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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 WORLDS 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 FLETCHERS
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 painters 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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