ride up to Morton's, where everyone on the sightseeing bus got a free steak lunch, courtesy of the Transit Authority.
No, actually, we all walked in that little alley between Morton's and its building and the Brooklyn Marriott back to Jay Street.
Most people got on the subway to Manhattan or Queens, but we headed for some oatmeal and iced tea at the NYU/Poly Starbucks. The sections of the Sunday Times that came early this morning were with us, still in their blue plastic wrapper. There was plenty of time to waste. In two weeks, when we start teaching on Sunday afternoons and evenings, it won't be like that.
But we're grateful to the MTA and the work on the tracks and stations for our little excursion this morning.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Tuesday Morning in Downtown Brooklyn: Outside the New York State Bar Exam at the Marriott
Just as we could not get into the McCarren Park Pool on Sunday night to see MGMT, we were on the outside looking in this morning at the downtown Brooklyn Marriott as hordes of young people with green wristbands were inside having more fun. Well, actually, this group probably wasn't having fun because this their green wristbands entitled them not to drink Brooklyn Beer as they rocked out but to be one of the thousands taking the New York State Bar Examination to become attorneys.
And we were there not to get in, but to give moral support to one of the test-takers we were coaching this year. Today was the state part of New York's two-day exam; tomorrow is the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE), 200 multiple-choice questions in six subjects given in 48 states. We help students with the latter part of the test, since our bar exam passage experience is limited to Florida and our expertise comes from our years as an academic support director at a law school in Fort Lauderdale. (In this 2003 issue of a newsletter for law students, we've got an article, "Conquering the Florida Bar Exam," on pages 12-16.) We tried hard to prevent our grads from failing, but some pretty successful people didn't do well on their first bar exam.
The bar exam is a pretty scary test and an ordeal for most who take it. In the early part of this decade, bar exam passage rates plunged in nearly every state, and so academic support professionals like ourselves and our colleague and friend Mark Padin, academic support director at Pace Law School, got involved in more intensive bar prep -- a full discussion of why law school grads need to take prep courses like BarBri would take up lots of space -- and eventually the passage rates started to rise again, even at so-called "fourth tier" (by U.S. Snooze & World Report standards) schools like the one where we worked. CUNY Law School, for example, is now doing exceptionally well.
Our own favorite story of bar exam prep came from believing the tales of horror passed on by those who had passed about what a nightmare the two-day test (three-day in California and a couple of other states) is this:
Our lecturer at PMBR, an MBE review class, convinced us to buy Depends because not only was the exam so time-pressured (the famous 1.3 minutes a multiple-choice question) but that the bathrooms would be so filled with vomit expelled by the panicky that we would not want to leave our seat.
In a test of the product before the test, we discovered that no matter how much we drank (we're teetotalers!), we couldn't go in our pants, even with that adult diaper. That's when we realized that Depends was made for people with true incontinence, not for those too busy to go to the bathroom. We went to the men's room twice during every three-hour exam session and it was a nice break (good place to sneak in an energy bar).
The Brooklyn Marriott is one of several sites in New York for the test, including the much larger Javits Center -- all Florida's bar examinees must go to the Tampa Convention Center; when students would ask me why the test wasn't given at more centrally-located Orlando, I'd say, "The state tourist board wants you to come back to Orlando!" -- but Brooklyn is only for those writing their essays by hand, not on a laptop.
Outside at 7:30 p.m. we saw people looking at highlighted pages of outlines, eating bananas, holding the clear bags that were required for all their stuff (just like for the liquids carried onto planes), chatting nervously. "You see anyone else here?" one person asked another -- presumably talking about fellow grads from their law school.
Inside, people started to line up outside the Marriott's second-floor grand ballroom, pretty much one abreast, supervised by men and women from the NYS Bar Examiners wearing gold nameplates. The line soon snaked around the second floor of the hotel, past the smaller Jackie Gleason and Roebling ballrooms and then the ones named after Jackie Robinson and Walt Whitman.
We tell people the day of the exam is not a time to look at notes or review and not to bring any books, but some test-takers felt the need. If you don't know it after three years of law school and two months of bar prep, you ain't gonna know it. We saw one young woman, wearing clothes more appropriate to late October than late July, sitting on the floor with what looked like half the library of the extensive collection of BarBri books. OMG.
The crowd was largely 25-30ish, maybe 75% or 80% white (diversity's still a problem in the legal profession), pretty much equally males and females. Most of the guys were wearing T-shirts and jeans, and the women were also informally dressed. We saw no neckties (absurd) and only one dress. Smart people held onto sweatshirts and jackets, as even huge test rooms can get really cold from the A/C.
In their plastic bags, we saw pencils, pens, erasers, energy bars, candy bars, potassium-laden bananas, aspirins, bagels, Coke cans, yellow highlighters, gum, boxes of raisins, tissues, sunglasses (?), and Pepto-Bismol. Many carried water bottles, with a few energy drinks there too.
People looked nervous, but not as nervous as you might think. No one was shaking although the bathrooms were doing brisk business. Some people had fixed, frozen smiles. There were some deer-in-the-headlights looks. Two women played with their neck chains. One guy kept clicking a ball-point pen. Another had a piece of paper in his mouth. "Did you move here?" one person said, catching sight of another. "No," she replied, "Brooklyn is better than Buffalo." Was that ever in dispute?
The most relaxed person we saw was a guy in sandals, one blue-jeaned pants leg rolled up beyond the knee, who had no plastic bag whatsoever and was reading the arts and leisure section of Sunday's Times. He scratched his beard absent-mindedly, looking as if he were on line not for the bar exam but for a slice at DiFara's pizzeria. This guy, we predict, will either ace the test or fail miserably.
As an academic support director in Florida, we met with people who failed the bar exam as many as six times. The odds are pretty slim that you will after the second try. Some of these folks in line now will be back here next February and a few will be here a year from now. Last July's New York pass rate was 79.1%.
By the ballroom promenade entrance, they start letting them go inside: "Have out your tickets and your ID." Most have been given their fluorescent green wristbands from an official peeling them off letter-paper-sized sheets. The line moves surprisingly fast, and by 8:10 a.m., with the test starting at 9:00 a.m., they're scurrying along.
Soon they start letting them in the ballroom -- or the promenade to it -- in two lines, and they don't appear to be checking the ID and tickets that rigorously.
We see people strolling in late, some frantic, some looking as if they didn't have a care in the world. One woman shows an expired passport and explains that she contacted the Bar Examiners and some document that was supposed to come never came. They tell her to go in, where they'll sort it out.
Peeking in to the grand ballroom, we see easels with five- or six-digit numbers, showing the range of numbers to sit in that area. It's a cavernous room, like the Tampa Convention Center we took the test in. When we started that Tuesday morning, opening our exam booklet (for the MBE, we tell people to use the trick we did: do the last ten questions first, so that when you later come to question 191 you're in for a delightful surprise), we soon had this realization: hey, this is just like another test, we'd been taking standardized tests since the Iowa test at P.S. 203.
By the time we got out of the Wednesday morning session, we were pretty confident that if we could avoid getting ptomaine poisoning at lunch, we'd pass.
When we got our score in the mail (we found out we passed online) that fall, it kind of annoyed us: if we had known we'd do that well, we wouldn't have studied so hard.
But no one really knows at this point, do one? A close friend of ours will be sitting in her Long Island home a few weeks from now, grading the essays written today.
Good luck to those taking the bar exams today and tomorrow, and our sympathies to their friends and loved ones who've had to put up with them lately. Thursday will be, for many, the most euphoric day they've experienced in years.
That's how it was for us. We just walked around downtown Tampa and took extraordinary pleasure in sitting for hours at a coffee bar, reading newspapers to see what had gone in the world since May. After leaving the Marriott, we cross Jay Street to get a drink at the NYU-Poly Starbucks and sit relaxing on a bench among the trees of MetroTech, hoping our friend inside taking the test remembered to breathe.
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