“I used to wonder about people who were born in New York and who still lived here,” Rivka Galchen writes. “Did it not annoy them that any block they walked down, any business they passed, was liable to bring up a ghoulish or irritating memory?”
For ten years, I have lived in a neighborhood defined by the Port Authority Bus Station to the north, Penn Station to the south, the Lincoln Tunnel to the west, and, to the east, a thirty-one-foot stainless-steel sculpture of a needle threaded through a fourteen-foot button. Though there are many, many people here, the neighborhood is not a people place. It is better suited to the picking up and dropping off of large pallets.
At first, we kept our windows open for fresh air, but soon we noticed a pervasive black soot. It turned up on our dishware, our shelving. It was unimpressed with Palmolive and a scratch-free sponge. Was this substance, which was likely lining our alveoli, the kind of character-producing grit for which people move to the city? I have almost neverthe neighborhood I lived in—it was always determined by external factors, often institutional housing.
The Two Bros pizza at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Thirty-eighth Street sells a fresh, hot slice of cheese pizza for a dollar. There are other Two Bros in the city—there are other Two Bros in the neighborhood—but this one is the best. It is nearly always busy, and it has a fast-moving and efficient line. I fell in love with Two Bros when I was pregnant. I would sometimes step out to have a slice there an hour or two after dinner.
When my yearning for a sense of softness and sanity in the neighborhood really soars, I go to Esposito’s butcher shop on Thirty-eighth Street. A handful of businesses have been in this neighborhood for decades, and the butcher shop has been here since 1932. When I go in there, the staff ask me about my kids. They ask everyone about their kids, or their dogs, or their parents, or whatever there is to ask about.
It’s not the violence in the neighborhood that makes me, at times, really hate living here. If anything, it’s clearer than ever how safe my family and I are, relatively, except from maybe being hit by a car or dying of lung disease. But the neighborhood used to feel to me like a rough part of a softer place, and nowadays the roughness feels more general, and this makes it harder to cheer for a neighborhood that is so loud and dirty and uninterested in or unfit for human life.
On the sidewalk that day, I realize that I’ve forgotten the blankie. I suggest that we go into this Lot-Less store, that maybe we’ll find something. “I want a Minnie Mouse blanket,” my daughter says, in probably the most clearly enunciated sentence of her life up to that moment. She used to watch “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” every time she stayed with my mother, and her love for Minnie Mouse mirrored the depth of love between a grandmother and a granddaughter.
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