I’ve been wanting to visit the newly refurbished and reopened High Bridge between Manhattan and the Bronx. It’s within walking distance of where I live, but I never managed it until yesterday. Good excuse: the NYC Urban Sketchers were meeting there to record their impressions. That was the push I needed.

I’m still having my issues with architecture–why are its details so confounding to me?–so I decided to just experiment with my drawing and see what happened. In the top sketched I managed to allow the trees to obscure much of the tower. The more stark view without the foliage didn’t work as well.

I brought my colored pencils, intending to use them alone, but the combination of man-made in ink and nature in pencil was fun to explore. I did the fence above the staircase to the bridge (long and steep…quite the climb on the return trip), and close to the Bronx side, foliage around stone steps, made mysterious by all the natural growth and shadows.

All the layers of highways ramps made a beautiful composition of shapes; very difficult for me to reproduce though. Paging the Jetsons…

When having trouble with the man-made, Mother Nature is always accommodating.

This simple unfinished sketch of the river view uptown may be my favorite actually. The water appeared to be very green when looking uptown, but blue on the downtown side. I’m sure there’s an explanation involving physics…

Here’s a photo of the downtown view. I often walk the Macomb’s Dam bridge, which you can see in the far distance, to go to Yankee Stadium, which is right on the other side in the Bronx. You can’t linger there; the narrow path always contains many bicycles (not to mention strollers and shopping carts), so you need to keep your wits about you. Also, the cars zooming by are not conducive to reverie. But it’s a nice view too.

The High Bridge, on the other hand, even has benches for earnest conversations (I sat next to one), or just for enjoying a beautiful September day.

You can read about it here and here. And thanks to NYC Urban Sketchers for the excuse to finally visit. I’ll be returning.