5

Area, Area, Area

2004–2008

That whole territory wherein the Village of Williamsburgh was first established, passed in 1638 from its Indian proprietors to the West India Company for “Eight Fathoms of Duffels, Eight Fathoms of Wampum, Twelve Kettles, Eight Adzs and Eight Axes, with some Knives, Beads, and Awl Blades.”

—Historic Williamsburgh (privately printed, 1926) by John V. Jewell, president, Williamsburgh Savings Bank

Everything belongs to me because I am poor.

—Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody

On May 11, 2005, the New York City Council approved a blueprint for the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront. The plan rezoned 175 blocks over 350 acres from ‘industrial’ to ‘mixed use.’ ‘Mixed use’ meant that housing could be built there; the proposal suggested that 10,000 units would be added. The devil is fond of small print and he made a home in the clauses that described the intended housing—most of it over a half-million dollars a unit. The original plan offered enticements to developers if they voluntarily designated a percentage of housing for low- and middle-income families. ‘Contextual heights’ were included for new buildings inland but the sky was the limit on the waterfront: 350 feet, or about thirty stories. To help us gag down ten thousand luxury units, the proposal included candy—fifty-four acres of parks and the promise of public waterfront access from developers, should they feel like granting it.

The city council voted 49–1 in favor of the proposal. Williamsburg was wide open.

Harry Havemeyer ended his 1987 book about his sugar baron ancestors with a prophecy. ‘Much of the Eastern District might be called an area in transition,’ he wrote. ‘It is today at the nadir of a curve. There are large amounts of land to develop both on the waterfront and inland. When will the next entrepreneurs come along? The space and the labor are as available today as they were in 1850. Will the cycle repeat itself? Only time will tell.’

The cycle repeated itself. Mayor Michael Bloomberg cared about the passage of the Greenpoint-Williamsburg proposal. After a career at Salomon Brothers, Bloomberg had founded Bloomberg LP (it was a ‘limited partnership’ because he owned 82 percent of it), a financial news and information services media company. Bloomberg LP made its first billions from software the company developed and sold to investment banks. The software gave banks an edge on the market. With his company prospering, Bloomberg turned to politics, running as an independent against the reformist Democrat Mark Green. Bloomberg’s victory over Green in the chaotic weeks after the towers fell came as a surprise to many, although the fact that he spent $56 million more than Green should have tempered the surprise. Bloomberg also had the endorsement of the 9/11 hero Rudy Giuliani, who had begged the city to ignore term limits and let him run again.

Bloomberg accepted exactly one dollar a year for his mayoral services; since that made him an altruist, the city council hurried to rubber-stamp all his plans. New York City had made the International Olympic Committee’s short list for the 2012 Summer Games and the Brooklyn waterfront was one of the attractions the city dangled before the committee. A new Olympic Village would rise on the East River.

The neighborhood that would house the ten thousand units wasn’t as sure about the Olympics or the mayor’s altruism. On December 6, 2004, Williamsburg’s Community Board I, directed by seven Hasidic rabbis, had voted ‘No’ on all but one of the city’s proposals. The community board had already floated a proposal of its own for the waterfront, one that offered more lower-income housing, more industrial zones and more parks (in 2003, the city council had approved this proposal). On January 13, Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz had also voted ‘No’ on the Bloomberg plan. The councilman who represented much of the district, David Yassky, had vowed on April 4 to spearhead opposition to the plan unless major changes were made. We even had Jane Jacobs in our corner, still fighting at the age of eighty-seven. From Toronto, she addressed a letter to Bloomberg. ‘Even the presumed beneficiaries of this misuse of governmental powers, the developers and financiers of luxury towers, may not benefit,’ she wrote. ‘Misused environments are not good long-term economic bets.’

The mayor brushed us all aside. Less than a month later, the City Council Land Use Committee voted ‘Yes’ to a slightly modified plan—it added morsels of affordable housing and a few more acres of park—and Councilman Yassky reversed himself. ‘It’s transformative,’ he said. This was true, in one sense: Williamsburg would be transformed. The plan with its waterfront ‘esplanade,’ Yassky crowed, added ‘yet another publicly accessible jewel to New York City’s waterfront.’ Like most jewels, this one would rest inside a glass case. The Williamsburg waterfront went from being one of the most open places in Brooklyn to one of the most restricted.

When the final vote went through, Teddy’s threw a party with Yassky as the guest of honor. The owner of Teddy’s was on the board of NAG, Neighbors Allied for Good Growth. NAG had started as ‘Neighbors Against Garbage’ to oppose the building of a waste transfer station on Kent. Good growth meant different things to different people. Thirty thousand more customers on the Northside wouldn’t hurt Teddy’s bottom line.

Architecture is where money gets naked. Every trust-fund kid can go to the same dive bars as you. He can wear the same thrift-store fashions, use the same slang, listen to the same bands. He can talk about the novel he’s working on or the canvas he just stretched. Get to be friends and you’ll eventually figure it out—he’ll mention the two months in New Zealand or the family place in Truro, and there won’t be much groaning about a day job. Walk into his home, though, and you’ll know right away. A two-thousand-square-foot loft with an enormous flat screen, a darkroom, a granite fireplace, mahogany paneling and a cast-iron spiral staircase. No gig riding a truck as an art handler is going to pay for that. Meet the competition, young bohemian.

When Congress opened the Indian Territories north of Texas in 1889, fifty thousand settlers crossed the border in a day. Today we call that place ‘Oklahoma,’ which means ‘red people’ in Choctaw. In the case of Williamsburg, the land grabbers weren’t Civil War vets, freedmen and Scotch-Irish southerners with surnames like Allison, McLaughlin and McCabe; they were corporations—LeFrak, Key and Select. The stampede favored the strong, although strength in the case of the Greenpoint-Williamsburg land rush meant money and lawyers rather than Winchesters and Conestogas. In both cases, natives and old-timers like me scratched our heads as the future trampled us.

I thought that dot-com had taught me about the power of money. The real estate boom showed me that I didn’t know anything about money. I didn’t know that the Wall Street wizards could perform acts of prestidigitation that made the stunts of the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus seem infantile. For finance magicians, the Williamsburg-Greenpoint rezoning was only a card trick, a warm-up in a world tour that swept six continents. Dot-com put businesses on Bedford and young, well-educated people into long-empty buildings. The real estate boom demolished entire blocks and erected condo towers in their places.

When the dot-com bubble burst I thought that the neighborhood would calm down. That people had learned their lessons, that my Williamsburg would have more time. I was wrong, again. The real estate boom dwarfed the dot-com boom. Real estate money took the waterfront and reshaped it, adding new piers, marinas and seawalls. Gangs of laborers dug pits and erected scaffolding, the huge cranes turning residents into dumbstruck spectators at the creation of a new city. The dot-com boom made history run faster; the real estate boom erased history. If you came to the Northside for the first time in 2008 it was impossible to imagine what it had looked like five years earlier. I wasn’t even sure myself. I’d walk to the waterfront and get lost, see a rubble heap covering a city block and try to picture the warehouse that had stood there for a hundred years. My memory was being erased. Rush hour on the subway platform had already become Japanese in its compression, and tens of thousands of new bodies were about to be dumped on the concrete that was left.

How to Become a Rock Star

I heard Gerard before I saw him. As I waited on the subway platform, a flurry of notes from a classical guitar floated past, knitting air. The Bedford L drew buskers, often of high quality; you have to practice somewhere, and spare change comes in handy. I got a picture of the new musician over the weeks: late twenties, Carhartt jacket, brambled dreads rising from his scalp. I put a few dollars in his case when I was flush: he could play, the bills received with a faint nod. He bent over his Del Pilar guitar with a pained expression and I’d drift on melodic lines until the train came. You don’t often see black hobos playing classical guitar—unless you’re in New York. Sometimes he’d accompany a singer, a short white girl with a Dennis-the-Menace haircut who sounded like Janis Joplin before the whiskey.

The Bedford Street L station had an embarrassment of platform talent. Another guitarist, Howard Fishman, had a repertoire of early-twentieth-century pop tunes and dressed like a refugee from the Dust Bowl Ballads. An inebriated Pole weaved along the platform with an accordion; he played Polish weddings, and I’d see him servicing the receptions in McCarren Park on the weekends, as melancholy and drunk with his squeezebox in sunlight as he was underground.

Paychecks, not music, brought Gerard to Williamsburg. Like a lot of art-school guys who were good with their hands, Gerard had ended up in the building trades, in his case, metal work. His employer’s shop was in the neighborhood and nine to five on the Northside led him to the subway.

Gerard had gone straight from high school in Plainview, Long Island, to a summer art intensive at the Pratt Institute in Clinton Hill. His focus was visual arts—graphic design, painting, printmaking. What made Gerard different from other anguished teen devotees of Morrissey was his West Indian background and the fact that he’d started taking classical guitar lessons at age three. Growing up in the brain death of the suburbs is rough on any sensitive soul, but it was even harder for a black kid in a white town. Gerard wouldn’t fake his way as a hip-hop stud—he dug Neil Young—any more than he would join the suburban jock world of letter jackets and beer pong. He had the instincts and in Brooklyn he would find style.

Pratt led Gerard to the oxymoronic Fashion Institute of Technology and from there he went to the SUNY art school, Purchase. Although he was at Purchase for fine art and art history, Gerard played guitar more than he studied. Purchase is also where he met Malcolm, the singer with the bowl haircut. Even though she sang Gerard’s songs, it was Malcolm that the music scouts slipped a business card when they heard her remarkable voice. After a few years on the welding job and the grind of busking, Gerard ended up pouring coffee at the Verb. We talked shit for months before I realized that the hyper guy making chai lattes was the same musician I’d seen in the subway: he’d whacked the dreads, and in his Carhartt jacket and short Afro, he looked more longshoreman than busker. It was a hard time for him; you couldn’t make a living playing classical, especially if you didn’t have the degrees, and immigrant parents want their kids to get real jobs.

The metalworker/barista/art-school dropout was one of the most animated men I’ve ever met, like Road Runner on Ritalin. Look up for a second while he was behind the counter and he’d notice your glance. When we talked his eyes always scanned: the counter, the room, the street through the Verb picture windows. His body quivered, frame wavering like he was made from some unstable element, the same frazzled look Snoopy took on when Charles Schulz kept drawing the strip after he got Parkinson’s. The only time the trembling stopped was when Gerard leaned over his guitar.

The Verb scene was different from the L’s of a few years earlier. The Verb was the center of a community but not one based in the neighborhood—the Verb fellowship stretched across the boroughs. People made pilgrimages to drink smooth Verb iced coffee and ask the barista what cool CD was playing. I understood the impulse: in 1992, I took the A train from 168th Street to West Fourth every weekend and hiked across town to Café Limbo on Avenue A. I made the trip because I wanted to feel at home. Verb denizens were better off than the old Williamsburg crowd—better clothes, better style, better manners. I hadn’t seen models sipping lattes at the L (Magda didn’t quite count).

Put ‘musician’ on your Verb application and you got hired. Every barista was in a band, the manager too, a laconic lesbian who dressed like Gene Vincent. None of the Verb baristas lived on the Northside—they couldn’t afford to. For them the Northside wasn’t home: it was an audition, ground zero for a career launch. Musicians need clubs, audiences, a vibe; when I first moved to Williamsburg it lacked such things. Of course, musicians had lived in Williamsburg from the beginning and played lofts there, but when they had a real show they took their instruments and got on the subway or into a van and went to Brownies and CBGB. Later, building code–challenged clubs like Rubulad, Llano Estacado and Mighty Robot dodged fire marshals to showcase bands, but you still felt like you were at a loft party.

The Bindlestiff shows at Gargoyle and the Brewery didn’t have bands. That was a good thing. Bands dominate celebration: they shut you out as a comrade and turn you into a spectator. Every rock band has a fascist soul, a fascist who wants you to lick his boots as he crushes you and sixty thousand other worshippers in an outdoor stadium. Fascism explains why every hit song is an anthem—exultation comes from spectacle and volume, a Nuremberg rally with the ideology extracted so it can sell. ‘Message, what message?’ the rock Nazi says. ‘I am the message.’ Even the explicitly anti-anthem lyric in a song like ‘Nevermind’ is swept away by 4/4 guitar crash and a catchy melody.

By 2003, the Williamsburg music scene was a national draw. Stinger Club and Trash Bar opened on Grand and a thicket of clubs ran down North Sixth to the water—Galapagos, Zablozki’s, the cleverly named Northsix, along with half a dozen others between the bridge and McCarren Park. In a new-order city where you had to make it young or not make it at all, the rock band was the perfect model. In the eighties, the New York scene had been eclipsed by the rise of regional centers—in the Twin Cities, Seattle, Austin—but Williamsburg became the hub of a New York renaissance with the Strokes (sort of), Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, Animal Collective, Fischerspooner. Word had it that electro-clash was born in a Kokie’s booth. Even if those bands weren’t officially from Williamsburg, the band members spent a lot of time at the Verb, on both sides of the counter.

*   *   *

I’d be un-American if I said that rock music and rock shows didn’t matter to me. I’d also be lying. My first concert was at age thirteen at the Providence Civic Center, a triple bill of the Joe Perry Project (Aerosmith was on heroin hiatus), Foghat and Blue Öyster Cult. At the concert, Tara Goldberg gave me my first slurp on a joint. (Then she complained that I ‘nigger-lipped’ it. I hadn’t even puffed on a cigarette before.) Although Taras D-cups allowed her to date college boys, she thought I was cute. Cuteness didn’t get me kissed—I was too weird—but the concert was an introduction to a lawless adult universe. Over the next decade I trekked to a lot of shows in a lot of places, but I soon learned that clubs were better than stadiums and that music sounded better if you knew the people onstage.

I have clearer memories of a friend’s band playing sloppy REM-ish tunes in a basement on Dexter Avenue than I do of a Neil Young solo show at the Civic Center the same year. I knew those other Providence kids: I partied with them, argued with them, slept on their stained couches when I was fighting with my father. A college friend had connections in the music industry and he got us VIP room passes at the Ritz on East Eleventh Street. Doing lines in the Ritz bathroom right after Hillel Slovak came out wiping his nose was a thrill at twenty, but it wasn’t as good as slam-dancing to Saccharine Trust at the Living Room because Joe Baiza came over to my apartment afterward and—when he realized my roommate wasn’t going to fuck him—talked to me about how Miles Davis influenced his solos. The media blares away about the lives of actors, divas, guitarists and athletes, trying to convince us that we’re all in high school together.

In Williamsburg all those years later, music still mattered to me. At the Verb the baristas/rock-stars-in-waiting would tell me that their bandmates were lazy, or on drugs, or had gotten their girlfriends pregnant, turned off their cell phones and moved back to Arkansas. They talked about how they wanted their records to sound, how they’d go back to school when they couldn’t bear being broke anymore. I’d troop to the Tuesday night showcase at Rock Star Bar on Kent and pay the five-dollar cover because a friend was playing and we could talk about it the next day at the Verb. Mostly I was a spectator nodding my head and looking at the clock. But then came the other times … when a Verb regular who looked like she got dressed in the dark channeled a demon and had the entire crowd at Zebulon dancing between the tables; or when the shabby barista whose constant intake of coffee and cocaine made it impossible for him to keep his eyes open managed, after a year of big talk, to astonish Union Pool with Beatlesque harmonies.

I was surprised to hear that Gerard had joined TV On The Radio. TVOTR had taken an unusual path to success: they didn’t exist on Monday and by Wednesday they had a hit; on the weekend, David Bowie showed up for a guest vocal. Napoleon told me that Tunde Adebimpe and Dave Sitek, the founding members, first discussed starting a band when they were hanging out in his apartment. The two men were roommates, or neighbors, something like that, in a building on Havemeyer. Sitek was a producer, and after he recorded the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’s Fever to Tell, he had leverage. The duo got signed by Touch and Go even though no one on the label had seen them perform, and soon they had a campus hit under the name TV On The Radio. It was at that point that they brought in Kyp Malone.

Yet another Verb barista, Kyp was the most popular man on the Northside. We called him the mayor of Williamsburg. Every hipster doll in Williamsburg seemed to want nothing more from life than a hug from Daddy Malone—hug posses would clog the Verb floor as women waited for their embrace. At Radio Free Williamsburg, upstairs from Gargoyle, I’d seen Kyp play a kind of avant-jazz noise rock far from the indie pop of TVOTR. The choice of Kyp for the band had as much to do with his local celebrity as his chops—people went to see Kyp to see Kyp—but the band was more concept than touring unit. Sitek’s idea for performances was to open a gold suitcase onstage and draw out his pedals and sequencers. This worked so well that some of the first TVOTR shows ended up being a cappella.

Like me, Tunde had heard Gerard busking at the Bedford station and been blown away by his chops. The need for more talent brought Gerard into the band. It didn’t hurt at all that, like the drummer and Kyp, he was black. Of course, Gerard took the gig; it was an offer a starving artist couldn’t refuse.

Williamsburg was diverse—you had a hundred different kinds of crazy to pick from—but it was pretty damn white. A couple of Asians, a few Hispanics, even fewer African Americans. Black people didn’t join bohemia in numbers; there were fewer of them in the middle classes and more pressure on the artistic souls to become professionals. Pop music requires a look—David Bowie the extraterrestrial, Stevie Nicks the hippie witch. TVOTR had a look to win. The Verb joke was that when TVOTR went on tour, it cut the black population of the neighborhood in half.

The band got famous almost before we knew it existed. A friend who worked at Main Drag Music couldn’t believe the mob that showed up at the release party for Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes. ‘The show sold out,’ he says. ‘And I was shocked that I didn’t recognize anyone there. Not one person. They didn’t live in Williamsburg. TVOTR didn’t build themselves up locally like Grizzly Bear and Interpol. It was the first show in Williamsburg where I didn’t at least recognize people in the crowd.’ It’s always disconcerting when your friends become celebrities. The guys I knew best in the band, Gerard and Kyp, didn’t change for the worse. Kyp just had to hug even more people when he walked down Bedford.

In TVOTR Gerard was assigned to the bass, an instrument he didn’t know, but then the drummer, Jaleel Bunton, another guitarist, had never played drums before, either. To their credit, Sitek and Adebimpe divided all TVOTR income equally with the rest of the band. For Gerard, it was the rock-and-roll dream come true—one day he was pouring coffee at the Verb and the next he was doing shed tours and gracing the covers of music magazines. His loyalty to a neighborhood he’d outgrown kept me interested in the band. When a Verb barista told me TVOTR was playing a ‘secret’ show at Trash Bar, Nadia and I ran down to Grand and pushed into the crowd. The energy was high, the room was shaking. Through the crush I could make them out onstage, for the time being still in the same room as us.

Success didn’t make Gerard complacent; if anything, he got more intense. His partner, Jessica, had a child soon after he joined the band, and that tied him more closely to TVOTR; dads can’t turn down paychecks. So Gerard went out and he toured. In the band, he played disciplinarian—making sure that everyone stuck to the rehearsal schedule until the live shows got tight. When he walked into the Verb during a busy shift, he’d head behind the counter and start making drinks and handling the register for old times’ sake. I’d see him driving around the neighborhood in the beat-up VW minibus TVOTR used to move equipment. When he was in town he’d complain about the hardships of the road. ‘I’m so tired of guitars,’ he said. ‘If I have to see another guitar band I’ll slit my wrists. Guitars should cost thirty thousand dollars. And amps should cost a quarter of a million.’ That he was in a guitar band himself, well, that made the joke even funnier. Gerard always thought of himself as a guitarist, and having to play bass felt like trading in a Maserati for a station wagon.

When it came to writing and recording with TVOTR, Gerard stayed in the background. It wasn’t that Gerard didn’t feel grateful, it just wasn’t his baby. Instead he took the free time he had to work on his own projects; at the Verb one afternoon he plugged me into his Sony Discman (no iPod, he was a Luddite) so I could hear a series of charming ukulele demos. From the road he’d call Jessica and talk excitedly about the museums and historic sites he’d visited. Gerard tried to use his new superpowers for good, introducing musicians he thought should work together, producing records, and composing the sound track for a film, The Lottery. He started a contest in which he gave his favorite musicians a short lyric and told them they had to make a song from it. One of the best lines, ‘Baby, I dig your magic,’ turned into a compilation record.

We all would have liked to have Gerard’s celebrity problems, but he was moral in an old-fashioned way, the legacy maybe of West Indian roots. Morality compelled him to tip 40 percent when he ate out (and he ate out a lot). It explained why he volunteered as a welder on the 9/11 site. Gerard knew that TVOTR was a springboard to musical freedom; all he needed was patience, persistence and time. At thirty-five, time seemed to be the least of those concerns.

February 2007

At several points in late 2006, Nadia broke up with me, tired of waiting for that two-bedroom Williamsburg apartment. On her third try the breakup took. Six years is a long time to be with someone, and breaking up seemed to take ten times as long. At night I’d sit in my apartment until I started gasping like a pigeon in Robert Boyle’s air pump. Of course, I didn’t have health insurance, so there was no doctor to tell me about depression and anxiety attacks and soothe me with Xanax. I had to get out but I wasn’t running to parties anymore; I just needed to breathe. There had to be more air outside. Downstairs the miserable Goth runt had been replaced by an Iraq vet who painted and wrote poetry. He was an upgrade, but the bakery doors still slammed at three a.m. and Polish bakers still smoked and bellowed under my bedroom windows. The yard was too small and I kept going.

Williamsburg had always been a good place for a long walk. Movement makes you feel cleaner. I’d walked away from teen misery on the historic streets of the East Side of Providence. Sprinklers hissed and chucked over big green lawns and Victorian houses soothed the eye. The Providence neighborhoods didn’t belong to me but at night they didn’t belong to anybody else, either. I didn’t mind empty streets—other people were the problem. Other people put you on guard and you shrank into your shell. In the dark I could be anonymous.

Twenty-five years later I had a few advantages over teenage Robert Anasi. More money, for one, and a driver’s license that said I was old enough. I could go into a restaurant and have a late dinner. I could sail into a bar for a quick shot. My shell was hard and polished. You had to stand really close to see the cracks.

Out front, I’d turn right toward Berry to avoid the Bedford mob. Across the street over Planet Thailand rose the spindle of a ‘finger’ building. It had been giving us the finger for four years. ‘Finger building’ was a term applied to those new buildings on small lots that jumped hundreds of feet over neighboring roofs. Even though the Greenpoint-Williamsburg Plan restricted heights away from the waterfront, developers ranked above civil servants on the Bloomberg food chain and generally ate what they wanted. A good three handfuls of fingers had been injected into Williamsburg during the land rush. Plastic sheeted the sixteen-story skeleton because hubris over zoning had caught it in the quicksand of the courts. The finger quivered in its plastic, constrained from fructifying the clouds.

Catty-corner from Teddy’s on Berry was the Brooklyn Ale House. When it opened in late 1997, the owner described the bar as ‘upscale downtown without the attitude.’ Translated from codespeak he meant that it resembled East Village saloons but with more people who paid for drinks with their own money. He wasn’t far from right. With its pool table and groovy jukebox, the Ale House reminded me of Joe’s Bar on East Sixth, my haven in the 1990s. The Ale House had more Poles and firefighters (from the ‘People’s Firehouse’ on Wythe—closed by Bloomberg in 2003) than Joe’s, and the girls had tattoos and pierced navels. Locals had dubbed it the ‘Tail House,’ a name any bar would wear with honor.

On the corner of North Ninth and Berry, another bar posed as a speakeasy. White paint bleared the plate-glass windows and a folding iron gate blocked the front door. Around the corner at the side door, a bouncer posed like he was waiting for a password or secret handshake (he just wanted to see your ID). In underlit rooms you crossed worn tile and sat at tables with scarred marble tops. Bottles of absinthe lined the shelves. ‘Something not quite legal is going on in here,’ the bar whispered. ‘Don’t you want to be part of it?’

I walked north on Berry past condos that had morphed from warehouse rows. One of the former warehouses had been faced in faux white granite. When a car rolled to the entrance, a Buckingham Palace guard dashed out to open the door. I turned the corner of North Twelfth and passed the Turkey’s Nest. I remembered a night I’d gone there with Rebecca, my Trotskyist-cum-contractor friend Ben, and some of the crew. In a city where all waiters are actors, all carpenters are artists. Ben had an army of architects and painters sawing boards and hauling rubble. That night we also had Willem Dafoe’s understudy with us. Rebecca called him James Taylor because he dressed like a hippie and had reached the venerable age of thirty-nine. Being Dafoe’s understudy made him an arrogant prick, and disappointment made him an even bigger prick: he wasn’t Willem Dafoe and he had to huff paint fumes and sawdust to pay bills.

I remember the night in high-def: we were celebrating the end of a big project, we were drunk, and we shoved each other into every snowbank along the way. All the guys were hitting on Rebecca because she was the only girl and because she was beautiful.

The Turkey’s Nest was still a dive bar. Hasidic pool sharks still came in to hustle, cues in leather cases, sidelocks dangling as they leaned over for shots. Italian and Puerto Rican guys still played league softball on the concrete field across the street and stood in front of the bar in their uniforms after games, bellowing and smoking. A three-hundred-pound guido still peddled bad coke next to the video games. Frank Versace had introduced me to the connect. The Nest had been on Frank’s way home from the L and it would ambush him before he could get away. ‘Just one drink, I’d tell myself,’ Frank said. ‘You know how that goes. Next thing, you’re in bed with a woman who has parts where there aren’t supposed to be parts.’

The girls I’d brought home had all the right parts in all the right places. I once saw a one-woman show in the theater above the KGB Bar in the East Village. From the moment the spotlight hit her faded jeans, a white hole high on one round thigh, I wanted to fuck her. This made sense: the whole point of the show was to make you want to fuck her. We didn’t talk that night but a mutual friend brought her to a Williamsburg party and she came back to 147. We had sex on the foldout couch because our friend, Helena, was having sex in my bed with a Polish guy she’d picked up at the Tail House. In earliest morning Helena walked into the living room wearing nothing but my Everlast groin protector and a pair of boxing gloves. She asked us if we wanted to share. I said no. I didn’t want to share. (Helena had published a successful first novel but then she got sick. On a trip to the bodega for milk, a vein in her skull ruptured and she died before her forty-first birthday, leaving thousands of draft pages of the second novel.) There was the German model who talked to me at the Verb because I was reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (not a conversation that happens every day). She lived on the corner of Berry and North Sixth and I’d read poetry to her because she liked the burble of my English. Through her two high grilled windows we’d listen to the workers in the meat-processing plant next door toss sacks of blood and offal. Later we’d hear the partyers outside Sweetwater growing louder into two a.m. and then, after three, the sound falling away. One afternoon, I walked in and she slid her hand down her jeans and pushed her fingers into my mouth. ‘See how wet you make me?’ she said. There was a filmmaker who didn’t like her curves because it drew the wrong demographic. ‘Hipster guys like skeletons,’ she said. ‘They think I’m a sumo wrestler. I only get hit on by Spanish guys.’ I must have Spanish blood because I watched her in my shower and thought about how much better she looked without her clothes. There were others too—the girl with the animal green eyes who took off her clothes before we even kissed, got into my bed and then vomited into a bowl. The journalist who came over disguised in a black wig and said, ‘What does a girl have to do to get fucked in the ass around here?’ Even though I felt alone a lot of the time, I wasn’t always. Nothing was better than that moment when I knew it would happen: at the party when the actress—her voice the perfect world-weary New York cigarette rasp—and I touched and then pressed together, back-to-back, pressing down our arms all the way down to our hands, and my entire body ached; at the Blue Lounge with the model, all six-foot-one of her, tall and strong, and she covertly pressed her leg against mine while the three guys with us looked at her like she was a cross between the Louvre and a breakfast burrito. When that moment came those guys weren’t competition anymore, just a nuisance we wanted to go away. Sex was the best drug of all. ‘The moment of desire! The moment of desire!’ Blake writes, exclamation points essential. Drugs make time meaningless and real passion is the best drug of all. But where drugs make you hate the morning after, passion opens a place where time can be embraced. I’d shared my flimsy bed with amazing women and the best times it felt like it had never happened before and that it would go on forever. It never did.

When you’re sleeping alone, memory doesn’t keep you warm. When I was twenty-six, I had an affair with a photographer who just happened to look like a brunette Botticelli Venus. In bed one morning she cautioned me against sleeping with anyone over forty. ‘Don’t do it,’ she said. ‘Something happens to their skin.’ She shuddered. The fact that she’d had sex with someone so ancient added to her mystery but it didn’t seem like something I’d ever have to worry about. Fourteen years later, I was older than James Taylor when Rebecca mocked his denim jacket. My skin still looked okay but that wasn’t the only place age showed.

I crossed Bedford into McCarren Park. Across the field, a squad car monitored the entrance, headlights furrowing grass. I skirted the lights and went north past the baseball diamonds with their batting cages and base paths. Warm weekends turned the park into a hipster beach, blankets and pale bodies slathered on every patch of ground. Months had passed since the last warm day, but the darkest park corners held limp bodies, Rip van Winkles waiting for spring. Next to the fence, four men with metal T’s and caveman beards sprawled in a mess of paper-wrapped bottles, their feet touching, heads the points of a satanic compass. Under a streetlamp at the side of the path a Polish man lay facedown, bald patch glowing red. A few yards away, another Pole was faceup, his cheeks the same angry color. On a bench under a broken streetlamp I noticed a curving black line and thought, ‘Woman’s hip.’ The curled form wore capri pants and a black sweater. Closer, I noticed her ghostly face. It was the madwoman of Bedford Avenue. Earlier that week she’d stopped me in front of the Salvation Army storefront. ‘The Hasids are after me,’ she said, clinging to my arm. ‘They said they were going to take me out. You should be concerned. The way they take somebody out is by taking somebody else out, and then blaming it on you. They want to sacrifice me. It’s because my family was poor.’

I was fertile ground for sidewalk prophecy. Semi-domestic life—Nadia had cats, we watched The Daily Show—had given me security but I wouldn’t leave the Northside, so I’d been left. I looked up, alone again, and Williamsburg wasn’t the same. Kokie’s was gone. The L Café was gone. There weren’t many scuffling artists. There wasn’t as much space.

I’d never had a plan for life; I just wanted smart people to read me and fall in love. All the smart people. Everywhere. With my first book the future had seemed clear. Old Roger Straus came out of his office and patted me on the back and it felt like I’d gotten the medal of honor from Abraham Lincoln. But Roger had died and—true story—the guy reviewing my book for The New York Times, another very old man, dropped dead with my rave review in his typewriter. The review never ran. I didn’t have a backup plan. I was as broke at forty as I’d been at thirty but Campbell’s soup didn’t go down so easily. It cost more too.

I crossed Driggs to the soccer field where I’d played hundreds of pickup games. For most of those games we scrambled over a mess of dirt and rock. Dust clouds browned the air and dust veneered our clothes and skin. After every tackle we stood up bloody and no detergent could remove the stains. The players were mostly Latinos with a few Poles and Americans and Euro travelers in the mix. Despite the excess of testosterone and machismo, there weren’t many fights, just a lot of bitching over bad passes and fouls. Then the city put down a beautiful crumb-rubber infill surface and erected stadium lights. The night before the official opening we jumped the fences and played for hours. The ball slid across the turf like an icicle in zero g. ‘Check out those lights!’ we said. ‘This is so smooth! Now you’ll see my skills! No more bruises! I’m going to be out here six days a week!’ Within months, league games filled the calendar, teams with permits coming in from across the borough. It was a microcosm of the changed neighborhood: when you have something good, everyone wants it, and everyone else is better organized than you. So we migrated across the street, except those fields had been claimed for baseball and softball and something called ‘hipster kickball.’ Hipster kickball rules required that participants lack all athletic talent. The rules also called for female participants to dress like strippers in vintage gym shorts or poodle skirts three sizes too tight and knee-highs over shapely calves. (Hipster girls were always in better shape than hipster boys.) As we tried to get our soccer game going in deepest center field, the Latin guys would ogle the hipster girls as if woman had just been invented, right there on the Northside. No Michoacán muchachas dressed like that for the zocalo.

At night the pitch was dark but east across Bayard twin searchlights probed the sky. The Semer Sleep Mattress factory where Chris Mis had smoked bowls while admiring the Manhattan backdrop had been reincarnated as high-end condos. A banner drooping on the glass façade proclaimed ‘Grand Opening’ and searchlights wheeled. The apartments weren’t built out yet—a construction elevator crawled up the building side like a metal tick on a robot dog—but a flyer someone had stuck in my hand at the subway entrance said that model units were open for viewing. From the field, I could see stick figures wandering through the models, backlit by fluorescents blazing on every floor. ‘Williamsburg is just a big construction site,’ Nadia had said on her last visit. She was right; you felt like you should put on a hard hat every time you left the house. Four other condo projects were going up on the same block and three more to the north on Manhattan and Driggs.

On the other side of the BQE, new bars and restaurants spread down Union and Lorimer, in place to service the condos rising around them. I wasn’t ready to crawl back under my bell jar, so I decided to brave the Bedford crowds and go to the waterfront. The week before, I’d left my front door open and stepped into a film set—production gnomes had set it up overnight and put buffet tables at the foot of my staircase. When no one was looking, I swiped a Danish, small tithe for the fact that over the following three days I had to tell the fat men with walkie-talkies that yes, actually, I lived on the street. The film shoot wasn’t unusual—on the Northside they ran continuously. My guess was that lazy location scouts looked out from the windows of their $4,000 a month one-bedrooms and said, ‘Uh, why don’t we just shoot here.’ On the Bedford corner tourists rubbernecked. ‘Did you see Alec Baldwin?’ a girl said, breathless.

My landlady lived between North Eleventh and Twelfth, a block down from a paint factory that had been demolished seven years earlier. Nothing had gone up on the site, although for a while a sign on the fence had proclaimed an imminent Starbucks. Behind the fence, a few dismal weeds pushed through the field of concrete and splintered brick. Rumor had it that the ground was so polluted no developer would take on the cleanup costs and that strong winds dispersed a toxic cloud.

I assumed I paid my rent in cash because my landlady didn’t carry insurance on my building and because she wanted to hide the income. She received me like I was a peasant in the manor house and counted out bills on the kitchen table like a cardsharp (she’d been a bookkeeper in Poland) as she shared the latest gossip and discussed her medical issues in relentless detail.

I am having problems with my back, she’d told me on my last visit.

Yes, she said. Even when I am lying down, it hurts. I think I need to have more sex.

Sex?

Sex helps, she said. But my boyfriend not gives me enough.

She cackled, unconcerned that the boyfriend, a stout Polish building super, was parked in front of her television with her demented Chihuahua.

Maybe he needs Viagra, I said.

How much this cost? she said.

I don’t know, I said.

Can you get this for me?

I told her I’d look into it. The conversation somehow moved on to the fact that I was circumcised. At this information, Henryka brightened.

Then you are Jew! she said.

Her kitchen and living room were straight immigrant kitsch—the family photos in heavy frames, the plastic-covered couch, the big-screen TV always droning. Her garden was beautiful, though, a rain forest in the urban jungle. She led me out to the last flowers of the season. More than the flowers and the rosebushes and the deep-green lawn, the sound struck me, a shrill and manic piping. Her yard was backed by a brick wall over forty feet high. Throughout Brooklyn old residential rows had those walls, with narrow iron ladders and laundry lines strung from rungs to windows. Ivy enveloped the wall and the leaves pulsed although there was no breeze. The sound came from inside the ivy: hundreds of birds—sparrows, pigeons, starlings, finches—clinging to branches and shrieking and launching as other birds darted in. Birds also filled the one large tree in the yard, bustling on the limbs.

They are very upset, Henryka said.

She told me that the warehouses on the other side of the wall had been knocked down and condos were going up in their place. For the first time I noticed the head of a crane jutting above the wall. She told me that demolition had already started.

They’re knocking down the wall? I said. But it’s beautiful. You should take them to court.

I can do nothing, she said. It belong to them.

Communist Poland had made Henryka a realist. In the future, two-bedroom millionaires would stare into her garden from their balconies.

On any weekend without hail, flood or whiteout blizzard, Bedford was an all-hours lotus party, dying with a whimper in the backwash of Sunday morning, gutters mired with cigarette butts, broken glass and shredded paper, the last partyers drained by booze and drugs and sex making their walks of shame. In the day, the Northside was ‘Babyburg.’ Kelly had married an architect and they lived in a loft building on the Southside with their daughter. From my table at the Verb I’d see her pushing a baby carriage and we’d talk outside. We’d kept a writers’ group going for almost a year but babies get in the way of literature. Once on Bedford, I’d seen Rebecca behind a baby carriage but when she noticed me, she turned and crossed the street.

At night the Northside was ‘Bedford Campus’ and I jostled along with the student body. The line for Anna Maria, the pizza place across from the Charleston, spilled out the door. When it first opened, old Benny wouldn’t let you into the Charleston if you bought Anna Maria’s pizza instead of his—but he and Agnes sold the bar and vanished into oldest age. A phalanx of cops held the subway corner, the 24th Foot at Rorke’s Drift braced for the next wave of Zulus. Two men in blazers waited at the light and the taller tried to define the phenomenon: ‘It’s like SoHo eight years ago,’ he said.

The L To-Go store was now Fornino, a gourmet pizzeria with a woodburning stove, and the café was Bagelsmith, one of four bagel stores on Bedford. The ghost of Frank the Bum didn’t wander into Fornino and insult me as I sat over a twenty-dollar wood-cooked pie topped with organic arugula from the owner’s greenhouse. What I felt was more disorienting: all the landmarks had changed and I didn’t have anything to hold on to. It wasn’t like I’d spent twenty years in prison or Antarctica and grown so ugly that old friends said, ‘Who the hell are you?’ I was a senior citizen at a scene from my childhood telling the people who lived in my old house, ‘We used to have a peach tree in the backyard.’ The Williamsburg I lived in was a time-lapse world, history on fast forward.

Across Bedford from the subway exit, vendors manned a line of tables. In the fall I’d seen Frank there behind a table of his own. After the L debacle, we’d lost touch. His table was covered with T-shirts he silkscreened—fanged plants and menacing anthropomorphic landscapes. He’d changed: shoulders muscled, his head no longer skewing right. Frank told me that yoga and kung fu had saved his life. All the partying had been a form of self-medication. ‘I was getting energy from the earth meridian and it was adding to the already messed-up energy in my body,’ he said. He told me that a tangled chi flow had misaligned his nerves and muscles and sent him spiraling into chaos. Now the energy flows were ordered and he shared his apartment with a pregnant girlfriend. The next time I heard from him had been the previous week, when he invited me over to meet his son. To see Frank cradling a child as infant fingers plucked his collar was a blissful shock.

In front of one of the three East Asian restaurants between North Fifth and Sixth, a blond skater kid slumped over his Vans and a spreading red pool. ‘Blood,’ I thought, but no one reacted to his violent death. Moving closer, I noticed chunks in the red fluid. The kid had emptied himself of dinner and an energy drink mixed with booze. A friend with an unfortunate beard stood next to him, shuffling feet and looking down, loyalty fraying. The sick boy slumped against the restaurant’s French doors but couples inside kept putting forks into faces. It didn’t have anything to do with them.

I’d run into Marcin with his daughter in front of the same restaurant a few days earlier. She was an adorable child, with his dark Gypsy eyes and floss-silk hair. In her father’s face, the eyes were bagged and deeply circled. His expensive chinos would have billowed on the old Marcin but prosperity had inflated him. As the girl swung from her father’s hand, Marcin told me stories that were years away from her comprehension. Judith was deep into heroin again. She was so out of control, Marcin said, that he didn’t want to leave the child alone with her. I’d heard from a mutual friend that Marcin was her husband’s pot dealer and that, in a panic the month before, Marcin had asked her to take custody of their daughter. When I mentioned our friend, Marcin gave his conspiratorial laugh and said, ‘I bet you heard very good stories from her.’ As he left he said, ‘Oh, Robert. Larry Clark is going to make a movie about me. About me and drugs.’

I reversed direction and turned west on North Seventh, passing an upscale Korean market where organic kale chips would set you back three dollars an ounce. Through a wall of windows I looked into the Planet Thailand compound. The restaurant had just closed for the night and on the flat-screen TV over the bar a pretty East Asian woman on a lawn chair was masturbating. Her scene was intercut with one of a man doing sit-ups beside a pool. No one was at the bar or down the gray length of restaurant. The small jolt bolstered my faith in Williamsburg. There was still a bit of sleaze left.

The waterfront had always been my refuge. When the state of New York bought the waterfront blocks from North Sixth through Eighth, we felt pretty good about it. The other option had been a ‘waste transfer station.’ Garbage trucks rolling through the neighborhood 24/7, diesel exhaust and more filth in a neighborhood of asthma and strange cancers. There was rejoicing: we stopped the garbagemen! We got our park! I went to the hearing at Van Arsdale High School, where the garbage company reps argued their case and we shouted them out of the room. It occurred to me that garbage would have kept the developers away, or as the distinguished sociologist Robert K. Merton frames it: ‘Any intervention in a complex system may or may not have the intended result, but will inevitably create unanticipated and often undesirable outcomes.’ Undesirable outcomes surrounded me: every month more of my waterfront disappeared.

Bodies blocked the intersection of North Sixth and Berry and cars horned frustration. North Sixth was for music and clubs and restaurants with fountains and plastic love-seat swings, plus an Urban Outfitters and an all-night diner, Anytime, that had made its owners wealthy by delivering booze and cigarettes right to your apartment. The meat-processing plant remained. They ‘fabricated’ veal and sold it wholesale. In the afternoon the fabricators grabbed lunch at a silver truck. They wore the white smocks of surgeons, those other craftsmen of death. Clumps of ice melted in the gutter and the sidewalk always smelled of corruption.

I moved down Berry through the crowd, away from the shouts and bass-thud that rattled suspensions like potholes. Just past North Sixth an eggplant purple Acura started following me, headlights prodding my back. I tensed, wondering if it was frat louts looking for a scrap.

Hey, someone shouted from the Acura. A woman’s voice. I ignored her.

Hey! she said, louder.

I turned.

Are you going to your car? she said.

I didn’t know what she was talking about. I didn’t have a car.

Are you going to your car! she said, as patient as a nurse in the psych ward.

No, I said.

As the Ac pulled away I realized she was looking for a parking space. Friday night in Williamsburg had turned into Sunday at the mall.

Over the next two blocks, old warehouse dark still held sway. On the other side of the street a man was walking two large dogs. One of the dogs slipped the leash and bounded toward me. I staggered back into a fence from the impact of a hundred and fifty pounds of Rottweiler.

Whoa! the man shouted. Whoa! Whoa!

He crossed the street as the Rottweiler teethed my arm.

Napoleon, I said.

What’s up? he said, smiling. Loosing the dog was his way of saying hello.

Napoleon always walked late, another Williamsburg vampire. As we talked, the dogs lunged at my legs, making it hard to follow the conversation. Napoleon just laughed at my discomfort. He’d survived the neighborhood transition unscathed. Real estate was his new trade. For the right commission, he’d connect you to that rent-stabilized apartment or a loft selling under market. His mother had bought her building and he rented an entire floor from her. For Napoleon this was good business but his hipster friends teased him about living with Mom.

I left Napoleon and his slobbering bullies and turned west on North Third past the bar formerly known as Kokie’s Place. Where the Antique Lounge had failed, the Levee thrived. The Levee had hot-plate chili and two-dollar cans of Black Label. It had a pool table and video games. The Levee was ‘indie’: tattoos and old T-shirts, skateboards and hard rock (like, yes, Zep’s ‘When the Levee Breaks’). The Levee called itself a neighborhood bar but its neighborhood didn’t live anywhere nearby. The regulars worked on the Northside—waiters and baristas and bartenders who needed to unwind before the subway ride home. I saw some Verb rock-stars-in-training outside but I avoided eye contact and kept walking. I still needed to catch my breath.

After the rezoning rubber stamp, construction permits went flying out of the Department of Buildings. By 2005 there were 130 new projects in the works and more requests, hundreds more, had been filed with the local community board—including a couple of buildings with more than 200 units apiece. Bloomberg called this ‘harnessing the private market.’ Harnessing the private market was a lot like the kid who tried to corral the chariots of the sun. Nowhere had Williamsburg changed as much as the Northside blocks between Berry and the water. They looked like Dresden circa 1945. On Berry and North Fourth, a pit had opened and swallowed an entire city block. I peered into the hole through planks painted blue, looking down at the concrete foundation. On North Fifth and Wythe, a former warehouse had been scavenged to a set of rusted steel girders. All along Kent, old auto yards and garages were rubble heaps, cranes a hundred feet over my head pecking at the bones.

Winston Churchill gets credit for the phrase ‘History is written by the victors.’ I have to disagree. Plenty of losers write history—this book, for instance—but the winners build it. As I walked down Kent, I felt like a truck-stop whore on the run from the Mafia. The business model had changed and I’d outlived my usefulness.

Blockbuster among coming attractions was the Edge, between North Fourth and North Sixth Streets. On the waterfront side of Kent, banners on Cyclone fences told us what to expect: ‘Rock Bands + Stone Countertops,’ ‘Swimming Pool + Shooting Pool,’ ‘The Hippest Dress Code + The Coolest Zip Code.’ I wasn’t sure how to respond: laughter, tears, projectile vomiting? At the Edge authenticity would be as accessible as the ‘healing’ whirlpool and salsa lessons downstairs. Three quarters of a million dollars would buy you one bedroom and proximity to cool.

In 2003, Robert Lanham, who lived around the corner from me, published The Hipster Handbook (9/11 had delayed it for a year). The book provided a mocking take on the subculture with entries like ‘UTF (Unemployed Trust-Funder)’: ‘Hipsters who have the benefit of a wealthy family and are thus unencumbered by the distraction of a “straight” job.’ Lanham even manufactured a vocabulary of hipster slang: cronkite, bleeker, bipster, boggle, bronson, deck. When I first looked at his glossary, it took me a blink to get the joke. No one I knew said ‘deck,’ maybe I wasn’t cool anymore. Lanham captured the contradictions of the hipster pose: ‘You enjoy complaining about gentrification even though you are responsible for it yourself.’ His wry take on comfortable bohemians added to the hipster’s ubiquity—by 2008, hipsters starred in ads for every compact car, new cologne and fast-food franchise trying to go upmarket.

The rise of the hipster brought reaction. ‘All my students despise those hipster types,’ a history professor at Boston College told me. The fact that the ad campaigns focused on male hipsters made them even more suspect—there was something very queer about men openly caring about the way they looked. We’d become the preppies of the new millennium, our lives a national joke.

And yet …

Despite their disdain for all those left-leaning, SUV-hating dudes in skinny jeans, Americans kept coming to Williamsburg. They kept coming even though the neighborhood had become a parody of itself, a bohemian theme park. On a continent that had been straitjacketed into more of the same, Bedford Avenue tourists had left Bennigan’s and the South Coast Plaza mall in search of something different. What they had wasn’t good enough. There was some hope in that.

A bar that catered to the metal crowd, Duff’s, had opened on the corner of North Third and Kent. At two a.m. metal nation was out in force, all black T-shirts and black leather and clouds of smoke over the winter-hardened street. Maybe Motörhead was in town. With the hearse parked in front and the shrunken heads on the walls, Duff’s fit right in with Kent Street’s industrial grunge. I didn’t think many Edge folk would make Duff’s their watering hole.

There was only one place I could still reach the water, one narrow passageway to the old world. It wasn’t at ‘our’ park, the one we wrested away from the garbagemen, that stretch between North Ninth and North Sixth where I had roamed the marsh and skulked in abandoned buildings. Those buildings had been flattened, their rubble carted away. It was now East River State Park, with Ranger Rick in a green uniform. An iron fence painted black surrounded acres of lawn. Yoga moms pushed strollers, the rangers kicked you out at dusk and you couldn’t ignore the curfew, not without going directly to jail. You couldn’t jump the fence and hide from surveillance cameras, either: there was nowhere to hide—no tall stands of cordgrass, no abandoned buildings, no thorny bushes. It was just a park, green and sterile, with one species of plant—Kentucky bluegrass—and one species of bird—the pigeon—where the marsh had supported hundreds of both. A park surrounded by a big iron fence with spear-point posts. Anyway, you wouldn’t want to go there after dark. There was nothing to stumble into, no piers, no danger, no mystery.

The last span of open waterfront stretched between Grand and North Third. On one side was Grand Ferry Park with its ferry memorial. On the North Third end was the huge Austin, Nichols warehouse that had been artists’ lofts. A developer had seized the building and ejected the artists. In the before time, the waterfront always had fences but the holes had stayed open. New York City didn’t care about a few holes. The Edge had added fences of its own, and any hole was patched the next morning. The Edge had security guards. The Edge had a maintenance budget. When the project manager picked up the phone, the NYPD took his calls. I’d crawled into the site a few times but a security guard had tracked me with a flashlight and I’d fallen waist-deep into slurry trying to escape.

Three enormous fuel storage tanks rose between the Edge and Grand Street Park. It was the last major industrial site on the Northside waterfront but New England Petroleum seemed to be losing its grip—debris piled against the tanks, and the fences were slashed. Once through the fence, you could climb ladders or staircases all the way up the tanks. You had to be careful, because it seemed like a squad car was always cruising down Kent. I had a hard time understanding why: fewer than a hundred people lived nearby. So I’d crouch behind a wall while the cruisers rolled, then hurry up the stairs to the maze of pipes and ducts and platforms. I’d brought Nadia there the year before. She’d fallen in love with the space too and shot a series of videos with parkour traceurs running and tumbling through the obstacles, their bodies staying in the air so long they made gravity seem optional.

If you climbed down the tanks on the waterfront side, you could wander along a series of floating bridges and piers. In those unhappy months, I’d spent hours watching Manhattan. The tide rocked the bridges under my shoes. ‘Here it is,’ I would tell myself. ‘I can’t be sad when I have this.’ The black surface of the river rippled like mercury and a shore breeze stirred my hair.

That fall I’d sold a book proposal that I’d been shopping for two years. The slim advance allowed me to scrape by on freelance work: an occasional article, some copyediting gigs, a stint teaching ESL at a tourist school. When I taught ESL in my twenties, I loved it. I mean, James Joyce taught ESL. In San Francisco, my students were Chinese refugees who’d immigrated after Tiananmen Square. Most had been successful artists in China—a well-known novelist, a first violin in the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, a painter whose blend of traditional landscapes and European Modernism landed him a cozy university post. In the United States, the artist worked in a glove factory and the violinist sold popcorn on Fisherman’s Wharf (where he was attacked by a gang and beaten into a coma). The only reason they were at the school was to avoid deportation. I couldn’t understand why they’d left comfortable lives to struggle in America. They smiled and murmured when I asked, too polite to make the earnest young teacher look stupid. The painter had a sweet three-year-old daughter and his wife was pregnant. ‘We couldn’t have another child in China,’ he said. ‘Child’ was a synecdoche.

At forty, I had no love left for ESL. The students, mostly Koreans, were young and sulky and sensed my diffidence. I felt too good for them but I wasn’t—I needed their money. Then I got a job offer from a magazine. It was an easy job and the mediocre salary still paid more than I’d ever made. At the same time, I got into grad school in southern California: five years of funding and I could write a book (this book) to get a PhD. The grad school stipend was crumbs, scraps, chump change, enough for rent and Campbell’s and not much else. My decision took all of two minutes: California, here I come. I didn’t feel guilty about leaving Williamsburg; Williamsburg had already left me.

After crawling around the site that night, I stepped back through the slashed fence and made my way to the street, sedans from Northside Car Service parked in a line, drivers dozing as they waited for radios to squawk. It was so quiet I could hear a car engine guttering three blocks away. The walk had calmed me but I still wasn’t ready to go home. I turned toward Grand Ferry Park, wanting to spend a few more minutes near the water. Even for two-thirty the park was unusually empty: I’d gotten used to seeing Latino couples, random hipsters and Hasidic men there at all hours. I hadn’t really understood the park was a Hasid hangout until I walked past a parked car and saw two of them making out, beards tangling and the flash of white shirts (they smoked pot too: the smell was hard to miss). When I’d wriggled under the riverside fence after another New England Petroleum clamber, the black suits had gathered around me. ‘You are having an adventure,’ one said, beaming. He shook my hand. ‘That’s right,’ I said. We all were getting the same thing from the waterfront.

I took a few steps into the park, hands in my pockets. Nobody sat on the breakwater piled out into the river. I stepped onto the first boulder and hopscotched along. Something moved behind me and I turned to see men rushing toward me. In the background a squad car light spun red. I jumped off the rocks onto the shore. A flashlight burnished my eyes. I took my hands out of my pockets. Very slowly.

What are you doing out here? they said. Two cops, one white, one Asian, both young.

Talking a walk, I said.

They thought about that.

Don’t you know? they said. The park closes at sundown.

I knew this in the same way I knew that there was a law about spitting on the sidewalk.

Do you mind if we search you? the Asian cop said.

For what? I said.

You could be carrying a knife or gun, he said. We have to protect ourselves.

Okay, I said, not sure what difference it would have made if I’d said no. A trip to the precinct house, probably.

They patted me down. No shiv, no brass knuckles, no Glock.

I like your jacket, the white cop said. It was a black leather biker jacket. He was right to like it.

They led me to the squad car, where they entered my name and address into a computer (high tech had come to the flatfoots). I was more worried than you would expect, as I’d been ticketed on Kent a couple of weeks earlier for having an open beer on the street. Here’s to the new Williamsburg. Fortunately, my name didn’t come up.

What’s this all about? I said.

Sorry about that, the Asian cop said. Just doing our job.

Cops were polite in the new New York. At least to lucid white guys.

I can’t believe you’re busting me for walking into the park, I said. That never happened before. It’s not posted. I’ve lived here for fifteen years.

I wasn’t around back then, the Asian cop said and smiled, abashed but also making fun of me.

I wondered if old Williamsburg cops missed the rough-and-tumble of the wild Northside, if they missed Kokie’s. Even the police force was changing. The cop who’d given me the open-container ticket was black. A black cop on the Northside? Yet in the old days, if they rolled on you with an open container, they wouldn’t write the ticket. The new boundaries were drawing tight.

It’s worse than the Giuliani days, I said. You can’t walk around without getting harassed.

I don’t know anything about Giuliani, the Asian cop said. I’m twenty-five.

That stung. To the cop I was a grumpy middle-aged man, a relic yearning for a place that didn’t exist. My Williamsburg didn’t matter to him. He had a job to do in the here and now, Williamsburg present. I was a ghost of Williamsburg past, one who was about to be handed a summons. Old age had made me polite and cautious: I waited until I walked around the corner before I tossed the summons in a garbage can. Good luck trying to arrest me on a bench warrant from three thousand miles away.