Ben Franklin Bridge from Delaware Avenue
27 May 2014
Yeah, I found it on a map, but I had no idea where the Pine Road entrance to Pennypack Park was in relation to anything else. All I needed were the directions to the start of the ride. The rest I didn't bother to investigate. We were going to Philly, somehow, and that's all I knew.
As it was, I almost drove right past the entrance. If there hadn't been a dozen or so cars parked on the road, I wouldn't have needed to slow down enough to see that Tom's was one of them, tucked into a gravel drive leading to a gravel parking lot.
Tom warned us that most of the roads would be busy. "Not as bad as Princeton Pike at rush hour," I offered. "Worse," he said, but he was hoping that the holiday weekend would be keeping people off the streets.
Mid-week I'd asked Tom what the terrain was going to be, because I was trying to figure out which bike to bring. He said he was taking his Feather and that, aside from the Manayunk Wall, which would be like the hill at Twin Lights, there wouldn't be much climbing.
So I took Kermit.
Then Tom said, "There are actually three thousand feet of climbing on this ride."
"What?!? You said it would be flat!"
"I said it would be rolling, but not as hilly as the Sourlands."
Still, for the first twenty miles, every time we hit an incline, I said, "You lie."
The first few miles backtracked the way I'd driven in, but then we turned onto a side road and found ourselves on the Bryn Athyn College campus, facing a cathedral. "We'll stop for five minutes so you can get pictures," Tom told me. I said, "I'm an atheist. Gimme two and I'll be done."
We spent longer there, though, because a couple of us were fiddling with our bikes. My front derailleur cable, recently replaced, had stretched. When I went to turn the barrel adjuster, I saw that the plastic housing above it was cracked; the barrel wouldn't turn. Tom said, "Well, you know what Chris Cook says: 'The more you mess with it, the more problems you'll have.'" So I left my chain in the small ring.
Bryn Athyn Cathedral looks like most of the old buildings on Princeton University's campus.
Winter Larry noticed the stairs inside of the bell tower.
After that I lost track of which way we were facing. We wound through hilly suburban streets. I looked at every street and store sign, hoping to find something familiar.
It took fewer than nine miles for that to happen. Old York (yes, there's another one), Jenkintown, Abington, Cheltenham, Baeder Road. "My aunt and uncle and cousins used to live near here," I said. "Their house was a duplex. There was a stream in the back yard. The stream flooded a lot. The houses were torn down after they moved away." I looked left and saw a neighborhood that seemed familiar, but not, because my aunt's house was stone and these were brick. (Later, after Tom posted the
route, I figured out that we'd come within a block of their old neighborhood: mile 9.6, satellite view, that gap in the houses, where the map says Tookany Creek.)
When we crossed Germantown Avenue I remembered my summer job as a house painter, my sophomore year of college, the summer of the Philadelphia garbage strike, the summer I learned my way around Mount Airy and was the only one in the crew with a car big enough to carry our ladder. I damn near drove that poor old station wagon to death. Germantown Avenue. Cobblestones. We'd be in the city limits soon.
You can tell by the street signs. Philadelphia labels theirs with block numbers and directions so that you can figure out which way to go to get to whichever address you're trying to get to. The signs are green, and most are not rectangular. Here's what I mean. Thank you, Wikipedia:
Then we were in Wissahickon Park. I don't need to look up how to spell that. Where I grew up, "Schuylkill" was on our spelling test.
So here's the
Raritan Wissahissahickinson
River Creek:
Henry Avenue? We're biking on Henry Avenue? Jeebus.
We were approaching Manayunk, riding along the Schuylkill River. At a red light, I asked, "Anyone dare to try to pronounce this like a Philadelphian?" No takers.
"Skookle," I said. "We swallow our consonants."
Then we were in Manayunk, and Tom was leading us up a short, steep hill that he said was the Wall.
"This is the wall?" I asked. A pedestrian looked over at us but said nothing. Turns out it wasn't; we were one block over. Same incline, though. Tom gestured left. "That's the Wall," he said, "If anyone wants to go up it."
I said, "If you've got 94, you might as well go for 100," and turned left. Larry and Ron and Ken followed me.
Kermit can climb. I forgot.
Behind me, Larry was groaning.
Here they are on their way back down:
Tom and the others were waiting at the bottom. We went in search of a snack. Main Street was empty. When we passed a cafe called Winnie's LeBus, I hollered out to stop. Le Bus used to be just that: a bus in University City that was famous for its bread and bakery. Then they got a real storefront, on Sansom (not Samson, damnit!) Street. Then that closed, and the rest of my college years were bereft of Le Bus muffins. I'd heard they'd opened up in Manauynk all those years ago. This must be the place.
We all got off our bikes only to find out that this was a real chi-chi sit-down place, and that they weren't really a bakery, and that there were no muffins. I'm not even going to link to the place. Phooey.
We saddled up again and headed over a couple of blocks to a real coffee shop. That's when we realized that we'd left Dave H back at Winnie's; Dave had gone inside. Tom called him, he found us, and all was well.
Then we were turning onto the East River Drive (that's what it was called back in the day), then the West River Drive (that's what it was called back in the day), off limits to cars this time of day. High school. Bike path along the river. Bluestreak, my 1983 Raleigh Grand Prix, with my sister and parents, me wanting to hammer (not knowing that it's called hammering), my mother yelling at me, Boston's "Long Time" in my head, my first bike tune? (I've come a long way with the bike music.)
We turned off and started to climb again, up to the Belmont Plateau. Maybe I'd been here in that old station wagon on the way home from painting or college or something, but I never did stop to see the skyline, no reason to, really. Off to the far right on our way up, I saw the high-rise once-hotel once called Adam's Mark, which sits at the edge of the Skookle Expressway (I-76 to the rest of you), on City Avenue, City Line Avenue (Route -- yes, that Route 1, our Route 1) to the rest of you), the divide between the city and the Main Line. Good riddance.
We did stop at the plateau, and we did look, and I explained the breach in the gentleman's agreement not to build taller than Penn's willie, and named as many buildings as I could.
"That tall ugly thing on the left is the Comcast Tower. The spire is Liberty Place. That thing on the right is the Cira Centre." Tom found City Hall (far left).
"Every picture's gonna suck," Tom said. "No matter how you adjust it, it's gonna suck. I tried. The light's wrong."
I punched up the contrast and turned down the brightness. It'll have to do. The sky was much more ominous than it looks here. The sky looked like it was ready to piss on us and enjoy it.
Then the zoo, the Girard Avenue bridge over the Skookle, the view of the city I saw from the train five days a week twice a day for twelve years and no, I'm not stopping for a picture because it's burned into my brain. Damn, I shoulda taken a picture.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art, or should I say the Art Museum, or should I say the blasted Art Museum steps, and no, I do not want to run up them and pose like fuckin' Rocky like that asshole up there is doing. Let's get out of here.
Tourists everywhere. Shit. We're tourists. I don't work here anymore. I haven't lived here since half my life ago. I'm a fucking tourist.
We were able to ride like cyclists again on Spring Garden, where there's a wide bike lane. The light was red at Broad Street, which gave us time to admire one of the many, many
city murals.
We were facing due east, the sky gunmetal gray in front of us. Winter Larry wanted to know if we'd be able to see the new Barnes Foundation building. I know where it is because it followed my parents out of the suburbs and onto Logan Circle. As we approached 17th Street, I told Tom that we were getting close enough to their apartment that I was feeling guilty. He said, "We need to get home before it rains." We didn't detour for the Barnes either.
On 6th Street we turned south, which seemed to me to be in the wrong direction if we were heading home. Tom was taking us to Independence Mall. Greeeeeeat. More childhood memories. This is what happens if you grow up close to Philadelphia during the bicentennial. "I know more about George Washington's wig than I ever wanted to know," I said, remembering how we learned to weave rugs and had to wear mop caps.
"Can we see the Liberty Bell from here?"
Oh, god, no. "It's a farce," I said. "The crack is a manufacturing flaw."
Tom got us out of the tourist throng eventually, and we headed towards the river on Pine Street. We stopped at Penn's Landing.
Across the
Raritan Delaware River, Camden. In front of me, a thistle. Which one gets more respect is a toss-up.
"Okay, guys. How does a Philadelphian pronounce Walt Whitman Bridge?" They shook their heads.
"Wall Wimmen."
The Battleship New Jersey, in Camden:
Left, the historic RCA Victor Building; center, Not Rowan:
Delaware Avenue has a decent bike lane. Who knew?
Here's the Ben Franklin Bridge:
It was somewhere in here that Tom's rear derailleur pulley started hopping something fierce. At every red light he'd bend over to turn the limit screw one way or the other, but nothing helped.
When Delaware Avenue petered out, we turned onto Aramingo, which also has a decent bike lane. Not a single car gave us trouble.
When Aramingo faded out, we turned left, crossing Tacony Street. "Hey, guys. Wanna know how to pronounce this one like a native? Tah-kaewn-ee." Laughter all around. I did some Northeast Philly accent for them: "Throw the bool against the wool and make a phaewn cool. Is that ool?"
We turned onto Torresdale. Somewhere on this road was my grandfather's pharmacy; the family lived upstairs. I remember the place only vaguely, a long, skinny apartment. I was a little kid, trying to get my grandmother's attention: "Mom-mom, the ceiling's peeling!" I shouted it over and over again until she heard me, looked up, and exclaimed, "The ceiling's peeling!" They moved away shortly after that. (My mother informs me that the drug store was at the corner of Torresdale and Magee, a street I don't remember noticing, although I did look at every corner store and wonder, "Was that it?")
I spent a lot of time looking over at I-95 and looking for the Northeast Corridor train tracks. I looked at the stone fronts of the row houses, each identical front meticulously painted, one color for the stone, another for the grouting. Brown and white. Green and white. Everything and white. For blocks and blocks and blocks it was like this, until I finally found one that was just plain stone.
"We're gonna pass a prison," Tom said, and "Holmesburg" popped into my head. We passed on the west side; the train tracks are on the east side. At the prison we turned left into Pennypack Park.
Somehow, there were going to be eight miles of bike path between here and our cars. It didn't seem possible.
The trail was nearly empty, wooded, paved, under water only once (we sent Dave through with his disc brakes first, Winter Larry imploring, "It's not worth it, Tom.") and peppered with tiny, steep rises. Tom was in front, and I was behind him. Every time we hit one of the steep spots, I was sure that Tom's chain was going to explode. "No no no no!" I said to his derailleur many times. "I was ready to put my hand out to catch you on that one," I said once.
Everything held together, and it didn't start raining until we started driving home.
I went straight to Hart's with Kermit. The rain was so intense that I left the front wheel on the back seat. Ross had a new cable in before I knew what he was doing. "When's your new frame coming in?"
"Dunno. I gotta call. You're gonna build it," I reminded him. I still feel a little guilty for getting it elsewhere, but that's a story for another blog post.
He said, "I'm anxious to see what they're doing in Italy these days."
Dave H came in, looking for new gloves. "I washed my old ones and they still stink," he said. "Mine never last that long," I told him. "One season if I'm lucky." Ross zipped by, then came back, pressing two 25th anniversary water bottles into my hands, gratis. He didn't charge me for the cable either.
The rain let up. I went home, chatted with Jack, had some lunch, washed off the city grit, and went to the lab to check on my mice and process some brains.
