Running for Your Life: The Perils of Coastal Living

Want to get a sense of why – suddenly – New York City became America’s largest urban evacuation zone.

The sad, moving spectacle of Breezy Point, the Rockaways, and the Jersey Shore (yes, the Sitch and Snook as spokescharacters) aside, look at the view to New York Harbor and Lady Liberty while walking/running on 23rd Street in Brooklyn between Seventh and Sixth avenues. It’s the most dramatic vantage that I know of to illustrate how low the lowlands are at the sea and why Red Hook and the Gowanus stand a chance of being permanently inundated if water levels continue to rise as they have in recent years.

What also strikes me is how Brooklyn – unlike a second lowlands place, New Orleans, which, of course, has fewer options, chose Green-Wood Cemetery, the highest ground – for its final resting place (see the Athena monument, at right, waving at her distant sister, Lady Liberty).

Suddenly homes on the hill in New York City have even more reason to be more expensive than their weight in gold.

Running for Your Life: My Next Marathon – Reading Moby-Dick