You took a walk on a
Sunday afternoon and came to a nice neighborhood, very refined. You saw a small one of these trees through
the iron gate leading to someone’s yard and you knew that soon that section of
Brooklyn would get to be a tenement. The
tree knew. It came there first. Afterward, poor foreigners seeped in and the
quiet old brownstone houses were hacked up into flats, feather beds pushed out
on the windowsills to air and the Tree of Heaven flourished. That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people.
Betty Smith A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
The NY Parks & Rec Dept has a literary tour of Brooklyn
– pretty abbreviated since it focuses on Brooklyn Heights. I never
participated in it, preferring to explore further afield, and almost right away
after moving to Brooklyn I took my own literary tour. It was not to see where an author lived
particularly, but to see the part of Brooklyn described in Betty Smith’s
semi-autobiographical novel, A Tree Grows
in Brooklyn. The appeal was the reality that Betty Smith created for life in Brooklyn as she was
growing up. The richness of the weather, cultural mix, morality, survival of poverty and rise from poverty, neighborhood streets, and a child's thoughts about all of it. Smith's love of Brooklyn was
compelling – a place so difficult, dirty, rough, vulgar, violent and scary and
yet so beautiful, passionate, creative, vigorous, historic, intense and
fun. You can’t know Brooklyn from the
outside or a book. I had to experience it for myself.
I reread Smith’s novel just before moving to Brooklyn and
made notes of the streets so that I could pinpoint Francie’s apartment building
and other places that Betty Smith describes in the book, hoping somehow to
capture a sense of what Brooklyn was like in the 1940s. That tree by the way, that Francie called
Tree of Heaven, is also known as ailanthus altissima. It is everywhere in Brooklyn. Surviving.
At the beginning, when Francie and her brother Neeley are
carrying their junk and rags to sell at Carney’s, she names all the streets
they pass as they walk down Manhattan Avenue – Ten Eyck, Stagg Street to Carney’s
on Scholes Street. After selling their
rags, they walked further south on Manhattan Avenue past Meserole, Montrose,
Johnson, Boerum, McKibbin, Siegel, Moore, Varet, and Cook to the nickel and dime
store on Broadway. The walk Francie and
Neeley took is the now in the vicinity of the Williamsburg Public Housing Buildings
(blocks of them) and about a half-mile from the Williamsburg Hassidic
community.
The area is now filled with small discount stores with plastic
brooms and mops in plastic buckets near the door with all sorts of plastic tubs
and kitchenware in small front windows. The tiny grocery store windows are completely covered
with ads.There are little stores selling clothing, hair products and wigs, as well as a
few botanicas. It was easy to find the
poverty and ugliness that Betty Smith described, as well as the cultural
melting pot. Many of the buildings were
original, including the apartment building where Francie's mother scrubbed the stairs. Looking at them -- rusty and grand -- gave me the sense of history, endurance, that permeates New York. And
like the hundred coats of paint on walls, railings, doors, the first layer is
still the there. All the layers are
there – it just takes imagination to find them.
