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BOOKSHELF
A Walker’s City
28 Apr 2003

A walk across the Brooklyn Bridge became a turning point for Kazin, as he began to leave Brownsville and become a part of the larger city.

“For all those first summer walks into the city, all daily walks across the bridge for years afterward, when I came to leave Brownsville at last, were efforts to understand one single half-hour at dusk, on a dark winter day, the year I was fourteen. There had been some school excursion that day to City Hall and the courts of lower New York, and looking up at the green dome of the World as we came into Park Row, I found myself separated from the class, and decided to go it across the bridge alone. I remember holding a little red volume of THE WORLD”S GREATEST SELECTED SHORT STORIES in my hand as I started out under the groined arcade of the Municipal Building and the rusty green-black terminal of the El sweeping onto the bridge from Park Row – somewhere in the course of that walk across the bridge the last of those volumes got lost for all time. Evening was coming on fast, great crowds in thick black overcoats were pounding up the staircases to the El; the whole bridge seemed to shake under the furious blows of that crowd starting for home.

Rush hour above, on every side, below: the iron wheels of the El trains shooting blue-white sparks against the black, black tracks sweeping in from Chinatown and Oliver Street under the black tar roofs and fire escapes and empty window boxes along the grimy black tenements on whose sides I could see the streaky whitewashed letters CHILDREN CRY FOR IT FLETCHER’S CASTORIA CHARLES S. FLETCHER; trolley cars bounding up into the air on each side of me, their bells clanging, clanging; cars sweeping off the bridge and onto the bridge in the narrow last roadways before me….

Somewhere below they were roasting coffee, handling spices-the odor was in the pillars, in the battered wooden planks of the promenade under my feet, in the blackness upwelling from the river. A painter’s scaffold dangled down one side of the tower over a spattered canvas. Never again would I walk Brooklyn Bridge without smelling that coffee, those spices, the paint on that canvas. The trolley car clanged, clanged, clanged taking me home that day from the bridge. Papa, where are they taking me? Where in this beyond are they taking me?”

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