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How Brooklyn is like Africa

BROOKLYN, N.Y.--Africa is much bigger than you think it is if you grew up looking at Mercator projection maps. Those are the maps we hang on the walls in our schools, that we reprint in textbooks.

Those maps were created in 1596 for sailors to use as navigation devices, not to present a realistic picture of the relative size of continents or countries. The cartographers' intractable problem is that it is impossible to represent a spherical world on a flat surface. Countries nearer the poles appear relatively larger than they are, while equatorial countries are terrestrially under-represented. So Greenland is huge, and Alaska is vast, and Africa--which in reality is three times larger--appears to be about the same size as North America.

This lie is imprinted on my Western mind.

Brooklyn is like Africa. It is much larger than I'd imagined. When Karen suggested that we spend a few days here simply because we'd never really experienced the borough (we'd ridden cabs through it) I thought, "Why not?" After all, Manhattan was right across the East River. I thought if we exhausted our options, we could always walk over to SoHo. I didn't think much about it when--in the months before our trip--she switched our hotel a couple of times (she kept getting better deals). I figured it was a matter of blocks, that it wouldn't make much difference if we stayed in Williamsburg or Prospect Heights, that we'd see it all anyway. We'd make it down to Woody Guthrie's Mermaid Avenue and up to Flatbush where Ebbets Field once stood. I figured after a couple of days, we'd know Brooklyn.

Brooklyn certainly looms large in our culture. It is an accent, the setting of Spike Lee's movies, the sentimental home of a lost baseball team. If you've seen the '70s television series Welcome Back, Kotter you might remember that as the theme song (John Sebastian's "Welcome Back") starts, there's a brief shot of a sign welcoming the viewer to "Brooklyn, the fourth largest city in America." Which is what it would be if it were an independent city, behind only the other combined boroughs of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

It is not difficult to see that it is more than three times as large as the island of Manhattan. Wikipedia will tell you it is home to nearly a million more people. (Brooklyn is the most populous of New York's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million people living in 71 square miles. Queens is even bigger in terms of area, with 109 square miles and about 2.3 million people.)

I knew all this, and still I thought of Brooklyn as a strollable neighborhood. It isn't. You need a MetroCard.

Still, we got around a bit of it in the course of a couple of days. We got lost in Red Hook, thinking about Al Capone and Crazy Joey Gallo. We walked the boardwalk on Coney Island, nearly deserted the week after Labor Day but for shirtless, barrel-chested old men with leathery tans and shocks of white hair. We bought apples that tasted like peaches in a Brighton Beach bodega where all the signage and conversation was in Russian. We were underwhelmed by a Judy Chicago installation in the Brooklyn Museum of Art. We dodged the double strollers of the privileged breeders in Park Slope. We browsed the curbs of Carroll Heights for giveaway items (and traded our old set of maps for a newer edition). We saw a lot of the usual stereotypes, and some things we'd never imagined.

We took the subway and surfaced at Barclays Center, then began making our way north. We skirted the old Navy Yard, walked a nondescript urban mile or so along Flushing Avenue before turning west toward the river and finding ourselves in Hasidic Williamsburg, an ethnic enclave that has existed since the early days of the 20th Century and which I've read about in Chaim Potok's novels. Tens of thousands of Orthodox Jews of various sects live here; there was a huge influx of Jewish immigrants after the devastations of the Holocaust.

They are an insular tribe who don't much care for the hipster impingement to their north--the young and affluent "artist'n" who have driven up real estate prices and lead morally suspect lives. They don't care for the girls on fixie bicycles who go whizzing through their neighborhood in shorts and T-shirts, they don't care for the bearded music makers and their trucker caps. A couple of years ago, at a rally to protest what they consider a siege on their community, Rabbi Zalman Leib Fulop called the the growth of the local artist population "a bitter decree from Heaven" and explained that those who sold real estate to the interlopers would "never be able to leave hell." Rally organizers distributed a prayer, originally written in 2004, "For the Protection of Our City of Williamsburg From the Plague of the Artists" that, in part, read:

Master of the Universe, have mercy upon us and upon the borders of our village and do not allow the persecution to come inside our home; please remove from upon us the plague of the artists, so that we shall not drown in evil waters, and so that they shall not come to our residence to ruin it ....

Please, our Father God of Mercy, have mercy upon our generation that is weak, and remove this difficult test from these people, these immoral antagonists that by their doing will multiply, God forbid, the excruciating tests and the sight of the impurity and immorality that is growing in the world.

Karen and I are used to being able to walk wherever we please without attracting much attention. (This has occasionally gotten us into trouble.) And so it took me a moment to realize that our smiles were not being returned as we threaded our way along wide sidewalks filled with young children. (The Hasidim have large families.) That we were actually being glared at, regarded as Other.

I'm not sure it isn't useful to be reminded that there are people who do not automatically like you. We take for granted that our tourism will be welcomed, that whatever resentments we engender can be soothed by a few dollars spent on expensive coffee.

Brooklyn is like Africa: Balkanized and tribal, a land of demarcated territories and deep history. The visitor must consider the local temper and be alert and sensitive to the native customs. It is not the "melting pot" the civics lessons suggest, just a place where immigrants can find familiar food and be affirmed by the familiar rhythms of their native language until they are pushed out by rising rents or the next wave of refugees.

It is the Old America, a purgatorial place waiting to be saved by assimilation and miscegenation. It is not what I imagined. It cannot be contained in a travelogue. Brooklyn is large, it contains multitudes. I should have known this, for unlike Africa, Brooklyn is not traditionally minimized on maps.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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Editorial on 09/14/2014

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