My rebuilt commuter bike,and Reunion Tower. Taken from the abandoned parking garage next to where Reunion Arena used to be. Dallas, Texas
My commuter bicycle with Reunion Tower in the background
I think this video is taken from the exact spot that my bicycle is leaning in the photo.
Trying to integrate bicycling into daily life – using a bike as transportation rather than a child’s toy – here in Dallas, the worst city in the country for cycling, I have become very sensitive to the barriers that cross potential cycling routes. Barriers… that leave chokepoints. All the trails in the world are merely outside exercise paths if they don’t have a way through the barriers. Barriers like highways, or railroads, or worst of all, rivers.
The Trinity River, as rivers go, isn’t much to write home about. In dry weather it’s not much more than a muddy green strip of particularly wet swamp. However, as a barrier, it’s more than river enough. Until recently, there has been no safe way to get across this riverbottom no-man’s land.
The City constructed a trail over an old railroad trestle (next to a failed attempt at a whitewater canoe feature) but they neglected to connect it to anything and it is useless for transportation. There are grand plans for the future, but I’ll believe those when I see it.
But now, there is something… something pretty good. There has always been twin roads over the Trinity, connecting downtown with Oak Cliff – the Houston and Jefferson viaducts. Built at different times, with different designs, they have been twinned, with one going in and the other going out.
Money has been found and now, the Houston Viaduct has been closed for construction of a Streetcar Line that will run from the Convention Center in Downtown across the river and over to the edge of the Bishop Arts District. In the meantime, both in and out traffic has been routed over the Jefferson Viaduct.
And, wonder of wonders, one lane has been blocked off and marked out for bicycle traffic, one lane going each way. There is now a safe and reliable route from Oak Cliff into downtown on a bicycle.
Bicycle Lanes on the Jefferson Viaduct from Oak Cliff into downtown, Dallas.
It’s been there for a few weeks now, but I haven’t had a chance to ride it until Sunday. I took the DART train down to the Convention Center with my commuter bike hanging from a hook in the middle car. A little girl in a stroller stared at me, sitting there holding my bike’s rear tire to keep it from swaying with the train’s motion, wearing a helmet and sunglasses, the entire way. Meanwhile, a con man with a little shell game monte played with tiny red plastic cups on a newspaper folded across his knees relieved her mother and a friend of a quick ten bucks.
I left the train in the parking garage under the Convention Center and wound my way up into the daylight by the new Omni Hotel, then looping around to the viaduct. I rode across, visited a little gateway park, then came back, pausing to take a few photographs here and there.
The bike route was nice – the bridge had a bit of a hill to it, but nothing too difficult. The views in all directions are pretty spectacular – you never notice how impressive when you are in a car.
The only downside is that the approaches to the bike lanes are very awkward on both ends. Since this is a converted one-way bridge, with both bike lanes on one side – there is no good way to get cars and bikes on and off without a lot of confusing and difficult signage and odd routing.
One odd thing is that there is an old deserted parking garage in the middle of the span. It had been built to service long-gone Reunion Arena and it now sits abandoned – acres of bare concrete and sweeping ramps. Surely something useful (maybe a rooftop park?) could be done with this monstrosity.
I didn’t spend too much time – I was meeting Candy for lunch at Lee Harvey’s in Southside and then I had about twenty five miles to get home. That’s a long way on the heavy, inefficient commuter bike… but the day was nice and I was in no hurry.
When I first moved to Dallas and worked downtown, I remember trooping out together at lunch and walking from the Kirby Building (which was offices then) over to the Spaghetti Warehouse which at that time (1981) sat alone in an empty sea of abandoned brick warehouses, west of downtown.
“This is such a cool area, somebody ought to do something with it,” I said.
My cow-orkers laughed at me, as was their habit. “This place, these old empty buildings, what a silly idea.”
But of course, in the next few years they were developed. The West End Marketplace was installed in a gigantic old cracker factory next to the Spaghetti Warehouse and for years it was the place to go for things to do. I remember going down there on the day it opened (maybe 1985?) and it was very exciting. The building had four floors of retail, topped with a food court and movie theaters. Next to the building was Dallas Alley, a narrow neon lit defile that gave access to a plethora of nightlife options. If memory serves, it had at least five nightclubs built into its base: a piano bar, a contemporary live music club, a blues bar, a saloon, and a giant multi-level dance palace. It was a blast.
But all good things come to an end, and big city nightclubs and urban retail… the end usually comes suddenly. After a few years of bright lights and a few years of decline, it all went dark. The West End Marketplace closed and is still mostly vacant. Dallas Alley was reduced to a slightly scary route to get north to the now-growing Victory area. The Spaghetti Warehouse is still there.
Back in the day, Dallas Alley was lined with sculptural tributes to great Texas Musicians. These have been stolen, vandalized, or fallen into disrepair. It’s a shame.
Roy Orbison’s glasses, though, still remain.
My old Raleigh Technium and the Tribute to Roy Orbison in Dallas Alley.
I want a new bicycle but I simply can’t afford one. So I’m making do.
I’ve been riding my old Technium and it’s doing well. It’s a road bike and a lot of fun. Still, one of my long-term goals is to integrate biking with my daily life and I want a commuting/shopping/bombing around the neighborhood bike. I want a bike that can go anywhere, anytime – and I don’t really care how long it takes to get there.
So I’m rebuilding my old Yokota Yosemite steel mountain bike. I’ve scrounged up a set of fenders, front and back racks, and a cheap lighting system. I found bargains on new shifters, brake levers, and more modern V-brakes to replace the squealing cantilevers.
My old bike. I bought it for sixty bucks at a pawn shop over fifteen years ago.
Looking at the bike, though, I realized the paint was really messed up. It was white, and showed every scratch and scrape… and twenty years of tough riding left a lot of scratches and scrapes.
I decided to paint the thing. If nothing else, this gave me an excuse to remove every little piece and part. One of the few good things about doing your own maintenance is that it teaches you about your bike and gives you a connection – the inanimate, mechanical object of metal, plastic, and rubber – becomes almost a living thing in your mind, and extension of your own body, so to speak.
The only problem is that stripping all the paint off the old steel frame was a ton of work. Paint stripper, flat bladed scrapers, and sandpaper… combined with helpings of time and elbow grease took the thing down to stripped bare steel. I don’t know what kind of paint they used, but it was tough.
I have become enamored of steel framed bikes. Nowadays, of course, it’s all aluminum and/or carbon fiber. Anything to shave off a few more ounces.
But now that I see the gleaming steel that was under that paint – I’ll take the toughness, versatility, and smooth ride of that steel even if I have to push around a couple more pounds.
I never noticed the Yosemite engraved on the seat tube until I removed the old paint.
A lot of tubes, a lot of paint to scrape off.
The bare steel flash rusts almost immediately without any paint protecting it. I’ll have to give it a final sanding right before I prime it.
Now I’m ready. We have this little plastic outbuilding that I need to clean out and convert into a temporary paint booth. I’ll have to slot out the time and I’ll need a final sanding to clean the flash rust off the frame; then it’s primer-color-clear.
I thought about colors – I want something really simple that won’t show dirt. It looks like it’ll be Charleston Green. – which is almost black, but is supposed to show a green tint when the sun hits it right. That’s darker than I was thinking originally (I was looking for a dark British Racing Green) but the more I thought about it, and the more I read about the history of the color, Charleston Green it is.
Magazine Street, New Orleans
Vintage bicycles (with fenders, Brooks leather saddle, and wire baskets), a coffee shop, a sunny day, Magazine Street, New Orleans, tables on the sidewalk, nothing really much to do… it helps to get through another day in the Cube simply to know things like this do still exists. Somewhere. Somewhere else.
New Orleans, French Quarter, Halloween
There is something inherently cool about a bicycle with a plastic milk crate strapped to the back.
Big Lake Park, Plano, Texas
It was unusually warm this weekend and since I was behind schedule in bicycling miles for the year I decided to give a shot at catching up. After work on Friday I rode the neighborhood trails with my lights.
On Saturday I did one of my favorite rides – after a bike ride to the bank and a few errands I rode to the station and then took my bike on the DART train downtown. By the time we reached the skyscrapers, there were five bicycles on my train car. Me, another woman with a road bike, she looked like she was going for a ride too. There was a young man with gold teeth and a tricked out BMX. Another young guy with a nice full-suspension mountain bike. Plus a homeless-looking fellow with a rusty mess of a bicycle lugging bags of scavenged aluminum cans and a workman that looked like he was on his way to a job on a beat-up department store cruiser.
An interesting and diverse bunch.
I rode my bike from the Plaza of the Americas down to the Arts District and hung out by the Crow museum, getting some tacos from a Food Truck. Then I rode down to Klyde Warren Park to check out the crowds. I bought a Stone IPA from the stand there – it was larger and stronger than I anticipated so I took an hour and a half to sit there and digest the alcohol before I rode my bike. There were a lot of folks hanging out, getting some sun – many walking in the Dallas way of seeing and being seen.
Then I rode home – Downtown through Deep Ellum, Santa Fe Trail to White Rock Lake, around the lake, White Rock Creek trail to the Cottonwood trail. That took me to the High Five where a steep side trail took me to Texas Instruments Boulevard… and I know the way home from there.
A nice day.
Then on Sunday I left the house going in the opposite way – going north. I rode my familiar routes up through Richardson into Plano and across the parking lots of Collin Creek Mall.
Thirty years ago, I remember when the mall was first constructed. It was a big deal. I had just moved to Dallas and we drove up there all the way from Oak Cliff to see what it looked like – this big shiny new shopping mall. It seemed so far north then.
Now the place is a bit haggard and lost in time. Riding a bicycle around a mall like this drives home how uninviting and inhuman a place it is, at least on the outside. It is a destination for cars, not for bicycles, or pedestrians, or even for human beings. No sidewalks, two way stop signs, oddly places concrete walls – all conspire to set the place as a fortress to anything not wrapped in steel and spewing fumes.
No wonder the monstrosities are dying.
So I fought my way across the vast expanse of cracked tarmac parking lot and found the terminus of the Chisholm Trail which follows a creekbed into the heart of Plano’s hike/bike trail system. Once there I spent the day exploring each arm of the system, mostly under enormous power line right of way desolate swaths… not a bad place to ride, all in all.
Of course, I overdid it and by the time I retraced my route back south I was sore and worn out and feeling old. Still, a better afternoon than sitting in front of the tube eating myself sick and watching the last football game of the season.
Oh, and now I’m twelve miles ahead of schedule. I think I’ll take Monday off. This morning, on the way to work, I realized that over the weekend I saw a large part of a large Texas city and never even entered an automobile at all.
Henri Laurens
French 1885 – 1954
Les Ondines
1932
Placed in Memory of Ted Weiner 1911-1979
Les Ondines, Henri Laurens
Raleigh Technium
Technium 460
Raleigh USA
1986
Les Ondines, Henri Laurens
Meyerson Symphony Center Garden, Dallas, Texas, Arts District
Though I am a ridiculous old fat man on a bicycle, I have been working on increasing my mileage and exploring how to integrate cycling into my daily activities better. My goal for 2013 is three thousand miles on my bike. I knew I would start out behind (the weather in the winter is too often simply too nasty to ride) but I try to get as many miles in as possible.
Saturday was a gray post-misty day, cool but not cold – usually considered depressing winter weather – but without a breath of wind, perfect for a bicycle ride. I cruised all over Richardson and North Dallas, getting in about thirty-four miles of city riding, which is a lot for me. I was pretty well worn out.
Sunday was more of the same, a little warmer and a little windier and I wanted to ride somewhere and get a few more miles in – somewhere more or less useful.
About eight miles away (as the bike rolls) is White Rock Coffee, one of my favorite independent coffee spots. There are a number of Starbucks within walking distance of my home, and a couple of bubble teas/smoothie emporiums, but White Rock is the closest non-national-chain coffee spot. There is a new branch of The Pearl Cup, under construction in Richardson, and when it is done it will be a nice bicycle destination. But they are still working on it – so until it’s done it’s White Rock Coffee.
The problem is, I can’t find a good route to White Rock Coffee. The biggest choke point is LBJ/635 Interstate Highway loop. The best crossing between my house and the coffee place is the pedestrian bridge next to the Skillman DART station.
The pedestrian bridge over LBJ at the Skillman Dart station – photo from Googlemaps.
Once you start looking at that crossing you realize a nefarious little bit of nasty city planning. The bridge is useful, mostly because it connects a couple of neighborhoods of rundown apartments (on either side of the freeway) with the train station and each other. The problem is that it is almost impossible to get into or out of those neighborhoods on foot or on bicycle.
I don’t think this is an accident. Streets running up to these areas lose their sidewalks – some residential streets are cut and blockaded. It is obvious that the powers-that-be don’t want folks walking out of their rundown apartment complexes into the more upscale areas of housing.
So I have been working on finding the best route. I came up with one and it’s not that great – there are several nasty road crossings (Yale and Walnut, Leisure and Forest, and Adleta and Skillman are the some of the worst), four places where I have to walk my bike, and some heavy traffic. A long stretch of narrow, crowded residential street with parked cars filling both sides – the door zone fills the whole street. It’s especially tough because I’m riding my road bike right now – I’m rebuilding my commuter/bad weather bike. The narrow tires are pickier about terrain.
I decided to give it a go today – stuffed my laptop and an extra shirt into my backpack and set off. I know eight miles isn’t very far, but it’s a tough eight miles. The backpack was heavy and I was always riding into the wind (how does that work?). It’s all crowded urban stop-and-go riding.
That’s the thing about riding a bicycle in the city – you see things you never do from a car (or on foot, really, because you can’t travel that far). You see beauty, notice hills you never would otherwise, connect with the weather in an intimate, organic way… but you see a lot of nasty, brutish, and ugly stuff too. A lot of trash, homeless people, and neglect.
I hadn’t anticipated the amount of broken glass on the streets and sidewalks in some of these neighborhoods. Sure enough, crossing 635 on the pedestrian bridge I put a sliver of shattered malt liquor bottle through my rear tire and had to patch it in a nasty little parking lot covered in antifreeze and oil that had been dumped there, keeping an eye on the crack dealers that were keeping an eye on me.
Life in the big city in this best of all possible worlds.
I had better finish this up and drink the rest of my coffee and get home – I don’t want to do that ride in the dark.
The Universal view melts things into a blur.
—-Emile Cioran
You must have a colorful fork.
New Orleans, French Quarter
I enjoy sitting at a little sidewalk table, sipping something – maybe my notebook is out – watching the world going by. If you move too much, you miss everything. Stay still, and it will come to you… sort of like hunting from a blind. It may not seem so exciting, but it’s how to bag the big game.
Having a camera does ruin things a bit. I don’t like looking at the world through a viewfinder. I don’t like closing my mind so I can think of angles, exposures, ISO. But if I don’t make that sacrifice I can’t share it all with you, can I… so enjoy what you can… viddy well, my little droogies, viddy well.
Of course, another option is to set the camera on the table and simply reach out, now and then, and tap the shutter.
Bill Chance 