Neighborhoods

In the morning I walked to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade along the East River, looking out toward the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, and the skyline of Manhattan. The story is that beginning in the 1940s, aggressive expressway construction led by Robert Moses divided up the borough and had the effect of isolating some of the old immigrant neighborhoods and killing off their small commercial enterprises. But in the more affluent and better-organized Brooklyn Heights, a great public outcry resulted in the modification of the plans: a two-tiered highway along the waterfront with a promenade that would serve to hide it, insulate the neighborhood from its noise, and provide a spectacular and unobstructed view of the river and city beyond. It opened up in 1950 and has since become the setting for countless romantic strolls, and a familiar background scene in many a film set in New York.

This particular day was a holiday, but the streets were already peopled with dog-walkers, joggers, and baby stroller pushers. I tried to imagine what it would be like to live in this leafy neighborhood, with its old brownstone houses and cobblestone streets, but my Brooklyn roots are shabbier, more akin to those immigrant neighborhoods, and my original street, Coney Island Avenue, is a long way from gentrification.

My dear friend Vickie wanted to see it, though, despite my warnings that there wasn't much to see, so we set out on the number 5 train, transferring to the Q and getting off at Beverley Road. We were pretty impressive in our navigation and dilemma-solving skills, I might add.

Beverley Road is one of the oldest of the MTA stations, built as an actual station, with wooden benches, a ticket office, and classy mosaic lettering and borders. It's amazing how vividly I remember getting on and off this stop with my mother when I was a little girl, seeing the bridge across the tracks, a house where violets grew along a fence, and of course the steep steps up to the street shielded by glass windows like a greenhouse.

See? Vickie took the picture of me above, while I was still in a state of enchantment about all those little details of the Beverley station. I also knew we were about to walk out into western Flatbush and one of Brooklyn's loveliest neighborhoods, now a designated historical district known as Ditmas Park. Its shady streets are lined with houses from Victorian times, many with porches and beautiful landscaping. Some were now in disrepair or need of paint, but I remember meandering through these streets many times in the 1950s and choosing the ones I would love to live in. We were now blocks away but a world apart from Coney Island Avenue.

The route of fifty years ago kicked in again: turn left and walk straight. Oh, how often I had walked these streets! There was a certain brick border we always had to jump on, there was a house from whose upper windows an enviable young girl once looked out at me, there was the porch I would have liked to sit upon, shaded by tall trees. As we approached Coney Island Avenue, the houses gave way to a stretch of stores. There's where Anthony's salon had been, where my sisters and I got our hair de-tangled and cut, and there's where Dave's newsstand and candy store had been, where we always got yelled at for reading...never buying...the comic books, learning to scan quickly before crabby Dave noticed and told us to scram.

Coney Island Avenue is a wide and busy thoroughfare that traverses Brooklyn from Prospect Park to Coney Island. We crossed over to the side I lived on, turned left, and there we were. "This is my block," I announced to patient Vickie, and then began reciting, as though in a trance, the tedious significance of each doorway. That's where the Keatings lived, and that's where Mr. Blitstein's lumber yard was, and there's my best friend Carol Bessey's house, (it's the one in the picture here, now situated above some sort of auto parts shop), and there was the Milici's house, and the Wittners next door to us, and there's where Mrs. Johnson was crossing the street when she got hit by a car. There's the stoop, and there's where we played jump rope, and there's where we bounced a pink Spaldeen ball against a wall, and there on the other side of the street, beyond the Mobil gas station, is where we paid the rent to Mr. Molinari, $40 a month... Gosh, poor Vickie!

At 624, my old address, we saw Scottie, who now owns the building and has run an antique store downstairs for 35 years. I have come back to visit on two other occasions and thus met Scottie already. "Oh, I know who you are," he said, when I introduced myself. "How are things in California?" I guess from his perspective, every five or ten years a couple of effusive, middle-aged white women come by to stare at his building as though it were a historical landmark. He's pretty cool about it, though. We talked about the changes the neighborhood has undergone, the different ethnic and religious groups that have moved in and seem to coexist just fine, a bit of welcome tree-planting that's been going on, and a beautiful old orchard hidden behind one of the houses across the street.

We ritualistically reviewed the floor plan of the apartment above: yes, that little room in back, the way you walk into the kitchen with the window overlooking the clothesline, the fire escape, and the alley below, the living room, the middle room, and the front room facing the street. I kept wishing he would at least unlock the front door so I could see the pattern of the tiles and the old wooden staircase, but he was understandably private about his domain. He did, however, lead us through his store so we could look out into the back alley for a moment, and even that had a certain charm. It's hard to explain, but to a city kid, the secret little spaces off the main street are special, somehow, the places where trees and weeds are growing, and forgotten things pile up.

"Been meaning to ask you," said Scottie, as though he'd been pondering it for several years. "Anything strange ever happen in this place? Anything mysterious?"

Sorrowful, tragic, violent, chaotic...all of that, yes. Strange and mysterious? Well, nothing beyond the weirdness and puzzle of life as it is.

"It's nothing too dramatic," he went on, "just a light going on and off for no reason, footsteps, a feeling...I just got to thinking maybe something had happened here a long time ago. That kind of thing. Didn't the lady in the upstairs apartment get hit by a car? Maybe she comes back."

"Maybe so," I said, although for the life of me, I couldn't imagine any reason for Mrs. Johnson to come back. But every old house is filled with stories. I think sometimes you can sense them.

"We're all part of something," said Scottie. He seemed to be in a philosophical mood, or maybe he was picking up on my wistfulness.

"Here in this neighborhood we got people from all over. We're getting along, we're doing our best. See all that stuff back there in this store? It's just stuff, a lot of stuff. None of it really matters. All we got is each other, and we're part of something bigger."

We said our good-byes and Vickie and I walked to the corner at Avenue C. There where Harry's grocery store and Joe's candy store once were, another little girl with a pink scooter and a big yellow ball was having her childhood.

I decided I might as well show Vickie my walk to school, along Avenue C and past Ocean Parkway almost to McDonald Avenue. So there it is, as somber and formidable looking as ever.

"Did you feel welcome there?" asked Vickie.

"No, I just felt required to be there. No questions asked. I didn't like it, but I knew what was expected of me. No one was too concerned with our self-esteem in those days."

At McDonald and Church, I tried to locate the site of my grandfather's pizzeria, where I sometimes went for lunch, but nothing even vaguely resembled it. We ate in a falafel place where a man urged us to try the hot sauce. "It says hot, but it isn't very hot," he kept telling us, and when we finally tried it, we had to admit he was right. "You see?" he said, "You have to try everything in life."

As we descended into the Church Avenue subway station I remembered the teenage boys with their greaser hair and tight jeans who used to stand in there singing doo-wop where the echo was good. We rode a couple of stops and got off by the park, and Vickie patiently waited as I took pictures of fire escapes, cellar doors, the curved arms of an old-style bench. Everything seemed amazing to me, like strands of old dreams coalescing into tangible objects, providing evidence that my history happened.

But it was also sad, like returning to an abandoned set long after the play has ended.It suddenly seemed absurd and self-indulgent to be making such a fuss over all these ancient details, these places long since occupied and transformed by the millions of souls who came after. Honestly, who takes pictures of cellar doors and benches? Why do I think any of this is important?

And on some level I realize it's not important at all. But do any of us ever get over our childhoods?

I actually asked the question out loud.

"First we understand," said my dear friend Vickie. "Next we forgive. Then we're done with it."

I guess Scottie’s right: we're all a part of something bigger.