Meet me at the moraine
13 July 2025
I’d always wondered why is there a big ridge that runs along Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn and along all of those parks and cemeteries in Queens? So much of New York City is flat but there are randomly some steep hills….
It turns out the hills were created 10,000 years ago by the glaciers that covered most of North America, the same process that created the icy land bridge across the Bering Strait and allowed humans to walk from Siberia to Alaska for the first time. The glaciers crept all the way down New York State and stopped just a few miles short of the ocean, smack dab in the middle of Brooklyn and Queens. It pushed a bunch of rocks and debris in front of it, which stayed as a long, gentle, snaking hill called a moraine, even after the glacier melted. I wanted to bike along the ridge of the moraine for as long as possible.
I was so excited for this ride. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, mapping the route at work, even looking at google street view to see what the roads looked like beforehand.
Photo by Francesca
Emily, Francesca, and I met at Lincoln Terrace Park in Crown Heights. We biked through Brownsville, East New York, Cypress Hills. We pushhheddd up one really steep block of Miller Ave, like San Francisco-steep, people on Strava called it the “Miller Wall.” Through Highland Park, the cemeteries, and Forest Park, we were following the Brooklyn-Queens Greenway, which was less of a bike path and more of a quaint route suggestion, a relic from the first wave of bike awareness in city planning. In Forest Park we paused a long while to forage raspberries.
We rode through Forest Hills and Kew Gardens and ended up in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, collapsing on the grass in front of the Unisphere. The air was thick with barbecue smoke and dust kicked up from raucous volleyball games. The park was an amazing vibe, it was a perfect warm sweaty day and everyone was there. We went into the Queens Museum to see the scale model of the city that they made for the World’s Fair in the 60s.
Photo by Emily
We were starving so we got tacos near the park, in Corona. Then we rode to eastern Flushing, a part of the city I’d never been. Quiet streets, lots of Korean businesses. We got these ice-cold sour noodle soups and laughed and laughed.
Our dessert stomachs were of course not yet full so we went to the Chinatown part of Flushing and ate shave ice piled high with jellies, tapioca, etc.
Then finally in the warm night we rode straight home, no twisting along the moraine.