Cross-Bronx Walk, the Bronx

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 3rd Avenue 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

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

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.