The Pearls of Brooklyn

On 76th Street between 4th and 5th Avenue, there are two runs of old trees. They brace the street and the old houses brace the trees, making the road seem narrow and solid, you know like a cavern in the heart of the city. Brooklyn, if it stood alone, would be one of the great cities of America but it threw in its lot with New York at the end of the nineteenth century and has been looking back ever since. At five on a February afternoon the street is calm. I have a strange feeling that I will walk this street again in July, when the leaves are on the trees and the sun is fierce and, it seems to me, this will once again be a cave of shadows. The old brownstones here mix with the new, fake brownstones with their bright mortar and too-neat stoops. The moulded iron railings that the wrought-iron gave way to back in the day, are now giving way to brushed runs of stainless steel which billow even in the gloom. The sky isn't even grey, it's New York Brown. But it is what it is. There is deep structure here which a little sun will kindle.

Fourth, here, is sedate. All churches and tired hotels, doctors offices, dentists and places offering lasik on easy terms, whatever that is - my glasses were elsewhere and I couldn't read the signage. But Fifth, and as it happens, Third on the other side closer to the water, are all aglow. There are New York pizzarias and souvlaki palaces. There are Irish bars and steakhouses. Drugstists, candy shops and liquor stores which I have curiously mixed up in the same category, who can say why. But every few shop-fronts along this street, in the drizzly half dark, half neon volcano, there is a grocery store. These shop fronts open into rows on rows of fruit and vegetables. They are fed from basements with weak doors up to the street which you don't step on if you know what's good for you.  A few displays are protected from the rain by plastic sheets, but the best are open to the elements. What's a little rain on a pear, or an orange, or a proper apple, or a drooping mouli? Did rain never fall on them while they ripened in Florida and California? They glow in the lights, like precious fountains of jewels. They are glorious and make my heart sing with delight and that, my friend, is a precious thing among the sprawl of New York City. There are pearls here.