My father grew up in Brownsville. He taught in the junior high school across the street from Afred Kazin’s childhood home. At least once a year, my dad and his best friend plan a pilgrimage back to their old neighborhood. They make a list of the restaurants they want to visit for lunch and dinner, the houses they used to play stick ball in front of.
When I first read Kazin’s piece, I felt a bit confused. I thought the text would really be about walking, as the title, A Walker in the City, indicates. But, it isn’t really about walking or about any one walk. While I can recognize that this piece is beautifully written, there is something off-putting about Kazin’s tone, the way he describes anyone outside his own “Jewish shtetl” as other and scary. But, this piece came out in 1951, and if Kazin was born in 1915 and the excerpt we have is set in his childhood, that is a very different city than the one I seem to want to place this text in.
Whenever my parents visit, my mom always says, “Alan, let’s go to New York.” My dad inevitably responds, “Leah, do you mean Manhattan?” I wonder how many of us know the real history behind the boroughs. Prior to 1898, all of the boroughs were separate, independent cities–Brooklyn was among the largest cities in the country, in fact. After the Brooklyn Bridge was built (in 1883), there was suddenly an easy connection between boroughs for the first time. Then, in 1898, we get the “modern city of New York,” one city that encompassed all of the boroughs.
Thinking about Brooklyn as literally its own city feels helpful when thinking about Kazin. I wonder if his parents lived in New York when Brooklyn was its own entity? I also think I hear resonances of this earlier New York when Kazin writes, “It took a long time getting to “New York”…” The fact that “New York” is in quotes indicates that even though he is talking about Manhattan, that term wasn’t really used in the same way. Maybe “Manhattan” as a phrase didn’t hold the same weight that “New York” did for a kid who wanted nothing more than to truly move out of Brownsville and get to Manhattan.
There was an article in Time magazine last year about a photographer who wanted to document life in Brownsville. The article refers to Brownsville as “untouched by gentrification.” This seems so far from Kazin’s experience of his changing home. I wonder if there is a moment when a place changes so much so quickly that it then freezes?
