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A Walker’s City
28 Apr 2003

Alfred Kazin, in his 1951 memoir A Walker in the City, describes his boyhood walks in Brownsville, Brooklyn, then a Jewish immigrant neighborhood.

“We were of the city, but somehow not in it. We were of the city, but somehow not in it. Whenever I went off on my favorite walk to Highland Park in the “American” district to the north, on the border of Queens, and climbed the hill to the old reservoir from which I could look straight across to the skyscrapers of Manhattan, I saw New York as a foreign city. There, brilliant and unreal, the city had its life, as Brownsville had ours. That the two were joined in me I never knew then – not even on those glorious summer nights of my last weeks in high school when, with what an ache, I would come back into Brownsville along Liberty Avenue, and, as soon as I could see blocks ahead of me the Labor Lyceum, the malted milk and Fatima signs over the candy stores, the old women in their housedresses sitting in front of the tenements like priestesses of an ancient cult, knew I was home.”

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