Our Metropolis

Cross-Bronx Walk, the Bronx

2009-05-12T19:41:00.015-04:00

PAWNIT. DREAMLAND PLUS. PAPPAS PIZZERIA. COLONY FRIED CHICKEN.

Acute and obtuse intersections, a convergence of maze-land streets with too much hubris to run straight and perpendicular, where the Prospect 2/5 train screeches overhead, over this disconcerting web of bi-ways that run through Mr. Bronck’s asphalted land.

At this hot urban confluence of people and the things that move them, my friend meets me. He has run a race through and around the Bronx zoo, and he looks like he’s run a race with the sun beating down on him, and the combination of this look and the impact it must inevitably have on his spirit now, makes him say, “You sure you don’t want to hop that train a bit farther south? Be closer to Manhattan?” “No. Let’s walk.” “Where are we, anyway?” “I don’t know. You told me to get off the train. So I got off.” He’d told me on a cell call to get off the train where I was. I was on the elevated 2/5, the doors opened, so I left, and came down here. “Well,” he says. “Let’s go then.”

E160 Street and Union Avenue lead us to the extensive McKinley Houses, a semi-autonomous-looking city of beige brick giants and hundreds of neatly stacked little windows, a NYCHA housing outfit. The beige and tan monoliths reach in exasperation over the bare tree boughs to the unseasonably hellish sun. The bricks sizzle. They seem to relish it. We begin to sizzle. We do not relish it.

Chicken bones and smudges of dog shit on the sidewalk lead the way north. Some struggling trees hide the pavement from unwanted sun, but the sweat begins to pour.

"Let me tell ya, the Bronx zoo was fun."

"Yeah?"

"You could see the gorillas playing with each other. Obviously playing. You know, we're basically gorillas, they're basically us. Wild."

"I remember learning that we're also basically bananas, genetically."

To the left, people quietly organize the trash outside neat two-story row houses. To the right, lush weeds reclaim the steep slope of an empty lot. The greenery refreshes, right up to the granite foundation of an old church. Graffiti covers the stones, but the artists have left holes hear and there that reveal the sparkling ingredients of granite. A short, inconsequential building, though stately in its declaration of presence against the street: Unlike the other buildings—the row houses, the apartment blocks—this old church runs far up, close to the sidewalk edge, only a couple of feet shy of standing flush with the grey street. The pointed windows at street level are long-barred, the iron gratings rusty and eaten through by a century of wet springs and humid New York summers. The old wooden door at the street is locked and fixed permanently shut with heavy slabs of unfinished wood. But around the corner we see the functioning entrance to this functioning church. A bucolic, winding path leads through spring orchids and roses up to the open doors of the sanctuary. Respite from Bronck's New-World sun. We take a left.

A group of men are hanging around a stoop. A New York pastime, past present and future. But there's an aggressive weight here, and all eyes turn to me and my exhausted friend. We cross to the other side of the street. Immediately, the guilt.

"Why did we cross?" I say. The sun glares strongest on this side of the street.

"Caution. Prejudice. Both, I guess. And intuition, maybe."

"I don't like that."

"They’re just talking. But we both did it."

"Let's go that way, down the hill across the street."

A precipitous stroll down the street gives way to another verdant, empty lot pockmarked by little piles of bricks, a heap of cinderblocks, and a lone, lean, tawny, leafless tree stretching out over some rubble. Facing this lot from across the street stands an extraordinary structure. Its ornate facade and its position at the apex of another steep slope recall a baroque Sicilian cathedral. The church demands respect like its southern Italian relation. It commands the South Bronx from a height. From the sidewalk in front of its doors we look out across a wide valley. Ahead, on the other side of the valley, on the steep slopes corresponding to us, jumbles of prewar apartment blocks rise in lines, great brick hulks rising slightly behind each other to the clime of their slope. Much as the church next to us appears stolen from Sicily’s hilly towns, the rows of buildings across the valley stand like medieval Italian citadels, or rather, an ancient walled city from the Levant: This part of the South Bronx extends forever; it would take a week to walk from one end to the other; this is Nineveh of the Old Testament. And 3rdAvenue snakes through the valley. We take 3rd Avenue to 168, and cross Park Avenue, cross Morris Avenue, end up at Grand Concourse and 165.

We’re now climbing through the potholed roads of Nineveh. The sun strengthens its attack. The sweat, the sweat. I notice a battered architectural treasure that briefly tells of the neighborhood’s history. A single-story church with three elaborately carved entrances. CHURCH OF GOD OF PROPHECY. And above this sign, worked into the concrete of the facade, a set of tablets each with a Jewish star, weather-sanded, worn, but visible, eerily triumphant, and surprisingly unaltered through the conversion of the synagogue to a church. Then, under one of the arches, behind a fluorescent light fixture, in Hebrew: HOUSE OF GOD.

The hill continues. At its height, another grand panorama. The elevated tracks of the 4 train cut across the view. The precipitous path down leads to a large, orderly green park whose trees are spectacles of white and pink blossoms. Farther, across a blue sliver that is the Harlem River, the cliffs and citadels of Washington Heights command the Bronx from Manhattan. We’ve come as far east as we’re willing to go. We descend, sun-beaten, to the park and catch a bus in front of the new Yankee Stadium.

My friend: “I suppose we’re decamping the South Bronx for the known comforts of the South Heights.”

The bus pulls into the street and crosses the 161 Street bridge into Manhattan.

Borough Park, Brooklyn

2009-02-21T22:01:00.019-05:00

Sixteenth Avenue at Fortieth Street; here the borough’s devout “park” introduces itself to me. A steely crisp wintry quiet, passive and blue, tickles the air. The wind blows slightly, taking with it incantations of Yiddish then and now. Men on the avenue sport the ubiquitous black coat and black hat; women stroll by wearing long skirts, thick leggings, and dark, bulky shoes. This dressing custom lends a sense of severe order to the neighborhood; I become ever more aware of myself as a stranger.

But I’ve arranged to share the experience with a knowledgeable friend; he has a mission in Borough Park that brings him close to the community. “What are you looking for?” I say once we meet on a corner. “A special book on medieval European Hebrew grammar,” he says, not looking to me but rather probing up and down 16th Ave, unsure which way to go. This book is to be found at a very particular store nearby, a Jewish academic-religious materials hotspot.

Disrupting all observing thoughts: The bang of a large metal door against a brick wall; a gaggle of boys in yarmulkes and with side-curls bursts from a building. They flee in all conceivable directions, smiling, screaming, stomping. A tall man in black, this man hidden behind his black beard and under the brim of a black hat; this man with a youth’s eyes staring out from a costume of black walks after the children. He shows no reaction to the joviality and rambunctious, incorrigible excitement of the boys. But where he walks, they follow. This tall Hasid moves slowly, deliberately; the bopping kids go where he goes, revolving round him like moons and satellites.

We pass a “shomer shobbos” barber shop, crave the offerings in the window of “Shlomy’s Heimishe Bakery”, and arrive at “J. Biegeleisen Hebrew Books”, our destination at 44th Street and 16th Avenue. Inside, a murmuring pidgin reaches me: The speech of Yiddish and English blended into a distinct tongue that compliments musty shelves of earthy-colored tomes filled with the foreign wisdom of centuries, in Hebrew, in Aramaic, in Yiddish. Men wear black hats and delicate fringes hang below their waists. They skim the dense shelves. Hebrew academic books, bible commentaries; the owner asks a customer how he’s doing. “Baruch Hashem,” the customer says—“Blessed is God (that all’s well with me).” Books on assorted topics: marriage, the Sabbath, tracts on Torah commentary, and one that stands out to me. With an illustrated cover, it contrasts to the austere—though handsome—covers around it. The illustration depicts a flamboyant and enchanting image. My friend translates and explains. It’s the journal of a famous rabbi who excelled as a chief student of a major 15th-16th century mystic from Safed in the Galilee. The journal records his visions while studying under the Jewish mystic.

“Did you find the book?” I look up from the journal. My friend holds a volume, but looks around anxiously. Then he says, “This place is best if you know the guy presiding over it, then he’d help you find what you need.” “You should have spoken Yiddish,” I say. My friend smiles wryly. I scan the sea of tractates. A man dressed customarily in black rides by outside on a bicycle. Two women pass by. The door opens and a man who looks my age rolls in a wide cart piled high with new orders for “J. Biegeleisen Hebrew Books”.

With the book of medieval European Hebrew grammar in tow, my friend and I hit the street. I notice how many of the apartment houses have unusually extended terraces, and we suppose it’s so residents can build a sukkah to celebrate the Jewish Autumn festival of Sukkot. A sukkah is a four-sided booth with branches, bamboo, or wooden slats for a roof. People in the sukkah must be able to gaze at the stars through the ceiling. That’s why these terraces aren’t stacked atop each other, but diagonally from the street to the roof, so that edifices have a zigzag pattern of generously deep terraces.

Often a normally structured house has a sign that promotes its abnormal use: “Beis Midrash”—a yeshiva or house of religious study. We’re not in any way surprised; this is the center of the Babover sect of Hasidism. We come to 18th Avenue. A large church straddles the road, and I’m thinking this is the cliff-edge of Borough Park’s Jewish enclave. But Hasidim walk by the church, some pulling suitcases on wheels. My friend says, “A church with Hasidim walking back and forth in front of it is more or less interesting.” But I’m in a wonder-trance: this Hasidic neighborhood now seems boundless. The city blocks continue, the Hasidic city blocks, swallowing up the churches, converting homes into yeshivas and little synagogues. Churches in Borough Park are ironic outposts of Christianity in a mass of Eastern European Jewry.

Hunger sets in, as it always does. “Lieberman’s Dairy Luncheonette” cries out for us, curious outsider patrons. It’s glatt kosher, which in this case means strictly dairy through and through. My friend gets a doughnut and coffee. This is a spot where regulars wear yarmulkes and fringes. Two such guys lounge at the counter, arguing loudly in Yiddish. The woman behind the counter asks them, “What do you boys do anyway?” Their talking halts immediately; they look at each other; they explode laughing; and one says to the woman, “What do we do? We look for jobs!”

Past the “Bobover Yeshiva” there’s the “Corner Café”. Everyone inside is in Hasidic dress—the patrons, the servers, those at the counter. Other than the clientele and management, the establishment wouldn’t fool the most discerning diner connoisseur. There’s the counter; there’re the hash browns; there’re the eggs, and the bottomless coffee, and the sandwiches, and French fries and soda and shakes. But this place is kosher. Hasidic families fill the tables because it’s brunch time, and all across New York City families and friends line diner tables, jittery from mug after mug of diner coffee.

Flushing, Queens

2009-01-20T18:26:00.014-05:00

Here: shimmering scrap yards outline the horizon; collapsed and crunched heaps of industrial detritus; and mud flats, oily spectacles at a high tide, urban swamps of flushed-out pouring rain, or highway runoff, dirty-metallic, putrid and unpopulated stretches between Flushing and All-New York. The 7 train slips past it all in a mechanical elegance matched only by the cars rushing past, shuddering on weaves of roadways, beneath above and beside MTA tracks.

The Flushing subway station burps passengers out onto the intersection of Main Street and Roosevelt Avenue. Out onto a land already teeming with lines upon lines and crowds upon crowds at crosswalks. Buses grumble past; holiday garlands complement the innumerable lit-up signs; signs in Mandarin and Korean and maybe Cantonese; signs assaulting all walkers with indecipherable images of the East; one sign atop another so that it’s unknown what signage is for what shop or market or restaurant, if any.

And food: the sweating and greasy roasting rabbits, chickens, ducks, and swine, all skinned and most headless; these the main selling items, like advertisements, impaled in windows throughout a whole neighborhood’s premiere market streets. Dried anchovies and dried shrimp rest in an eternal reflection of a winter sun, in wooden bins along the sidewalk. They make seas of little dehydrated organic bodies crowded around each other, brittle, weightless, and dead. Their counterparts you find inside the spacious markets: deep bins of live crabs, the legs and pincers rising and falling, the eyes writhing, confused and dreadful of a certain end; oysters and all kinds of mollusk dream under the salt water in gigantic tubs; butchers chop what you like and wipe the blood onto glistening crimson aprons; turtles on display, to be pointed at, chosen, and killed for food. Descriptions in English and Mandarin guide customers. At first we react as if visiting a zoo, mesmerized by organic Others, too strange for nonchalance; then, after a kind of acceptance, fascination alone rules, and the stench of dozens of different fish, and of salty tank water, and of slimy exoskeletons conquers the olfactory much stronger than the alien forms had before excited our senses of sight.

A periodic roar shakes the air. It is the low passing of jets above, on a flight path from the clouds to La Guardia airport. Great noise from above: it is a perfect supplement to the already-raucous character of the streets.

We see, for Westerners like us, the most foreign of all advertisements: flashy, aggressive Chinese movie posters.

Families, bundled up against the stinging winter winds, enjoy fried food and cheap black-market imitation wares.

Ahead stand, at odd angles with the street, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) “Bland Houses.”

In the window of a restaurant hangs the statement: “Where to go when the jellyfish craving hits.” Outside this restaurant a splattering of bubble tea freezes on the sidewalk, the tapioca balls scattered in a crime-scene fashion that begs the intervention of a private investigator.

We are interlocutors in a street drama of mutual misunderstanding; struggling communicators in quick firing inconclusive thoughts about inexplicable storefront curios.

We’re drawn to a Chinese pharmacy. Herbs, roots, ginger, and nuts sit in large bins outside and down the middle of the store. There is a definite emphasis on the largesse of stock in all these shops, as if at the heart of the Chinese patron’s mindset is a demand for Costco-like proportions in a mom-and-pop setting. Sex pills line the shelves at the back wall, all the way to the fifteen-foot ceiling. “American visagra” shows some very explicit and entertaining pictures on the package; “breasts” and “members” would be the most innocuous way to explain the basics of each and every package of Chinese-made sex drive-boosting medicines. On a shelf, apart from the mojo section, are little packages of the enigmatic “Dr. Yale’s Phostose Brain Tonic.”

We join the hordes that migrate along Main Street. On the wall of an arch, beneath the Long Island Railroad, a stained relic: a painting of the world’s fair, mimicking the grandeur at Flushing Meadows Park at the fair’s opening, yet as faded and ignored as the park’s skeleton itself.

Kissena Street drives a wedge into the foot traffic along Main. Two men yell in Mandarin, and hand out flyers. We feel like the only people who don’t understand them. As the eighths-of-a-mile build up, it becomes clear how Flushing may be Chinatown a thousand times over in energy, but surely in its massive, monster-of-an-area size and, above all, those hundreds of signs, hanging out into the street, each an attempt to outdo one before it, to better gain the attention of passersby, until the signs reach nearly as far above the sidewalks as the boulevards, and over the passing cars and trucks.

Even blocks of houses have gone commercial, their front yards paved to hold two parked cars, and no shortage here of great rectangular plaques advertising:

PASSPORT PHOTOS; MONEYGRAM; LUCKY JOY; DUCK; PIG; SQUID; OCTOPUS; FISH MARKET; DOCTORS IMMEDICARE; DENTIST; THRIFT SHOP:

The signs; the shop signs; Main Street an artery clogged with signs; is this New York?

Left on Sanford, pass the grand, Greek-revival-fronted, old Free Synagogue of Flushing. At another left we see the red lights of a fire truck, see the ladder pointed in the air, see a fire truck blocking the street, see crowds gathered around it all. We walk closer. The ladder rests against the roof of a fire house. Firemen escort Santa down a ladder from the roof, Santa waving and smiling to the cheers and laughs of children. The firemen allow kids to sit in the truck’s driver seat, each kid proud with an over-sized fire hat on; parents jump up with the flash of a camera, immortalizing the moment the FDNY saved Santa from a fire house roof.

All the signs have somehow worked. We’re hungry, and go into “Bitgout Tofu & B.B.Q. Restaurant” on Roosevelt Avenue. It’s actually a Korean place. But a wallpaper covers the interior, with characters in Mandarin and Korean. Tea is served up. The restaurant is largely empty except for an entire family, enjoying a meal together.

Outside the orange winter evening light falls heavier and heavier. The signs buzz on slowly at first, but as the light sinks away, a new one fills the neighborhood: the reds and purples and cyans and yellows and greens and pinks of uncountable fluorescent signs lend their collective glow for the night. And the crowds keep on moving because Flushing never gets dark.

Belmont-Fordham, the Bronx

2008-11-15T16:39:00.028-05:00

What streets of mountain steps are these, stretching tall to the aluminum-sided fortresses of the Bronx; heights from which a sleepy Sunday neighborhood huddles for warmth; where strangers pass by below, with a careless glance up the pedestrian ramparts, to us, visitors from snaking express lines. Mute breezes make tears flow. The camera clicks this world into digital view, and we must descend, to roam, up and down asphalt precipices, one tenement block to the next.

The wide trench of the Metro North commuter line, this steel-and-concrete river through urban frontier, cuts in front of us. Down, over there, there is a pedestrian walkway to cross, but a series of sudden sounds pierce the calm: a woman, up an anonymous flight, in a building of greater greater-New York anonymity, screams and preaches, curses and accuses, her feminine voice bellowing. There is nothing to record of her words, but her yelling sounds, and we cross to E 183 Street.

In sight is Arthur Avenue, famous Italian-American strip. But on the corner, at 187 Street, a squat old woman, in raspy tone, recounts personal histories at length into a handheld recorder. Something of growing; something obsessive about the 1970s. Beyond her, Arthur Avenue pompously provides a neighborhood transition: things are neat, painted, orderly, quiet, for sale. There’s a Zagat rating in a few windows. On a building wall we see street art that fascinates us for the novelty of its symbols. On a red shield, a fearless, black, two-headed eagle, comically punctuated by the portrait of a man in a tuxedo. All this beside a commanding picture of Christ with a fiery heart. Farther down the avenue a majority of restaurants and bodegas bear the double-headed eagle insignia. And here’s how we discover that it’s tied to Albania: beside a double-headed eagle, a shop’s banner reads “DARDANIA (European Mini Market) Albania, foods, CD’s, DVD, VHS.” So Italian Arthur Ave has gone Albanian. Then that’s what we’ll eat; we step into Gurra Café. We order the combination plate, with three different kinds of sausages and a bowl of warm goat cheese for dipping. Albanian music videos, esoteric impersonations of American pop Hip Hop, bump and bump. The waiter treats us with such deference I almost feel guilty. With toothpicks in our teeth, we hit the street. An old Fiat mysteriously guards an Italian business. Pedestrians eye it cautiously.

Wandering proves bouts of neighborhood bleakness. Like its unpredictable topography—here steep, there a gradual climb—the area’s streets can on one stretch be neat, clipped, and facades carefully painted, and around the next corner a whole floor’s windows could be smashed out, the bars blocking them twisted in spasms. Down one of these warped blocks, a statue of the Virgin Mary blesses a green front yard; folk-art canvases adorn the porch next door. Two pleasant properties on a barbed-wire stretch. All expectations dashed, thrown aside, irrelevant: In Belmont, we exert a prejudicial attitude that faces contradictions on every block. What we thought was not; and what we see is always new.
Then there’s Dorothea Place, of granite-brick pavement, a haven side alley with grander homes. And dead end at the top of a cobble-stoned hill. A man wanders into a home, his shoulders hunched, not a look to us who trespass. For Dorothea Place’s stone paving is a resident’s treasure, and we are strangers on a strange mountain.

A cramped arboretum comes up on the left. There’s a sign: “Fordham-Bedford Lot Busters Community Garden.” Here narrow paths wind through autumn colors, a speck in the concrete Bronx maze.
“Hello,” a woman says. She is old; the leathery skin on her face tight and proud.
We ask about the garden.
“It’s community-owned; this can’t be shut down by the city,” she says.
The woman teaches arts and crafts to neighborhood kids, in the gazebo over there. Right now she is working on a drawing of these trees during high autumn, “so I don’t begin to forget the colors,” she says.
She points out a 150-year-old willow. She says of it, “In the summer it stretches out to the sun, and covers this whole garden. Now it’s cold. It sags like that all winter.”
Down the commercial strip of E Fordham Rd to the Grand Concourse. Stores here sell everything at every price all the time to everybody. The streets teem with hurrying weekend shoppers. Barber shops are full; jean stores blast music on boom boxes; pizza parlors are packed like rush-hour subways; traffic roars; the Metro North chugs in its trench; street vendors shout; the smoke of burning hot dogs fills the air; the elevated 4 line rumbles, and that’s the train we take through the Bronx, over the Harlem River, through Manhattan, south, south, to another of these United Boroughs.

Brighton Beach, Brooklyn

2008-10-12T17:15:00.013-04:00

A jubilant, boisterous Russian language greets me on arrival to Brighton Beach Boulevard. This is the true southern terminus of the borough. It has the genuine character of a foreign world. Not a word of English reaches my ears as I wander from shop to shop; from bookstore to supermarket and from corner to corner. The Q train, shuddering overhead, is making its way to Coney Island. I cross under the elevated tracks onto a more peaceful stretch. These homes are in medium repair: Paint peels away from eaves; splintered doors bear the scars of heavy winters astride the sea. Women in Muslim headdress watch their children from stoops. The neighborhood kids are yelling and playing ball in the private drives between houses. Clouds, which obstruct the sun for some minutes, eventually submit to the repeated triumphs of sunlight. The neighborhood descends into darkness before returning to light.
Oceanview Avenue—these days in view more of the elevated train tracks than any ocean—reveals clusters of single-storey bungalows. The bungalows line side paths and side lanes with names like “Brighton 4 Walk,” and “Brighton 5 Court.” Most of these little buildings are in disrepair, and the lanes and walkways are overgrown with weeds and dominated by the odor of urine. Half-constructed towers of new development rise above this section of bungalows. I observe how not one of the new towers is completed. Each is a steel and concrete skeleton, seemingly abandoned mid-construction. The resulting atmosphere haunts a lonely sightseer like me.

Throughout the area the light of a beach town glows: A soft orange sea light accented by the cool, salty breeze down streets.
On Brighton Beach Boulevard the impressive fruit and vegetable stands are teeming with afternoon customers. It takes the skill of a linebacker to break through the wall of concentrated, shopping bodies. Energy spent like that brings on pangs of hunger. I dash into a tiny establishment on Brighton 2 Street, called Varenichnaya.
For $6.50 I buy a pile of vareniki with potatoes. I look around the place as the cooks prepare my order. Patrons seated at the tables are watching Russian television. A picture of the Hasidic head Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson hangs on the wall beside the kitchen.

I take my food to go. I walk through streets of pre-war coops to the boardwalk. I find a comfortable bench in view of the sand and the green ocean. I open the to-go container. The vareniki are boiled pierogi-type dumplings topped with thin strips of uber-caramalized onions, with a side of sour cream. At first I worry that I won’t be able to finish the whole batch; $6.50 apparently buys you a plentiful pile of vareniki. But I’m hungry, and when I finally finish I remember where I am, and I take a look around. An Anglophone visitor is chatting with a group of men in Russian—testing his skills. Though it’s cold enough for a jacket, two men in swimsuits walk side-by-side on the sand. Far off in the distance I see Coney Island’s Wonder Wheel, unmoving, a mystical shadow. And a strange, pink-yellow, grey-blue sky rests low over the Atlantic. I could sit here till dark, listening to Russian conversations, and watching the sun weaken as it cracks through the ocean clouds.

The Bridge

2008-10-12T17:07:00.003-04:00

I feel like I’ll be walking a half-mile on this ramp before I’m truly on the Brooklyn Bridge. The rooftops and facades of post-industrial America rise up ahead, and I espy a curious sign painted across the exterior of a building: Read God’s Word The Holy Bible Daily. I get it: To read a quotidian dose of the (presumably Christian) bible. But without the tools of punctuation I’m left with more than one message.
Maybe it’s an advertisement for a God-owned daily newspaper called the Holy Bible. Or maybe “God’s Word” isn’t found in hundreds of pages of ancient text, but in a single, three-worded phrase, to be recited daily: “The Holy Bible.” Chanting those three simple words each day promises the devotee an afterlife of enduring happiness and peace.
Grey-bellied clouds hover over the East River. They threaten menace and chaos. I start ascending the concrete slopes of Roebling’s masterpiece. To the right, the Manhattan Bridge rises over Dumbo, but it’s only an illusion, because the rooftops facilitate a disappearing act. The Manhattan Bridge is suddenly out of sight.
The Brooklyn Bridge approach: Redefining Visceral. Lanes of traffic underneath roar and choke and honk, shaking the pedestrian walkway above; those grey clouds sweep in with a mind to consume the sky; helicopters swirl among downtown Manhattan spires; and faraway views of Jersey and Staten Island show unreachable, exotic lands.
The Statue of Liberty emerges. It mollifies the velocity of traffic, the ferocity of the clouds.
The descent into Manhattan is a circus. Hordes of roving tourists wield cameras in an assault of flashes and laughter. The anonymous reporter strains all muscle to dodge the photography. He ducks into the City Hall subway, and flees.

Ozone Park, Queens

2008-09-20T00:24:00.014-04:00

The name Ozone Park conjures the celestial, the open, the pure, recreation and boundlessness. But as I descend that last stair from the elevated subway platform, this place greets me with auto collision repair shops and barred-up furniture outlets. That, and the raucous outer-outer-borough-ness of the A train overhead.
Ozone Park: It’s a buffer between greater Brooklyn and Queens, and the ozone-blue skies and waters of Rockaway Beach.

An impulsive stroll down 92 Street reveals neat rows of gabled houses. For Ozone Park, this is cookie-cutter. And there’s room for more. Amid a seemingly endless zone of suburban housing stock is a new construction of three two-family homes, one after the other, each sharing its neighbor’s brick wall. A “for sale” sign hangs outside on the green lawn.

“This is kind of an impenetrable neighborhood—like a sprawl of houses,” my cohort says.
In one yard an orderly coy pond is alive with the bright oranges and yellows of its busy fish. And standing above the pond, so close she could jump in for a quick swim on this terribly hot day, is a whitewashed cement statue of the Virgin. The Ozone Virgin and her prostrate coy fish.
Then we hit Cross Bay Boulevard: A wide, rambunctious highway where the rattle of the A train, thumping car stereos, revving engines, and screeching brakes come together in a cacophonous opus unparalleled in this borough or that. Crossing Cross Bay in this heat is such an objectionable task. We backtrack a few blocks, cross Liberty Avenue, and head down Rockaway Boulevard. On this Sunday devotees, darkly and elegantly dressed, enter a tan-brick church with tall stained-glass windows. A man lifts a baby carriage up the front steps. A woman in a black dress follows. The door closes behind them and now there is only the occasional car on Rockaway Boulevard and the sun’s extreme strength as it lights up the church’s façade.
A few blocks down, two floors up, two girls in saris sew and chat on a wrought-iron terrace. Loudly colored fabrics drape the railing and veil the seamstresses.

From yard to yard, street to street, we notice an ever-present feature of cement sculptures of lions guarding either side of many gates. These statues begin to characterize the neighborhood. Though we see the lions everywhere, any connection among them eludes us.

Two kids with scooters stand in the street as they lick at Italian ices. Large trees amply shade them. They’re breathing hard, and perspiration covers their foreheads.

Then there is the cornfield in an empty lot. Beside a red, boarded-up building grows a substantial cluster of corn stalks. They look tall and healthy; they look regularly tended. A lasting farm within the urban stretches of New York City.

A desolate alleyway gives access to parking spots behind homes. We walk down here. Two men sit on lawn chairs in an open garage, watching a baseball game on TV and drinking from beer cans.

The heat, the walking, and the indecipherable variety of scenes in Ozone Park fatigue us. We are hungry. We duck into a restaurant on 78 Street and 101 Avenue, called Tres Reynas Mexican Restaurant.

I order pineapple juice with my lunch; my cohort orders mango juice with his lunch. In a Manhattan restaurant when you order juice, that’s it: That one glass is what you paid for, and if you want more, you’ll pay for more. At Tres Reynas the waitress continually arrives with big pitchers of freshly blended pineapple and mango juice. She refills our glasses as if with water. When I do ask for a glass of water, the waitress thinks I’m crazy. She smiles, puts a fist on her hip, and says, “What then? You don’t want any more juice?”

Bay Ridge, Brooklyn

2008-08-28T20:19:00.001-04:00

The kid’s rapping to music from his dad’s cell phone speakers. To the tinny report of beats and melody, the kid delivers resounding rhymes. He sits on a subway car bench. His diminutive legs don’t even come close to touching the floor, so they dangle, swinging back and forth to his voice’s rhythm. His dad and mom, and a sister who’s smiling, all move their heads and shoulders to the lead of this little emcee.
At the 95 Street stop I exit the station. The first thing I see is a landmark visible from most streets and corners of Bay Ridge: The majestic Verrazano Narrows Bridge looms above, a blue-steel harbinger of this southern end of Brooklyn.

I’ve got a friend who lives in Bay Ridge. I stop by his house, and he says he’ll join me, but only after a hefty portion of chips and salsa (this is Costco-size stuff, keep in mind).
We’re walking down Fort Hamilton Parkway when a Ferrari zooms by. I associate Ferraris with the more obviously affluent sections of the city (if any sections at all), and Bay Ridge isn’t in this group. My friend says he’s not surprised, there’s a “culture of expensive automobiles” in these parts.
Again the Verrazano commands the area, presiding authoritatively over the neighborhood. We pass the functioning Fort Hamilton of the US Army, situated at the base of the bridge where it begins to slope upward on its path into Staten Island.
We wander north on Third Avenue—into the 80s, the 70s, the 60s. Two incorrigible tikes on trikes nearly collide with us before they veer expertly around and down a side street. Many shops have signs in Arabic. Many bodegas and restaurants advertise a healthy stock of Middle-Eastern food.
Soon we come back south.

Hungry, we stroll into King Falafel on Third Avenue. We both order the falafel pita sandwich. Not only is it delicious, but we especially like the flat—rather than round—falafel. A man walks in and talks a minute with a cook behind the counter. We figure he’s a familiar patron because he’s invited to sit in the empty, unlit back seating area. As he sits, the lights turn on. He’s offered a grape leaf free of charge as he looks at the menu. Some admirable hospitality at King Falafel.

Then we’re back at my friend’s place. His second-storey apartment has a terrace, and we lounge outside playing old American spirituals and folk songs and some blues, too. A little kid in a blue shirt looks up longingly from the street. When I see him he jumps and darts away. A few minutes later, he’s back. I look down at him. Maybe he enjoys the music. When he sees me looking, again he nervously scuttles away. He returns three or four times. Picking on the guitar, I look down toward him each time. And each time he hurries away.

Midwood, Brooklyn

2008-08-22T23:35:00.000-04:00

The car's parked beside the “Yeshiva of Flatbush” on Avenue J. If my friend and I were looking for that yeshiva, then we’d be finished with our trip. But we’re not looking for any of the numerous yeshivas of Midwood; we’re on a victual pilgrimage to Di Fara Pizza, lauded by many as the pinnacle of Big Apple pizza. And remember, New York’s a city where every pizza joint advertises, “best pizza in NYC.”
We stroll over to Di Fara on E15 and Avenue J.

Di Fara’s décor, reviewers say, evokes the type of sordid eating establishment that health inspectors either avoid or conveniently forget about. They couldn’t be more drastically mistaken. The décor is perfect. Imagine that a man from southern Italy (in this case Domenico DeMarco) emigrates to the United States, opens a pizza shop, and decades later has not changed the decorations or scrubbed down the wall—purportedly, not once. After visiting Di Fara, it’s obvious that such a man is, by the basic neglect of a conventional commercial aesthetic, a genius. Scattering the walls are outdated photos of the Amalfi Coast and Mount Vesuvius; framed prints of artichokes and other pizza-topping vegetables, subtitled with their scientific Latin names (Cynara scolymus for artichoke); and article after article praising Di Fara. To observe that these walls have taken on a serious dinginess is to observe only half of the atmosphere. Yes, there’s a dinginess that, at this point, would defy any cleaning agent. But the pizzas' smells and tastes brighten up the entire space; they imbue it with lightheartedness, that feeling that “this was worth it.”
A patron must accept that this is no boutique eatery. This is where Domenico DeMarco carefully fashions the tastiest pizza this side of the Mississippi.
If we measure Domenico DeMarco’s success by the taste and notoriety of his pizza, we may have a success to rival Bill Gates. You visit Di Fara Pizza and decide.
I’m loitering by the counter for twenty minutes before Mr. DeMarco notices. He’s preoccupied obsessing over a pie he’s preparing (this is a good thing). He does, however, repeatedly check in with patrons who’ve already ordered. Finally he asks me what I want. I order two slices: One with artichokes, and one with baby eggplant. Twenty more minutes later, the slices are ready. But I’ve actually been fortunate: In order for Mr. DeMarco to prepare a slice, he has to wait for enough people to order enough slices to comprise a whole pie. He makes his pizzas per order, and slices can only come from a complete pie. The wait’s long, but once Mr. DeMarco snips that home-grown basil onto the pizza and that first taste hits the tongue, that long wait is a distant, blurry memory.
Out on the street I take a look around. Di Fara’s neighbors seem unlikely—or, among them, is Di Fara unlikely? There’s Isaac’s Bakery and Kosher Bagel Shop. Men, young adults, and male children wearing yarmulkes; and women, some in tight head-scarves, all shake hands and talk. Some men wrap themselves in woolen prayer shawls. A group of women in traditional Muslim dress passes by among the groups of observant Jews. The encounter is brief, but often what’s simplest and most brief can be most poignant. What I see here looks routine, unremarkable, peaceful. A sense of tension is thankfully absent. There are laughs from somewhere, and a light breeze blows by. Conversations lift energetically and descend in mumbles, as conversations do. Avenue J in Midwood isn’t an ordinary place, considering this intriguing scene, but it feels ordinary and rhythmic. A place where people live, and pass each other on the street, and talk now and then.
My friend directs us to a street (E15 Street) with some quiet row houses and apartment blocs. Kids are playing tag outside. There’s barely a sound, except for the occasional clattering of an elevated subway train.
On one block a used clothing store is having a sale. Multicolored racks of clothes stand outside, lined up on the sidewalk. Women in dark Muslim headdresses meticulously comb through the racks.

Emerging onto Coney Island Avenue, I see some blocks down what looks like a grand mosque. Two towers—what I guess are minarets—reach above the brick building’s roof. On the way there I tell my friend there’s a chance it’s actually a synagogue designed like a mosque, to achieve a Middle Eastern aura. I’ve seen a Jewish religious and academic building like this in Washington Heights in upper Manhattan.
Once we’re standing across the street from the building’s entrance, we see the huge Star of David dividing the panes of a prominent window.
I say, “That is a synagogue.”

As we pass the Edward R. Murrow High School, I’m struck with the suburban layout of this section of Midwood. Generously proportioned Queen Anne Victorians line the streets; mature elms shade the sidewalk; we pass one or two people.
We find the car and get in, ready to head back up Ocean Avenue.
I struggle to understand which Midwood phenomenon—Di Fara Pizza or the synagogue-mosque or the peaceful mixing of Jews and Muslims—has made the most profound impression on me. That ridiculous artichoke poster, labeled Cynara scolymus, returns to me over and over. Di Fara Pizza. That’s the most extraordinary ingredient at the center of the Midwood patchwork.

Underground, Manhattan

2008-08-19T21:38:00.000-04:00

Something happens on the subway tonight while flying through the belly of the steel-and-concrete isle of Manhattan. The cohesiveness of family manifests itself beautifully in a sad—and perhaps degrading—but ultimately uplifting way.

The Q train doors open at Times Square, and a forty-something man and two kids get on. The kids have got glasses: thin plastic oval frames. Looks like they share the same style. The man holds a guitar; the kids each hold double-bongos, a mobile rhythm section.

The man plays a chord, fiddling around.

The taller kid says, loudly, looking around the train, “Hello folks, just trying to make some money for food. We missed dinner at the shelter.”

The man, the father, plays another chord.

“Whatchu boys wanna play this time?” he says.

The kids look at each other. The little one makes a suggestion.

The father says, “Na, we played that already. Let’s play something new.”

He begins. The kids start pat-patting on the drums. They all start singing in a brisk harmony. It’s the Beatles, Revolution. The father can carry the tune, but the kids, with their harmonies delivered in two completely different registers (the younger brother’s got a crisp alto) bring the song together. What’s obvious is that people are moved. They try not to look, but can’t help it; they fight to maintain those cold, stony city faces, but the muscles twitch. The emotions struggle to allow the affect of this iconic song, played now on the Q train by a small family troupe that’s down and out.

Jackson Heights, Queens

2008-08-14T22:22:00.000-04:00

Riding the elevated subway into Queens provides a rich, quintessential, multi-dimensional New York landscape: Outside, you have a sweeping sea of brick and concrete dominated by Manhattan towers; and inside, the train is full of people of all colors and histories and languages.
Silently—even gravely, I feel—the passengers and I watch Manhattan’s spires fade farther away, taking on a brilliant shade of steely gray-blue. The train rattles over the roofs of Long Island City and Woodside. Queens Boulevard snakes its way between towers of masonry and old factory buildings. Then we’re here: Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights.
From the platform I go down to the street: Roosevelt Ave which runs directly under the elevated number seven MTA line. Above, the train bangs and screeches away. Here on the street is an explosion of weekend afternoon commerce. Fruit and music seem to be the most popular commodities. At the stands people laugh and talk, say hello and goodbye.
A woman approaches me, speaking Spanish (this happens often). “I don’t speak Spanish,” I say, frankly. She hands me a flyer. “It’s Spanish classes,” she says.
Around the corner, somewhere by La Casa de Pollo the smell of vomit and day-old garbage cuts the air. There’s an explanation for this: New York City, and everything we love about it.

I walk north on 81 Street: Four- and eight-story, red-brick apartment buildings with manicured gardens in front line the blocks. At 35 Avenue there’s a street sale on the pavement around the “Community Church founded 1919”. Jewelry, hats, second-hand clothing, shoes, china, records, prayer beads, books, cast-off computer parts.
I wander the blocks, not really knowing where I’m going. Queens with all its numbered “avenues” and “streets” and “roads” and “drives”.
After a period of roaming down pristine blocks of red-brick co-ops, I’m at 75 Street and 37 Avenue. The store signs I see tell me where I am: “Amit Fabric & Saree Palace”, “JMD Palace”, “Afghan Kebab House”, “India Sari Palace”. I flip through the pages of The Sayings of Mohammed at a stand that sells Islamic texts—and this isn’t the only stand. On some blocks three stands of Muslim books sit side-by-side. The book sellers relax in seats by the curb and speak amiably with their competitors to the left or right.
I find a theater with a worn, cracked sign that says “EAGLE”. Bolliwood posters litter the front window and wall. My favorite poster has a particularly exuberant, bearded man in the foreground. A banner above him reads, “Singh is Kinng” (that’s right, two n’s). It’s no doubt a theater that features Bolliwood films. “Call 205-2800” is posted on the side of the building.
For a few minutes I have the arrogant notion that I’ve got the place figured out, then a man stops me and asks if I’m sending money home to my family. He’s carrying a red bag. On a table nearby are many similar red bags filled with something bulky. I tell him no, I’m not sending money home. Did he think I was Indian, working in the States and sending money home to my family?

Then I take a right, and I’m in Indian buffet paradise. One Indian buffet after the other. One advertises all-you-can-eat lunch for $7.95. Most of them are about $11.

It’s evident that most of the Indian, Middle-Asian cultural center is between 37 Avenue and Roosevelt Avenue, because when I cross Roosevelt, I’m back in the rhythm of the Spanish language.

But a serious culinary part of me has an enduring need for Indian tastes. I head into an Indian buffet on Roosevelt. For the ride out of Jackson Heights, I order a cold Lassi--a sweet, milky, yogurt drink from the land of saris and “Singh is Kinng”.

Crown Heights, Brooklyn

2008-07-30T21:10:00.000-04:00

Monolithic and regal, the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch towers over pedestrians and traffic at Grand Army Plaza. The bus roars down Eastern Parkway to Crown Heights, past the Brooklyn Public Library and the Brooklyn Museum. I’m with a friend who has made the long trip from Staten Island. “I’m hungry,” he says. “Staten Island’s so far. Think we can get some Jamaican fare in Crown Heights?”
If the neighborhood lives up to its reputation, we’ll be tasting Caribbean spices soon.
We leave the bus and stand on the Parkway. It’s a pleasant spot: Trees and rows of three story brownstones and pre-war apartment buildings line the long road. We cross Eastern Parkway, going south. Right away we’re in the middle of a busy scene of street vendors and discount convenience stores. The bottom of my friend’s right sandal is tearing off with each step. We think maybe we’ll find cheap sandals in one of these stores.
Inside, there are rows of T-shirts and shorts; soap, brooms, even priced-down air conditioners line the shelves. Slow, indulgent reggae plays.

“Negative,” my friend says. No sandals.
We move on. Walking along the street—somewhere around New York Avenue—we notice people doing weekend shopping. Children chase each other down the block yelling and laughing. At a corner a mother scolds her child. Her language is austere, even frightening.
“You see this stern Caribbean parenting,” my friend says. I warn him not to generalize, but from our perspective the evidence is there. We’ve seen more than one parent very harshly berate a child.

As we walk, the neighborhood becomes overwhelmingly quiet. On the upper jambs of front doors we see mezuzot—Jewish religious objects placed at the entrances to homes (and rooms inside the home). This must be the orthodox, largely Lubavitch section of Crown Heights—a community for which the neighborhood is famous. Down a tree-lined side street we find a building with Hebrew letters over the door. Under the Hebrew is an English translation: “Beth Rivkah Schools Lubavitch.”

Rivkah (Rebecca) is a matriarch. This must be a girls-only yeshiva—a school of Jewish religious learning.
It’s Saturday—the Jewish Sabbath—so we’re not surprised that the streets are so still. Occasional groups of men wearing black suits and black hats stroll down the sidewalks. On one porch a middle-aged woman in a tight headdress, long sleeves, and a long skirt reads a newspaper. On many homes a banner hangs that says, in Hebrew, “Welcome, King the Messiah.” This message regards the Lubavitch Hasidic belief that the late Hasidic leader Menachem Mendel Schneerson is the messiah.

The layout of the neighborhood is pleasant, peaceful; architecturally homogenous: You see straight streets of two-story, red-brick, single-family homes with front yards about ten feet deep.
As we continue down a block between Brooklyn and New York Avenues, a multi-generational group of Lubavitch Hasids is walking toward us. There are an elderly man who looks to be in his eighties, a middle-aged man, a young man in his early twenties, and an adolescent boy. They’re all speaking energetically in Russian. They are garrulous with each other. A voice rises; one throws up his arms over his head; another grabs the shoulders of the ancient man and, smiling, fires speedy, animated sentences—his voice resounds, slashing the block’s quiet.
We turn a corner to find an RV parked on the street. On the driver side there’s a large picture of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, serious and sage in his voluminous white beard and black hat. Beside him, the message Moshiach [the messiah] is coming Now! Beside that message are the words MITZVAH TANK. Then there’s the license plate: TANK ONE.

We walk north across Eastern Parkway. There are no more Hasids; no more black hats and beards; no more Yiddish and Russian and Hebrew characters on the buildings. This is now a neighborhood of Caribbean immigrants. Walking down the street we hear what sounds like the English dialects of the West Indies. Groups of men and teenagers talk loudly on the stoops of buildings. Kids play catch with a football on the sidewalk. I can’t ignore the feeling that people seem to be watching my friend and me. There is a burdening tension here. I sense that we are seen through aggressive stares. I ask my friend about this. He feels the same unwanted attention. And I wonder whether this feeling is valid, or whether it’s a product of our unfamiliarity with the neighborhood.

Since my friend hasn’t eaten, we wander into an Associated Supermarket. An employee asks me if we’ve been skateboarding. We tell him no. His accent is heavy; he sounds Jamaican.
“You see these days a lot of the black kids is skateboarding. But the white kids has been doin’ it since the eighties,” he says.
He goes on to explain: Because black kids are new to skateboarding, as a rule, they aren’t as good as people who’ve been doing it for a decade or more. So it’s very dangerous, and he thinks they should bike instead. Neither my friend nor I are skateboarders, so we can’t really offer opinions. We say goodbye. My friend buys a peach, and we’re back outside.
There is a big block party on Lincoln Place. Monstrous speakers are set up angled toward the street. They blast reggae. Tied to metal banisters and street lamps are balloons in all colors. Kids running and smiling and playing. And the reggae—the loudest reggae in New York must be on Lincoln Place.
Finally, a fish market. My friend orders the fish and rice plate. When it’s ready, I see the server put one, then two fish on the plate. That’s pretty generous, I’m thinking. Then the server throws on a third! The plate is heaping with fried fish, and then yellow rice. All for five dollars. We sit on a bench on Eastern Parkway, and my friend devours the feast.
Later, after we’ve left the neighborhood, we’re discussing the places and the people of Crown Heights. My friend says, “You know, I got the sense that at any moment the shit could hit the fan.” I want to disagree, but I can’t: Being honest with myself, my thoughts return to that encompassing sense of tension.

Sunset Park, Brooklyn

2008-07-15T23:33:00.000-04:00

After the graveyard; after the tombstones and the elaborate monuments and mausoleums of Greenwood Cemetery, we have bustling Sunset Park. Stands where you can buy pupusas and quesadillas. Markets where yucca and chayote are as ubiquitous as apples and pears. This is a neighborhood for all senses. Children and parents, adults and the elderly, people representing three generations stroll down Fifth Avenue. Some shop, some browse, some argue, some discuss. The street corners are filled with an urban ebullience.
I am with my cousin, and we agree: Sunset Park enchants us both.

At the corner of 45 Street and Fifth Avenue a stocky woman shoves a pamphlet my way. It’s in Spanish, and the woman sees the confusion on my face.
“You can’t read it?” she asks.
I tell her it’s fine; I’d like to learn Spanish.
“English. Here,” she says, and bluntly pushes another pamphlet into my hand. Satan the god of this world, it reads. I put both the Spanish and English versions into my pocket.
Around a nearby corner the commercial bustle eases and gives way to a block celebrating the dry, sunny day. Hydrants are open down the street. Eager kids yell and run through the cold showers of water. On the sidewalk, residents have set up chairs outside their two-story, turn-of-the-century row houses. The smoke of barbecues wafts up the street’s slope. A group of friends plays football on the asphalt, the young athletes splashing through the puddles from the open hydrants.
After a tour up and down Fifth and Sixth Avenues and many side streets, my cousin and I decide to try more avenues east. We walk down shady streets of pre-war single-family homes, all nestled next to each other. The occasional American flag flaps in the hot breeze. Then we’re at Eighth Avenue, and the Spanish signs are gone.
Businesses advertise in Mandarin. The avenues are much, much quieter when compared to their counterparts to the immediate west.
“I want ‘Boba’ tea,” my cousin says.
We walk into a bodega that advertises smoothie-looking drinks on a poster. My cousin asks for “Boba” tea.
“You mean ‘Babo’ tea?” the clerk asks.
My cousin says, “Boba, Babo? Babo tea, yeah.”
The clerk tells us to try across the street. We cross Eighth Avenue and enter a take-out place. On the menu there is neither “Boba” nor “Babo” tea, but there is “Bubble Tea”. This is obviously what my cousin was looking for. She orders one.
Out in the sun, we sip the sweet, refreshing “Bubble Tea”. There are tapioca balls piled up inside. When you take a sip, you also get to chew on the tapioca.
Nostalgic for the activity from before, we make our way back down to Fifth and Sixth Avenues, where the Spanish signs dominate the scene.

My cousin buys a pupusa—a fried corn tortilla with cheese, and I buy a quesadilla with beans, Mexican rice, and guacamole. We decide that nearby Sunset Park (the neighborhood’s namesake) must be the place to eat our lunch. We climb the wide steps of the park. They lead to expansive lawns where healthy trees provide ample shade. Families enjoy picnics, kids kick around soccer balls. Nearby, an announcer yells through a megaphone in Spanish. He’s beside what looks like an organized neighborhood basketball game. The announcer’s words follow every move, every play.

We find a bench toward the highest point of the park. From it there is a sweeping view of midtown-to-downtown Manhattan, Jersey City, downtown Brooklyn, Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, and the northern parts of Staten Island. Barges slowly travel through New York Harbor. I point out that, from our perspective, the hand and torch of the Statue of Liberty rise above the Jersey horizon.

At a Pennsylvania Picnic Table

2008-07-12T19:14:00.000-04:00

My cousin was married just before Independence Day this year. There was some liquor; there were some yarmulkas; there were blessings; there was dancing; and there was a healthy, pervading sense that history simultaneously repeats and rejuvenates itself. The wedding was in Cleveland, and I drove there with my grandparents. We drove across New Jersey and Pennsylvania to get there. The ride's scenery was dominated by views of farmland--fertile land that rolled into the bluish-gray horizon. We had some Appalachian bluegrass on the radio. When the signal went too fuzzy, we searched for another bluegrass station. We always found replacement bluegrass. About halfway across Pennsylvania on the drive back, we stopped at a rest area to eat tuna-salad sandwiches and gigantic pickles. I got a drink of water inside the rest area building. When I came back outside, I found my grandparents sitting at a shaded picnic bench, but sharing the bench with a stranger. I noticed everyone was laughing, so they were already acquainted. I sat down and said hello to the stranger, a man who looked to be in his forties.

"You want your tuna sandwich?" my grandmother asked.
I told her I was still full from our large brunch at a Cleveland diner.
"What? You don't want your tuna sandwich? Have just the half. And a pickle, too."
I couldn't fight it. I started eating the tuna sandwich. The pickles were perfect dill pickles.
My grandfather asked the stranger how long he'd been driving. Before he could answer, I asked where he'd come from (my grandparents had already learned this while I was away).
"Oh, you know, been driving about eight days now. I'm coming from San Diego to visit my mom in Queens."
I could tell from his accent, from his inflection, that he was a native Spanish speaker (as well as native English speaker--truly bilingual).
"Oh, Queens. Where in Queens?" my grandmother asked. She was excited to have a chance to talk about New York. My grandparents grew up in Brooklyn, and have always lived in the City.
The stranger said he was traveling to Cypress Hills.
"Cypress Hills!" my grandfather yelled pretty loud. "I grew up in East New York."
"Well that's where I'm going: Cypress Hills--East New York. My mom still lives there."
From my grandparents' questions, we all learned that this man had grown up in East New York.
"I used to go to Thomas Jefferson High School," my grandfather told him.
The man laughed: "That's where I went. Graduated in '76."
My grandfather talked about where he used to play baseball on a field near the high school.
"That's where I played ball," the man said.
My grandfather said, "Now I was at Thomas Jefferson in 1946, '47. But do you remember a Mr. Greene, an art teacher?"
"Yeah," the man said. "He was an old guy. Mr. Greene."
Soon we said goodbye and wished the man an easy last day of his trip.
It was my turn to drive. Once we were all seated in the car, I turned to my grandfather and told him that the conversation with the man from San Diego had deeply impressed me as a classic story of the immigrant experience in New York City. My grandfather's poor, awestruck, energetic immigrant parents had come to New York from Hungary. They settled where many of their own ethnic population were settling: East New York. A generation or so later in East New York, the same pattern occurred, but this time with immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries.
"Well, that hadn't even occurred to me," my grandfather said. "But I suppose you're right. Can you believe he went to Thomas Jefferson?"