The Reverse Commute
On Wednesdays I drive down towards downtown San Diego, which is where the University of San Diego is located. I was a commuter in New York City for years, but have never been in that groove (a.k.a. rut) here in San Diego. I teach from 7pm to 9:50pm on Wednesday nights and will do so through May of next year (actually 7pm to 8:50pm in the Spring). That has me leaving home at about 5pm and heading south towards the city. Naturally, that means I am driving against the flow of the normal commute. While the traffic here in San Diego County can be Southern California heavy, it is almost never as bad as in the Los Angeles basin, where I try very hard to never find myself if at all possible. The thing about L.A. is that it is so sprawled out, it always strikes me as impossible to tell which way is the natural commutation flow. L.A. just seems to be messy and busy in every direction to a non-Angelino like me. At least San Diego seems to be more directional in its commutation pattern like I was used to experience in N.Y.C..
Going against the flow as I drive always seem to have a feeling of empowerment. I sit in my Tesla X, usually with my sunglasses shielding me from that intense West Coast setting sun, listening to streaming internet radio on something like The Homeward Bound station, which is kind of appropriately contrarian in a sense. There is a turn off at Friars Road, named, I imagine, for Friar Junipero Serra, who founded the first of the California network of Franciscan missions at Mission San Diego de Alcala. That mission was initially located at Presidio Park high on a bluff across the San Diego River from the alternate bluff location of the University of San Diego. The University sits on what was called Alcala Heights, which is a low mountain plateau that overlooks Mission Bay towards the blue Pacific beyond. The University, founded in 1949, only a scant 72 years ago, has the distinction of being considered by some to be the mot beautiful college campus in America.
It is amazing to me to think that in such a recent time there was a 100 acre tract of amazing hilltop land so near the center of such a beautiful city as San Diego. It is a testament to the post-war growth of this land of eternal sunshine that the campus now stands so central to the downtown area. That seems to be the case with other important sites here in San Diego like the main airport (formerly known as Lindbergh Field) and the world-famous Zoo, both of which are located in such a central place (just south of Presidio Park) so as to bear witness to the area’s inability to anticipate the tremendous pace of growth of the city and county. Normally, a modern airport or a Zoo for that matter is nearer the outskirts of the city, not in the main central corridor. The airport is so close to downtown that when you land you can literally see yourself depriving below the altitude of the nearby buildings, making you feel all the more weird about landing in the middle of a city. One might imagine that some day soon we might hear about San Diego deciding to build a new big international airport further outside the city, but the truth is that they just approved a $3 billion plan to expand their Terminal 1, so it seems unlikely to be anything that will take place during my lifetime.
In the evening, after my class ends, the roads are virtually empty and I sail home in the Tesla magic carpet, past the old mission site on the Presidio Park bluff, up the river to the 163, past the Miramar Naval Air Station (the scene of the original Top Gun fighter warfare school) followed by a leisurely jaunt past Poway, ranch’s Bernardo and Escondido to our little hilltop just this side of the Lawrence Welk Village, now owned and operated by Marriott. Doing this drive once a week, at night and against commuter traffic reminds me of what commuting was like in the bad old days.
I started off adulthood (post Business School) living in Bayside, Queens. There were three ways to get into the City and none of them was especially great. You could take an express bus that dropped you and picked you up on Madison Avenue in midtown (pretty convenient to my office by 1 block), there was a City bus to the subway in Flushing (the #7 line), or there was the driving to park at the old Shea Stadium, where you could then also catch the #7 train, which took you into Times Square with a stop at Grand Central (6 blocks to my office). Taking the LIRR into Penn Station would only make sense if you worked in the Penn Station area, and driving and parking in the City was simply prohibitively expensive. One of my favorite comments about living in New York City is that everyone lies about two things: how much they earn and how long their commute it. No matter what you do, almost no one has a commute less than an hour door-to-door. My commute from Bayside was ….. about an hour.
Very soon after moving to NYC, I bought a house on Long Island and moved out. I was there less than a year, and during that year I got engaged, married and fully mortgaged with a house the mortgage lady thought was too expensive for a young couple. I seem to recall that my rent for the one bedroom in Bayside was $400/mo. And the mortgage and escrow on the starter house (three bedrooms, 1.5 baths) something like $610/mo. before the tax deduction. Those were the days of high finance where an 8% mortgage seemed like a bargain with rates soon skyrocketing into the double digits. The commute from Rockville Centre, Long Island involved a ten minute walk to the station and then a 36 scheduled minute train ride on the LIRR into Penn Station followed by a walk cross-town or a shared cab or two subways (the shuttle and the #1 from Times Square to Penn). Whatever anyone tells you about how they use their time commuting to read, catch up on inbox work, play bards, listen to music or just unwind, don’t believe it. That is all less about taking advantage of quiet time than it is about distracting yourself from the mind-numbing and frustrating process of commuting twice a day.
I once worked for a guy who had a daily 2.5-3 hour commute each way each day. His salvation was the ability to sleep on the trains, but the price was occasionally getting hauled into the New Haven MetroNorth rail yard for the night. You would think that would be disallowed, but in the 70’s MetroNorth and LIRR were on the brink of fiscal insolvency so night watchmen were a luxury often overlooked. It was during those years that subway graffiti art reached its heyday and rumpled businessmen rode in on the early morning trains to go shower at their athletic clubs.
Once I moved from the starter house to the big, beautiful stone and brick house in the northern part of RVC, I sprang for a parking pass so I could drive to the train station for that scheduled 36 minute rise to Penn Station. By the way, if you wonder why I keep calling it 36 scheduled minutes, it is because it was usually more like 50-60 minutes after stopping once at Jamaica Station. The motto of the LIRR commuter trying to get home (unless he rode the direct Port Washington line) was “Ya maka Jamaica, ya maka your home.” In other words, many an hour was spent sitting in the tunnel beneath the East River or on a siding in Long Island City while the MTA sorted itself out. The station parking used to fill up early, but that was no problem for me since I used to catch the 5:14am train (don’t ask why, because I have no good answers). My favorite RVC story is about a guy I know who became a billionaire in family real estate (he inherited the business and then grew it nicely). He still lived in the same house he always lived in in northern RVC. But to beat the station parking problem, he simply bought the nearest small commercial building and rented it out leaving himself the one parking spot fifty feet from the station door. That is one of the best uses of acquired wealth I’ve ever heard of. Now if he could only do that with a train seat…
After Rockville Centre for thirteen years of LIRR riding, I moved into the City, first into Battery Park City, then Tudor City, then Union Square. I became a committed downtown denizen eventually landing for ten years in the South Street Seaport, moving there when the Fulton Fish market was still going strong but destined to move up the Hunts Point in the Bronx to a new modern air-conditioned facility that the local unions and mob bosses fought off for a few years on account of its expected impact on the fish bootlegging game. After a few years they acceded to the move, probably only because they had figured out how to scam the new system. One of my great moments in NYC sports took place one morning at the fish market when a policeman and a CIty inspector were questioning a gumba who had a swordfish in his car trunk. It was like a scene out of My Blue Heaven when Steve Martin says to the police, ‘what fish? I don’t know nothin’ about no fish’.
While my train and car commuting was over, I still had years ahead of me of intra-City commutation. I certainly rode the subway at times, but I have to admit that surface transportation was much more my preference. I was lucky enough to have been given a car and driver by Bankers Trust and then Deutsche Bank. My guy, Fernando, came to me after our Chairman, Frank Newman, gave me a ride uptown in his car in 2018 after I had been put on the Management Committee. It was a stormy day in New York and it was literally pouring when Frank had his driver drop me off on a street corner on the West Side Highway so as not to take him out of his way. The next day Frank called me to say I should have a car and driver of my own. It was a great and prideful day, but I quickly found that a car and driver were a great convenience and a great burden. Keeping another human being busy enough to justify your egotistical perk of a car and driver was hard for me even though Fernando became a wonderful friend. I even kept him on after leaving Deutsche Bank, more as a favor to him than anything else. At the time, my ridiculously short commute was from 15th Street and Park to 12th Street and Broadway. That distance is literally about 1,000 feet or 2.5 minutes of walking time if the lights were accommodative.
Now I drive 42 miles to campus and it takes me 36 scheduled minutes (sound familiar). Going probably takes me 40 minutes, but zipping home at 10pm probably takes me just 30 minutes in the Tesla. The best part is that I don’t have to lie about my commute any more due to the reverse commute…unless I get stopped for speeding.