Conduit Boulevard: in the mid-distance fifteen-storey project blocks loom over five-storey mounds of trash. Yellow excavators root their saw-toothed snouts in this machine-age midden. At the junction with Linden Boulevard stands the Linden Motor Inn, a beige, concrete shape that resembles the superstructure of a ship that has been buried in the verge. Even from the far side of six lanes and a broad median strip, I can make out two figures in baseball caps, rooting in a bush beside the motel. They are searching, I presume, for their discarded stash. When we close in on the Linden, I see a sign threatening ‘Jacuzzi’.
The cloud has burnt off, and it does, indeed, promise to be a fine spring day in November. I’m a little footsore, and to be frank, verging on sadness. People always say that you can’t walk in American cities — implying that the very sidewalks curl up in front of your feet, or that the traffic mows you down. But that isn’t it: no one walks through East New York, I’m forced to conclude, because it’s so fucking dull. Mile on mile of tract houses and apartment blocks, with only plastic Santas to break the monotony. Popeye’s Chicken and Biscuits, offering ‘New Naked Chicken Strips, Only 1 Carb per Strip’, constitutes a visual feast. Yesterday’s stroll beside the Thames, romp through Richmond Park and meditative progress beside the River Crane now looks in my mind’s eye like a Watteau, complete with lavender flounces, airborne cherubs and diaphanous, trailing greenery. These memories are paintings hung on the leafless branches of fume-smoked trees.
At last, we swing off the thoroughfare and along Glenmore Avenue. This has a more human scale, even if the humans are obese and surly with poverty. Ragtag people are dumped on benches outside the Brooklyn Adult Care Center at 2830 Pitkin Avenue. Brooklyn has been described as the ‘city of a thousand churches’, and here they all are: the Apocalipsis Pentecostal Church; the Zion Tabernacle of Deliverance Ministry; St Lydia’s Episcopal Church; Christ the Rock Bible Institute; the Universal Temple. They vary wildly in style, from storefront, cinder-block God shops, to shingled Carpenter Gothic, to nineteenth-century banking blockhouses. One is an old synagogue, winnowed out by Christ, another a hefty, Greek Orthodox encampment complete with genetically modified, square-onion domes.
Glenmore Avenue is two arrow-straight miles of churches, frame houses, low-rise apartments. Nowhere in New York — the natives now say, not without a trace of regret — is truly dangerous any more, but this area is one of the poorest. Every twentieth dwelling is a condemned rat’s nest, complete with municipal orders pasted to the boarded-up doors and filthy underpants espaliered on the railings.
Ah, the Blighted States of poverty. Survey after survey tells us that the American poor are oddly optimistic about their lot, remaining convinced that even though they may be standing in the welfare line, those armies of global, capitalist salvation are going to sweep down and enlist them. But I don’t get that vibe. I think the surveys are filled in by those who self-select for co-option. East New York reeks — albeit in a subdued way — of desperation, of a populace who can never attain that shiny repose, or dream the American Dream. For them there is only the rock, the apocalypse, the End of Days — a chasm full of brimstone, into which are hurled broken white goods.
Clearly, Chip, Casey and I do not belong here, but we attract little attention; there are few people on the streets mid-morning, midweek. Only once, as we near the projects at the end of the avenue, is there a frisson of old New York, the New York of discarded crack vials crunched underfoot and violent, illiterate men with writing on their trousers.
An SUV slows to a crawl along the kerb beside us, its tinted windows pulsing with the confinement of an insistent beat. One of them reels down to reveal four African-American faces giving us the once-over. It reels back up again, and the SUV moves off, only to circle the block and come level with us once more. ‘We’re being dicked,’ I observe to Chip, ‘people are wondering what we’re doing on their turf.’ Chip seems blithe about this — or perhaps he’s preoccupied by something else. I suspect his loafers may be beginning to chafe.
Personally, I would relish the opportunity to engage the gun crew in a discussion of urban territoriality as it relates to topography; this would be the sort of rambling conversation — at once deeply patrician, yet prescriptively egalitarian — that I remember my father having with holidaying coal miners, when we walked from Taunton to Lyme Regis. A divorced father and sulky son walking tour, back in the sunny uplands of the early 1970s.
East New York ends in the metallic gnashing of elevated railway tracks, freight and scrap yards. We stumble past a shut library, my bladder a painfully inflated balloon rammed in my crotch. We turn up Rockaway Avenue and I duck into an abandoned lot to pee. Then we’re in Eastern Parkway. A half-mile on and there it is: the ethnic interface I’ve been waiting for. A Hassidim in a blue sweatshirt with ‘KITCHEN EXPO’ written across its shoulders, stands chatting to a heavyset black man. Beyond them looms the Holy House of Prayer for All People (semicircular transverse arch, attached half-columns with foliated capitals, this recessed in red brick and strongly reminiscent of the Twickenham Green Baptist Church).
The Parkway rises towards affluence, and we labour up one of the two flanking median strips, past Ralph Avenue and the Trinity Methodist Church. The buildings are putting on weight, becoming solider and more self-assured. We gain Utica Avenue, and this is a proper city junction. There are people on the streets hurrying, with the kind of pecuniary and sumptuary motives that would gratify Adam Smith — or even Milton Friedman. From the entrance to the subway there comes a great meaty, oily, burnt-dust afflatus; down there, New York is moving its bowels, peristaltically pushing its populace through snaking colons and sooty back passages.
Here in the Parc Tower is Wishco Manor, Catering Kosher. Or here, between wars, it once was; for the neon letters are bleary with the years, and above them Washington Mutual reigns, while alongside them there’s the indefatigable strength of Popeye with his chicken and biscuits. The frummers flap about the place in their ghetto get-ups. Their women — condemned by observance to eternal frumpiness — are less in evidence, and the only school kids I see are boys with skullcaps and spaniel locks, loitering on the steps of a cheder.
I poke through the paperbacks for sale on a stall. Survivor: Outwit, Outplay, Outlast. . Thailand; Danielle Steel’s Second Chance, Frank McCourt’s mawkish demi-memoir ’Tis. . and a couple of novels by people I know in London. It’s faintly preposterous finding these here; as if they were intimate possessions mysteriously transported across the Atlantic. Indeed, I happen to know that these particular titles have sold in small enough numbers for them to be like the personal effects of their creators. Perhaps this is all contemporary literature is, the staging of an emotional yard sale for strangers on Utica Avenue?
I like to think that, were I without Chip and Casey, I would engage some of the frummers in sage politico-religious discourse; encourage them towards a midrash that would enlighten us all as to the Divine Ingathering and the Clash of Civilisations. But, just as with the gun crew, I’m deluding myself. Far from being elevated by Crown Heights, I can feel my mood dipping. Far from feeling the walk to New York as an achievement, I’m beginning to think this is just another slog away from commitment and engagement, and towards empty-headedness. The Hassidim, it occurs to me, so mirror — with their literalism and their theocratic zeal — that which they revile; that they are like Calibans in homburgs, checking their appearance in the humungous pier glass of a glassy office block, only to become enraged by the brown face staring back at them: another Semite who’s sought asylum on Prospero’s isle.