Between the fruit sellers, the racks of discount clothing, and the women selling African masks and glassy-eyed dolls, I could barely wade through the teeming crowds of Church Avenue. The smell of meat and lard boiling in the distance wafted through the air while the commotion of yelling, horns, and the loud dollar-store marquees exhausted what little I had left of my senses. On the street corners, boys heckled pedestrians, while old leathery women clogged the sidewalk depressions, wary of the flashing orange hand. Deep in the Land of Golden Krust, under a trove of heat lamps, I had found my meat pie—or, I suppose, it had found me.
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Licking the fried batter residue off my oily fingers, I noticed a peculiar brick column across the street. As I jaywalked through the idle traffic to investigate, the scene grew increasingly bizarre. Down Buckingham Road, the tenements disappeared and in their place, grand Victorian mansions grew. Tall Norway maples and plush green lawns materialized where once my imagination had seen only Jimmy Jazz and the bodegas. On the finely tapered brick pedestal, I read the initials PPS, and noticed that Buckingham was spelled with a Latin “v” where a “u” belonged.
From this momentary warp in the city’s fabric rose not only the colorful Queen Anne-style houses of the Gilded Age suburbs, but great mansions and manors crafted in every style from the Shingle and the Swiss to the Japanese and the Mediterranean. Each house outdid its neighbor in pomp and pageantry, and each street name, chiseled onto the identical corner pedestals, boasted a more Anglicized title than the one before. From Buckingham, I came to Marlborough, Westminster, Stratford, then Albemarle. Then suddenly, like some misfit prep who’d been thrown out of too many prestigious Connecticut boarding schools, I was tossed to the corner of Coney Island Avenue, to walk to the ocean, and blow my money on beer and hot dogs.
Though the grand suburban illusion had worn off and I’d sulkily returned to the sun-baked sidewalks of Brooklyn, I now considered Church Avenue to be a strange and lively port on the shore of some eerily misplaced countryside. In the late 19th century, before the speculative amoeba of tenements and row houses had wholly devoured the village of Flatbush, a man named Dean Alvord undertook the construction of a neighborhood between Church Avenue and Beverley Road he called Prospect Park South, not to be confused with the actual Prospect Park to the north. Anticipating the arrival of Brooklyn’s BMT Brighton subway line—today’s Q train—Alvord envisioned a “rus in urbe,” a “country in the city.” On his 40-acre development, he sold grand mansions to hand-selected buyers, and his neighborhood was soon a district of well-to-do businessmen. Chief among the lot were the founders of Ex-Lax, Fruit of the Loom, and Gillette, and a pair of tugboat businessmen, the McAllister Brothers. While Alvord’s leafy suburban enclave has mostly avoided the bulldozers and decay of post-World War II New York, the home he built for himself on the corner of Albemarle Road beside the railroad tracks was abandoned, then burnt to the ground in 1955. However, his rustic vision remains largely intact today, and the neighborhood was officially landmarked in 1979. Here, the streets are quiet and covered in foliage, and on sunny days, children play tag in the yards, a far cry from the technicolor commotion of Church Avenue or the treeless, asphalt streets just across the subway tracks.
Crossing the threshold from Buckingham Road onto Church Avenue, I could almost feel the ripples of the portal through which I passed. And yet, when I turned back to face the brick column, it no longer evoked images of an alien world, like the enormous black monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey. For New York must be a place of opposites, where the projects of East Harlem spill onto blocks of Upper East Side apartment towers, and the smelly, fish-carcass-filled alleyways of Chinatown lead the way to cobblestone streets of chic SoHo boutiques. That two competing visions of the city—the town and the country, the tenements and the villas—might exist in such concert and contradiction, and then harmonize into this great and chaotic dissonance, is what produces this phenomenon that is New York. And I think I’ll have another meat pie.