‘Twixt Brooklyn and Manhattan at Midnight
by chris ~ July 27th, 2008. Filed under: Misc Rambling.
The nice thing about living in New York City as opposed to a smaller town is that there’s a near-infinite number of things to do at any given time. Sometimes, though, one forgets to take advantage of these things and ends up spending nights on the couch staring at the television. My fiancée and I seemed headed for one such night yesterday, when we decided instead to get the hell out of the house. It was a gorgeous night, 75 degrees with a light breeze, and we decided that it was time to do something we’ve been saying “we should do that” about for years: taking a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.
Unlike many bridges which cater almost exclusively to cars (giving grudging sidewalk space to pedestrians, if anything), the Brooklyn Bridge has an upper walkway above the traffic which consists of dedicated walking and biking lanes. We’ve known about this since moving to the city, but when we lived on the Upper East Side, we rarely ventured that far south and usually when we did, we were on a specific mission and didnt have time to make the walk. Last night however we had nothing else going on, so we hopped the 2-3 line to Brooklyn Heights, took a short walk north (during which Charlotte was startled by a roach and I nearly twisted my ankle. Hooray, New York!), and headed onto the bridge.
The Manhattan skyline at midnight is pretty amazing. Sorry for the crappy cell-phone shot … I should’ve thought to bring my camera, but I didn’t. From the Brooklyn Bridge you can see: The Manhattan Bridge, all of Midtown and Lower Manhattan (midtown contains the Empire State Building, lower Manhattan contains the financial district), the Statue of Liberty, Governor’s Island, and more. It’s a fantastic walk, even if all you do when you hit the Manhattan side is turn right back around and walk back – which is exactly what we did.
I recommend the walk highly to visitors — it’s a much less touristy thing to do than, say, visiting Times Square … and unlike visiting Times Square, it won’t fill you with utter disgust for all of humanity!
