By Eric Uhlfelder
One of the best ways to take in New York’s diversity is by peddling along the meandering route of the annual TD Five Boro Bike Tour.
Unfortunately, this year’s ride, on May 1st, started in a cool drizzle, which eventually turned heavy, with winds adding to the fun. Still, the vast majority of the 30,000-plus bikers who paid $100 for the privilege to ride around the city traffic-free showed up.
Coming from all over the world, riders began the 40-mile journey crammed into a few blocks of Lower Manhattan, each awaiting the staggered start up Church Street. As the tour slowly progressed uptown, Sixth Avenue grew as dense with riders as it normally does with workday traffic. Passage within the Avenue’s glass and concrete canyons suddenly morphed into a bucolic ride through Central Park.
Though New York is surrounded by rivers and abutting the Atlantic Ocean, it’s easy to forget such geography when in Manhattan. But within minutes of leaving the north end of Central Park, bikers made the first of several water crossings over the Harlem River and into the South Bronx.
The Bronx gets short shrift as the ride quickly returns to Manhattan and south along the Harlem River Drive, then onto the FDR, along side the East River.
The pace then slowed to a walk as the route sharply ascended the 59th Street Bridge. But bikers were then quickly rewarded with the route’s first skyline views as they curved their way down the Queens side of the bridge with Manhattan flush in front. (See image, shot in 2013.)
Once off the bridge, the ride headed north to Astoria Park, which sits in the shadow of the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge. It then traversed the entire western edge of Long Island (a.k.a. Queens and Brooklyn), over the Maspeth Creek, through Williamsburg and beneath its eponymously-named bridge, passing new East Riverfront developments that are creating some of the city’s hottest emerging neighborhoods, then through DUMBO, and underneath the arched approaches of the fabled Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges.
The views turned even more dramatic as the ride ascended the elevated Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE), alongside Lower Manhattan and the Upper New York Harbor, passing the Statue of Liberty as the tour headed south toward the bottom of Brooklyn.
At this point, the weather turned ridiculous with slashing rain and wind gusts, which did in more than a few riders who bailed for the nearby D Train.
Then came the ride’s final assault: the mile-long push up the Verrazano Bridge. The ocean headwinds were especially hard this year, forcing even some of the most ardent riders to abashedly dismount and walk a part of the way up. The crest of the bridge rewarded all with awesome views—north toward a fog-shrouded Manhattan; south toward an equally obscured Atlantic Ocean from which a frigid wind chilled waterlogged riders.
After cresting the ride’s summit was the effortless descent to the official end of the tour at the Staten Island base of the Verrazano. But there were still many more miles to go along an industrial shoreline ride to the Staten Island Ferry and the trip back to Manhattan.
This year’s queue for the boat was mercifully short and the sogginess of the day did put a damper on the normally festive boat ride back to the Battery. But it was a small price to pay for what always is a most extraordinary day.
