Sweat broke out on my palms as I followed the SUV around the whooshing spin-cycle of vehicles. While I was living in New Jersey, I’d driven every day. Now that I was a fulltime Manhattan resident again, my car sat in a garage while I mainly got around by subway, bus, or taxi, so I was pretty well out of practice putting pedal to the metal. On the other hand, I’d never liked traffic circles. I’d always end up going around and around, as if I were trapped on some out-of-control carousel, and I had to gather the nerve to jump off.
At the moment, I didn’t have the luxury of going around more than once or I’d lose my quarry. Vans, trucks, buses, and cars were zooming by in lanes on my left and right. Signs announced the upcoming turnoffs, and it was difficult to keep my eye on the Town Car, the SUV, and the rest of the traffic.
“Madame!”
“Yes?”
“Make sure you watch for any sign of Ellie’s Town Car peeling off the circle and taking a turn, okay? My eyes are still on the SUV in front of us.”
“Okay!”
“I’m anticipating a right onto Flatbush, by the way.”
“Why?”
“That’s the way we came in. It’s a straight shot right up Flatbush to the Manhattan Bridge crossing, and I’m betting Ellie’s destination is Manhattan. Here it comes...” I began to swerve the wheel, moving into the turning lane, and then—
Oh, crap... “They’re not turning!”
“Stay in the circle! Stay in the circle!” Madame cried, her wrinkled hands practically lunging for the wheel.
I swerved back to my original lane and an immense, white SUV behind me blew his horn. I glanced in my rear view. The man driving was cursing at me, one hand on the wheel, another holding a cell phone to his ear, which was completely illegal and reckless, thank you very much!
“Someone should tell that guy ‘hands free’ is the law of the land now!” I cried.
“Eyes ahead! Don’t try to turn before they do,” Madame warned.
“Okay, okay! I was just anticipating—”
“Don’t anticipate!”
The black SUV kept going. It was still following Ellie’s Town Car. A few seconds later, Madame started shouting. “She’s turning now! The Town Car’s turning!”
“So is the SUV!” I shouted back.
Both vehicles had left the Plaza and were heading for Union Street.
“Union Street?” I murmured, continuing to trail the sports utility vehicle. “Now why does that sound familiar?”
We drove a few blocks, then a red light up ahead halted our progress for a few minutes.
“I’m not too familiar with this borough,” Madame said, glancing at the rows of beautifully restored brownstones on both sides of us. “How often have you been here?”
“Quite a few times. Matt’s been renting a storage warehouse not far from here.”
“I remember coming to Brooklyn when Matt was very young,” Madame’s eyes took on that faraway look again. “Antonio took us to Coney Island. The park was a madhouse, of course, since we went on a sunny Saturday afternoon, Matt did so love the rides—”
My fingers tightened on the steering wheel. If Madame went down memory lane now, I’d lose Ellie for sure!
“Coney Island’s many miles away,” I pointedly interrupted. “It’s on the south end of the borough, on the Atlantic, probably over forty-five minutes away from where we are now.”
“And where are we now exactly?”
“Park Slope.”
Brooklyn was home to at least ninety different neighborhoods and two hundred nationalities, many of whom had created ethnic enclaves (not unlike Manhattan’s Chinatown or the nearly vanished Little Italy). Brooklyn’s more recent immigrants—from the Caribbean, Middle East, and former Soviet Union—had brought cultural color to many of the borough’s streets with native restaurants, festivals, and specialty groceries. In this upscale Brooklyn area, however, the overriding heritage appeared to be that of my own Village neighborhood: Transplanted Yuppie-Hipster (“Yupster” was the current pop-sociological term, Young Urban Professional Hipster). In fact, the area had so many relocated writers, editors, academics, and lawyers, Mike Quinn once joked to me that he’d blinked one day and realized Manhattan’s Upper West Side had teleported half its residents to his borough.
The red light changed to green, and we moved forward. We were now crossing Seventh Avenue, the main shopping area for the North Slope (the northern end of Park Slope), which boasted the sort of bistros, restaurants, and boutiques typically seen in Manhattan’s trendier neighborhoods.
“We’re still close to the city,” I mentioned for Madame, “certainly less than thirty minutes from the Manhattan crossings.”
“Well, you know what they say these days about real estate,” Madame noted, “anything within a half-hour commute to Manhattan, is Manhattan. I have an acquaintance in Brooklyn Heights, near the promenade—she tells me her brownstone’s been valued as high as a Chelsea townhouse.”
Brownstone... my memory kicked in, and I suddenly knew why Union Street sounded so familiar. It was Mike Quinn’s old street address. I’d never visited him in Brooklyn, but one slow afternoon while I was doing schedules in my office, I took a break and regressed into teenage crush mode to find his home by satellite on the Web.
I knew he was melancholy over selling the place, which wasn’t here in Park Slope, but two neighborhoods over in Carroll Gardens. Since his wife wanted the divorce, and they jointly owned the property, he was stuck. Apparently, the building was worth so much now (easily five times the value of their original purchase price fifteen years before), he couldn’t afford to buy her out, but the good news was that he’d be getting a nice chunk of change from his share of the sale.
“Union is definitely a cross street,” I told Madame, thinking back to that Web satellite map I’d consulted. “I’m sure we’re heading West.”
“Toward the East River?”
“Yes.”
The black SUV was still rolling forward, right behind Ellie’s Town Car. And I followed them for a few more minutes. We were now leaving the restored brownstones of Park Slope and entering the far less upscale neighborhood of Gowanus.
Madame pursed her lips as she took in the blighted area of rundown clapboard row houses tucked between dead factories and a network of abandoned shipyard waterways.
“Are those canals?” she said, gawking down one of the channels of water as we crossed the narrow Union Street bridge.
“You’re kidding? You’ve never heard of the Gowanus canal debate?”
“Oh, yes, I’ve heard about that, but I didn’t realize they were actually canals...”
Gowanus, with its maze of narrow waterways, once served as a working extension of the nearby shipyard. When the ports shut down, the heavy industry left, and this neighborhood of factories and warehouses became an urban eyesore. Then artists started moving in, taking over and transforming the large spaces. A former soap factory, for instance, had been converted into a site for a community arts organization.
In more recent years, the area was “upzoned” to allow for the construction of residential buildings. Now two new towers were standing, overlooking the once stinky canals (which had since been cleaned up). A Whole Foods store was about to open, and major developers were buzzing about turning the entire area into a “Little Venice,” complete with the sort of Yupster restaurants and upscale rents we’d just left behind in the North Slope.
The debate right now was with residents who saw themselves being priced out of their homes. It was the same old song that had been sung so many times on Manhattan Island. Low rent immigrant and industrial areas, plagued with cracked sidewalks, graffiti, and crime, became havens for struggling artists who turned them trendy, making them gold mines for developers, who boosted rents, squeezing longtime residents and poor artists out.