I was twelve years old when I first read the novelist Colson Whitehead’s definition of a New Yorker: “You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.” I did not understand those words until at least sixteen. I suppose this is simply because the teenage years are around the time “before” truly begins to exist—when the past is more than scattered and odd memories. You begin to know people “from before,” know places “from before.” Until a certain age, really, a past is a foreign concept. It’s the reason why I never understood my father’s obsession with the Brooklyn of his younger years, until I was old enough to remember the Brooklyn of my younger years.
During every one of the many times we found ourselves in the borough of Brooklyn, he would remind us that the Brooklyn we saw then was not the Brooklyn that raised him. The Brooklyn that shaped his memories was long gone, never to return again. No matter how many times we drove through those soaring buildings he always seemed shocked, announcing every single convenience store that had driven out the mom-and-pop stores, and every billion-dollar clothing retailer that had succeeded some smaller department store that he couldn’t quite remember the name of, as if trying to relay the news to his past self of what had happened to his city.
Of course, this should have moved me—it would have, if I could have pictured those old places like he was able to, when he squinted and craned his neck to take in the full height of what had been erected in place of his childhood. But I wasn’t, and nor was my sister, so instead, it became a running joke between the two of us. We were too young to understand the complexities of that feeling upon looking at what used to be, and was no longer. It was more complicated than unadulterated nostalgia—it was confusion, and disbelief. But we were not old enough to see the ghosts of Brooklyn that existed twenty, and thirty years ago. And so we laughed.
It was around the age of sixteen, or seventeen, that I began to find myself engaging in this sort of reminiscing more than I would like to admit. I swore I’d never do it. And if I did eventually succumb to it, I figured, it would only be when I was old—after all, rambling about how everything was way-back-when was something I had been certain only old people did. Yet I was far from old, not even yet an adult, when I first stopped in my tracks in front of a coffee shop in Brooklyn. It was charming, with the fake vines and fairy-lights of an establishment that catered to the sort of young and Instagram-minded crowd that wanted fake vines and fairy-lights in their coffee shops. I thought aloud, wasn’t that a bodega before? Yes, it was definitely a bodega, I remembered. I remembered because I had always gone there after my doctors’ appointments as a child—generally to be bought cookies or candies as a reward for not protesting as loudly as I wanted to against my required vaccinations for elementary school.
My gaze drifted to the dollar store next door. I felt an unusual rush of affection for it, and even more intensely, relief that it was still there. As my father once said, in one of his Brooklyn-based reveries, in the land of ever-increasing rent, anything reasonably priced was often the first to go.
I recalled, to my friend walking alongside me, that I had gone to that dollar store to buy balloons for my tenth birthday. I began to delve deeper into this story, and then stopped mid-sentence with the sudden realization that I had become my father.
But my destination was an ice cream shop that had only opened last year.
My bodega had gone, yes. It will almost certainly never return. It took with it even more of the unaffected, informal charm of the Brooklyn my father remembered. But on the same day that I noticed the absence of this place of my childhood, I enjoyed the presence of a new favorite spot.
Van Leeuwen Ice Cream was nothing like the lost bodega, of course. It was expensive, ridiculously so, and only accepted Apple Pay—a criminal snobbishness that I felt somewhat guilty aiding and abetting with my purchase. But as I sat in a recently-built waterfront park, enjoyed by Brooklynites of all ages and backgrounds, with artisan vanilla bean ice cream in one hand and a time-tested honey bun in the other, I couldn’t quite balance my feelings in the same way.
The Brooklyn of my father’s memories was long, long gone. The Brooklyn of my childhood memories was slowly fading. There was a new Brooklyn in front of me—charming and artisanal and crafty, but pretentious, too. I enjoyed it with my friends, but we were teenagers with phones—why wouldn’t we enjoy coffee shops with fairy lights?
I still have conflicted feelings about the changes in Brooklyn. Perhaps it would be easier to simply sit on a beautifully-landscaped waterfront project and enjoy my $10 ice cream if I didn’t have the awareness of the perspective of old Brooklynites like my father. I could hear him too well—Ten dollars? For ice cream? What was it made of, slow-churned gold?
But perhaps all the charm of Brooklyn is that it’s never quite the same. Nothing ever lingers long, but isn't that what New York is all about?
Comments