I delivered dry bulk and flat bed commodities here & there across LI for 15 years. At 3 am there would often be traffic jams on the LIE & BQE. I used to think "It's 3 am in the frikkin' morning. Where the HELL are you people going? Go the frig home and go to bed!"
My favorite trip 'round there was to deliver dry bulk limestone to Queens, then cut across the Willie B* and Delancey through the tunnel, then load fly ash out of the power plant in Joisey City to go back North. The trip across Manhattan was like visiting three or four separate countries in a few miles - The East Village, SOHO, Chinatown, The gallery district, and so forth. You get a great view of the assorted 'wildlife' from 10 feet in the air. I remember this one guy who was the spittin' image of Charlie Manson, bumming cigarettes in the same spot every day. Then the squeegee dudes near the tunnel. The squeegee dudes are all union. Ever see them out on a National Holiday? Me neither. Union.
* The Willie B was in such rough shape then, (around 16 years ago) that they used to close the inner roadway, as they were afraid it was going to collapse. When I got to the Manhattan side, you could see there were 12 X 12 timbers to hold up the former vertical steel beams that had rusted through and fallen down. I used to wonder if each trip across would be the last, especially on a windy day, when traffic on the inbound side was bumper to bumper and at a full stop, and the vehicles on the other side were bouncing along. From an engineering standpoint, that's perhaps not the most safe stress load for a rickety old rusty bridge? I hear they've refurbed the bridge since then.
