For all intents and purposes my Green Trail bicycle adventure through Midtown began across the way from Frank Guido’s Little Italy, a Neapolitan restaurant and bar, a local’s favorite.
Attached high up on the exterior of the building, a red boot of Italy traced in neon tubes hangs off the pale yellow brick. The famous peninsula, resembling the silhouette of a hefty gam in ruffled garters, looks less like a bistro and more like an advertisement for a high-kicking can-can — bloomers and knickers joint.
Inside, it’s someone’s birthday. Mylar balloons hover up mid-way in the air.
Just down the block from Tubby’s bar, here in the parking lot across from Guido’s, an .08 mile section of an ADA-accessible asphalted trail begins, said to follow the path of the former Ulster & Delaware Railroad Corridor.
This section of the trail, from Cornell St down to the Kingston Plaza parking lot, is known as the Midline Linear Park and it was Jimmy Ha’s recommendation that I look into it.
“Lots of sketchy people,” Ha confided. “Today I jogged by a homeless-looking man wielding a four-foot pole, smashing it over and over against a recycling bin.”
Ha nodded wisely, as if he understood the reasoning of the disturbed man.
“There’s drug dealers and homeless picnics, but there’s also families walking their kids, runners, bikers, Narcan stations, piles of garbage, but really well-maintained garbage cans and lighting, but also eBikers nearly hitting you and cars not yielding at crosswalks. And it’s also an extremely convenient way to get between Downtown, Midtown and Uptown,” Ha adjudged. “And it’s environmentally friendly but also you get whiffs of industrial chemicals…”
The Yin inseparable from the Yang, Ha made it all sound so dazzling. But this day the outdoor scene at the beginning of the trail was sparse and no one was attacking trash receptacles. There were just a few lonely souls sitting on park benches staring into their phones, which was reassuring in its familiarity.
Before the Internet blossomed, righteous and upright citizens in an urban environment of decades-gone-past expected to see smacked-out citizens lingering on park benches. Sort of a feature of urban environments. “Lost in a dope dream”, a hygienic and condescendingly sober bypasser might say, unwilling to imagine just what was so compelling in the movie reel of pictures playing in a junkie’s head.
Now, that the dreams and fantasies of the Internet have proliferated, everyone knows a version of what it’s like. Constructed to satisfy algorithms, doctored increasingly by artificial intelligence, the human being sitting on the park bench is just a techno-junky addicted to the doom scroll, the swipe left and the endless video and comment parade. In real life outside the screen, the rewards of dopamine and serotonin are fewer and farther in between. Atrophied social skills result, yes, but also increased earning potential. Someone sitting on a park bench in Kingston might be internet famous in Tokyo.
Crossing over Cornell to the next block, a man wearing a T-shirt with a Batman symbol finishes smoking a blunt and he hawks phlegm and spits it into the grass and comes towards me with blazing red, tired eyes. As he walks past, he looks homeless — unshaven for a week, in dirty jeans and mussed hair — but then again, I check all the same boxes.
A woman walks her dog to the head of the path and is just about to start the walk alongside the giant painted murals there, the perspectives and inspired poetry of The Black Experience, pain and hope and perseverance writ and scrawled 20 feet tall, when the woman catches sight of my rust-colored bicycle, my dirty jeans and unshaven appearance. The pen and a pad is not much to recommend myself in a world of smart watches and computer tablets. Who stands around on a bike path writing in a notebook during a work day? She backtracks and walks her dog back up Cornell Street towards Tubby’s.
From the start, the experience has all the hallmarks of social anxiety playing out in public, everyone cautious about interacting with everyone else or just indifferent, pursuing some flavor of high.
Past the murals, the trail has got grass patches, benches, shade and even a picnic table. Cross O’Neil and the asphalt-paved path starts to descend while hilly vegetation rises to either side. Here a bicyclist can pick up speed and progress is marked every block by passing through the short tunnels underneath the roads of Downs, Elmendorf and Albany Ave passing overhead.
There really is Narcan supplied and at the ready like Ha said, in bright red bird-boxes. They’ve been placed at two locations just outside the short tunnels as if those most in danger of overdosing resembled a species of troll known to gather in the shadows of the stone arches made by the roads overhead.
Anti-overdose bird-boxes can only be society’s admission that the allure of intravenously delivered narcotics continues to be stronger than the prohibitions against them, and that the causes behind gobbling pharmaceutical pills could be rooted deeper than a simple lack of willpower.
Near to the Elmendorf overpass, just up the set of stairs is a natural gas transfer point, the pipes emerging from beneath crushed rock, fenced in with barbed-wire. Here a strange metal wind blows through the pipes, the methane breeze never stops hissing.
Here was a group of young men gathered in a circle and the tang of marijuana was again in the air.
Women, men, other teenagers, the elderly, police officers and even dogs, everyone recognizes the dangerous potential which comes from walking alone past a group boiling with testosterone, the gift of the Y chromosome. The fact is the prefrontal cortex of a young man isn’t fully formed until 25 years of age. In matters requiring reasoning, problem solving and impulse control, they are badly disadvantaged. Even in the time of Caesar they knew it. During periods of societal stress, it was forbidden for more than two men, young or old, to gather in public. They still make the most willing soldiers.
Keep moving through the tunnel of the Albany overpass. On the bicycle there is less chance of getting molested by word or deed, and anyway, like in the city, one builds up kinetic energy directly proportional to one’s mass and the square of one’s velocity. A U-lock always serves as a sort of righteous hammer at the ready.
Then the dirt and vegetation walls of the corridor fall away. The space opens up wide and natural, which is to say, overgrown, disheveled, and swampy— just the way nature likes it. One has escaped the confines of the city if only for the one-hundred yards or so before passing under the Colonel Chandler Drive overpass, the conduit to Interstate 87 from the roundabout on Broadway. The path then runs alongside a fence with out of service train cars resting on the other side and then the train cars of the tourist service, the very much active Catskill Railroad.
The linear park is midtown’s portion of Kingston’s grand vision of the Greenline, a sort of healthy living exercise corridor which was transformed from a condition of squalor and neglect to encourage a better community Feng Shui.
County Executive-at-the-time Mike Hein presented his thoughts on the desirability of the creation of the Midtown Linear Park to the Riverview Missionary Baptist Church.
Overgrown and strewn with litter and junk, he said it was. Conducive to crime and nuisance activities, he complained. Noise and air pollution from diesel train operations were a problem as was disruption of neighborhoods and house foundations, the shaking from the trains. Hein brought with him photographs of the horrorshow to prove it and he was an effective salesman for what could be though some of it was pie in the sky.
He singled out the dichotomy of the supermarket versus the convenience store, providing photographs of a dirty and dingy, graffitti’d exterior side by side with rows of fresh vegetables.
The creation of the linear park would somehow manifest one in place of the other.
He identified much-needed park space for children and families in Midtown Kingston, and no one could deny it. Healthier families led to stronger communities and an improved quality of life. All this from connecting Midtown Kingston to the Kingston Plaza.
The calendar days flicked past like the pages in a flipbook and by 2018, the county had received $1,508,000 from the Department of Transportation to which the legislature added another $377,000 in matching funds, and by the summer of 2021 the old railroad tracks had been ripped out, stairs had been built, stone arches of the overpasses had been repaired, the trail had been widened, the sides of the trail had been stabilized with an eye to the vegetation and trees, crushed stone had been laid and compacted, asphalt would soon be poured over and work was getting done to fix up the Cornell and O’Neil street intersections.
To see it now, improved by a million light years, the transformation continues.
Across the almost mile-long stretch, there and back, I didn’t witness any overtly furtive or dubious meetings. Nobody was shooting up. Nobody was drug dealing per se, just drug smoking, which doesn’t necessarily rule the former out. Fathers and daughters rode bikes. People walked dogs. Ha was right that the cars didn’t stop when crossing the intervening streets between the trails. A daredevil scooter-rider did blast past me with a strange horn and shouting unintelligible words.
At Colonel Chandler Drive — the overpass formed by the wide lanes stretching from the roundabout to Interstate 87 — some men wearing dirty jeans have scrambled up deep underneath the overpass, far from the trail, to drink beer and listen to the songs from a homeland far away.
The ironic thing is, the people who look like they have the least, they’re the most relaxed. It’s the people who look like they’ve gathered possessions and socked resources away in bank accounts — they must be the most uptight on the trail. The most to lose under the sunny blue sky.
Just beyond is the terminus of the Catskill Railroad and the train cars of the Catskill Flyer. And beyond that Brad Jordan’s asphalted outpost of strip malls, where the Hannaford grocery store is situated and the main hub of the Ulster County Area Transit waits and rumbles. The buses come and go from all over and in the interstices a lively social scene has sprung up, with many gathered here having no interest in going anywhere. At least not by bus.
Two gentlemen sit together on a bench smoking cigarettes near the idling diesel engine locomotive.
One in wrap-around Oakley sunglasses, the lenses colored like the queasy rainbows cast by oil floating in water, the other with short shaved hair, receding. They inquire how my day is going.
“Fair to middling,” I respond, choosing enigma. “Yourselves?”
“Can’t complain,” said the one wearing sunglasses. “And it wouldn’t make a difference if I did. No one would care.”
Shaved head laughs at his friend’s wit. Neither one of them have heard about the attempt by the County Planning Department to solicit the opinion of local area residents and have them weigh in on the further transformations coming to a short section of the linear park between Cornell and O’Neil.
“For real?” sunglasses asks.
“They should make a what-you-call-it,” shaved head struggles to find the word and then snaps his fingers. “An amphitheater. Like a half-shell amphitheater. Live shows. Electric guitar. That’d be sweet.”
The Ulster County planning department really is soliciting input and ideas. The zhushing-up of a portion of the linear park, unnamed as of yet, is a project overseen primarily by Deputy Director of the planning department Kristen Wilson, though department director Dennis Doyle is also keeping tabs.
Reached by telephone, Doyle said, “It’s a little bit bigger than what I would call a pocket park. We’re calling it a community space while we wait for a name.”
For the planning department, the main focus is just trying to figure out what the community would like to see built there. “There’s a number of public meetings. We’ll continue to do outreach and do designs, then moving to several design alternatives, then move to preferred design, then move from preferred design to actual construction drawings.”
With an eye to gauging the fluctuating markets of both building supplies and political ideas, Doyle is loathe to predict just when the vision will be realized. While making clear it’s not a promise, he cautiously offers that by next January the design process could be wrapped up and that observers could hope to see the blueprint turned to action.
“Bidding that out and finding the additional funds, that’s a reasonable time frame,” Doyle said, though he noted that they had come in under budget during the initial project.
“We had state money and we had money from community foundations for that construction. When we finished up, we had funding left over for the design piece of this, and we had a lot of talk with the community when we did the Midtown Linear Park about what to do with that space.”
A consulting firm out of Pennsylvania and a local design team in Kingston, Port Architecture and KaN Landscape Designers respectively, (pronounced like Shaka Khan) are already on board through the initial stages of the process.
“They did the post office park for the city,” Doyle said, meaning KaN.
On Tuesday, May 15, Wilson held a community open house event at the Broadway Bubble and a site walk guided by the Kingston YMCA Farm project. The intent was to solicit feedback and observations and have gathered residents envision what the park can become.
Whatever else it will be, it is the juncture for at least four other rail-trails spider webbing through the Hudson Valley.
There’s the partially completed O&W Rail Trail, which starts at Washington Avenue next to the Super 8 Motel parking lot and endeavors to run out to Ellenville, in part along Route 209. There’s the Wallkill Valley Rail Trail which arrives from New Paltz by crossing the Rosendale trestle, a suspended walking bridge which all fall-time leaf-peeper’s are compelled to make a pilgrimage to see at least once in their life.
A proposed link is also being developed from Kingston to the Ashokan Reservoir Rail Trail, with the goal of avoiding the need to ride along the shoulder of Route 28, one of the more accident-prone stretches of highway in Ulster County.
And then Kingston’s Greenline, after passing through Midtown, finds its way down to the Strand and north from Kingston Point Beach, up along the river to cross the Rhinecliff Bridge into Dutchess County and beyond. The humble .08 mile stretch of the Midtown Linear Park is considered part of the Empire State Rail Trail, a 750 mile path from New York City up through to the Champlain Valley and Adirondacks, or veer westerly to Buffalo.
Ha, who is a big fan of Cormack McCarthy’s apocalyptic book The Road, sees the practical possibilities should travel by interstate and highway become impossible.
“A vibrant, accessible, inclusive public space, and ADA compliant,” says Ha. “Perfect for pushing shopping carts full of belongings from town to town, following job opportunities or food supplies.”
For now, a 10-month public engagement and planning process to develop a community-driven design for this space on the Midtown Linear Park between Cornell and Downs Streets is ongoing. A survey to share thoughts on what could improve the pocket park can be found on Participate Ulster.
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