Brighton Beach, Brooklyn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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”.