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Exuberant Kids on NY’s Restored High Bridge

As I wrote on this blog in 2013, New York City’s High Bridge is a pedestrian walkway that “connected the Bronx and Manhattan beginning in 1842, an interboro link across the Harlem River that was built to bring fresh water via the Croton Aqueduct in to Gotham. The span connects 170th Street in the Bronx to 173rd Street in Manhattan. In a deliciously arcane example of NYC geography, [a reporter] points out, that’s ‘West 173rd Street and not East,’ though this is the east side of Manhattan, ‘Because it is technically west of 5th Avenue,’ the east-west midpoint of the island for street-naming purposes.”

When I wrote that in 2013 a full renovation of the span was underway, and a few months ago it reopened to the public. Last fall I pedaled up to High Bridge for my first look at the restoration of the span. Here are some pictures I took that day when I was fortunate to come upon some children playing on the new walkway. 1 Exuberant kids on High Bridge 2 Exuberant kids on High Bridge 3 Exuberant kids on High Bridge 4 Exberant kinds on High Bridge

Annals of Urban Wildlife—My Latest Encounter

Walking in Riverside Park tonight at dusk, at about 106th Street, I heard a scuffling nearby. Before I could actually walk up to the source of the noise, I spied what was making it: a raccoon feeding noisily on the contents of a decidedly full trash can. I stood a few minutes and took some pictures. Unconcerned about me, the animal kept angling for ways to get at the food scraps in the can. At first it was pulling stuff thru the steel mesh, then it got up on top of the can, dipping its head and torso in for maximum effectiveness. Quite a show of nimbleness. I was reminded of the time a couple years ago when I saw a baby skunk at the West Harlem Piers in Riverside Park at 125th Street, and my friend, CBC Radio 3 host Grant Lawrence saw a white sturgeon in his hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia. Click here to see all the photos I took of the raccoon tonight: