A man's field trip is his castle

The ride from Manhattan to Brooklyn’s Red Hook ball fields has quickly become one of my favorite weekend bike excursions.  In three short miles, you pass through an incredible spectrum of New York City. Starting amidst the echoing canyons of the financial district, you cross the iconic Brooklyn Bridge and meander through serene and picturesque brownstone neighborhoods.  Your idyllic spell is broken by the sudden emergence of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which separates Red Hook from the rest of Brooklyn like a castle wall.  The metaphor becomes more pronounced as you continue, the traffic of 9^th Street often as treacherously impassable as a moat before you pass under the expressway, the cars overhead clacking and booming on the road seams as if a battle were being fought above.  Past the expressway, you cross through the strangely quiet Red Hook housing projects, and finally arrive at the bucolic playing fields.

Once there, you can enjoy the city’s best street food, served up by “a cluster of food stalls like those found in markets all over Latin America — except that there are not many places in Latin America where a Mexican huarache maker works beside a Salvadoran pupusa peddler, an Ecuadorean ceviche stand and a Chilean purveyor of tuna soup.”  Food in hand, you can park yourself on a picnic bench alongside Hispanic families, hipster couples, yupster group field trips, or old Jewish couples, and watch the thrilling and seemingly perpetual soccer games that surely served as the genesis of this vibrant community.

It is, in my mind, New York at its finest, density and diversity producing an experience where the uniquely urban whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Best of all, the entire trip requires just a few hours and a few bucks, a treat in a city awash in and over-gorged on money. And if you time the trip right, you can catch the sunset on the Brooklyn Bridge as you return.