He descended the steps and stood beside me, shaking his head. “This is all the Cannon Street there is.” He waved his arm north to south. “From that to that.” He introduced himself as Norris, the superintendent of Florence Nightingale Elementary, PS110. He offered what he knew of the street’s history: PS110 was built in 1903; the projects at the southern end likely went up in the 1950s, as most of them had. “Most likely they tore yours down to build that,” he said, pointing to the closest brown tower. “Ninety-six probably was right there. Or maybe over on the other side of Broome, if it ran all that way. Hard to say.”
“Any idea about the origin of the name Cannon?”
“No,” he said. “Maybe a battle or something?”
He offered to show me the blueprints and old area photos that the school kept on file. “We’ve got ’em upstairs,” he said. “Any other day, just tell me the next time you’re coming.” He liked the idea that I’d come to take photos for my grandma and to understand our family history. “My grandmother,” he said, “lived to be one hundred and four. And my son—he’s thirty now—went to school right here.” After we shook hands, he went inside and I didn’t know what to do. So I photographed the street and the school, even photographed the projects and garage, all of it and its meaning dwarfed by the soaring steel mass of the Bridge. I stood and stared. Cannon was a weird little street.
Unlike nearby Pitt and Columbia streets, Cannon had no counterpart on the Bridge’s north side, no extension that shed its name and become one of the main channels aerating Alphabet City. Instead, it stopped at a wire fence on Delancey. Behind the fence, an empty lot, its rough black asphalt streaked with the late-day shadows of the Bridge’s support beams and a pigeon’s dry corpse.
Cannon was as long as PS110 was wide. It wasn’t Manhattan’s shortest street. That title often went to Weehawken in the West Village, though some argued that Moore Street, in Battery Park, was shorter. Others said Edgar Street downtown was the shortest, though thanks to its size and configuration, Edgar hardly resembled a street, more just the lanes coming in and out of a parking structure. There were many short streets below 14th: Mill Lane in the West Village; Gay Street, between Stonewall and Waverly Place; Minetta Street, just beyond Bleecker. But those obscure names weren’t part of my city. They were bits of someone else’s mythology.
Hoping for more info, I looped down Broome to Lewis Street and asked the security guard at the closest project if the building’s address used to be 96. “I don’t know,” he said in a Caribbean accent. “Could be.” Dressed in black slacks and a black button-up, he stood in a cramped, rectangular structure on the building’s front steps.
I glanced behind him for an address: 550 Grand Street. “No idea?”
“No idea.” He suggested I come back when his supervisor was on the property.
“When will that be?”
“Maybe an hour or two.”
I shuffled back down Lewis, feeling thwarted in a way well beyond defeat. What had I expected? To walk past Essex and find a preserved tenement building etched with a large bronze 96, in a streetscape like those described in Joseph Mitchell’s McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon? This wasn’t a Martin Scorsese film set. This was the other quintessential New York story, the story of New York the recycler, New York the perpetually reborn.
The opening lines of Cynthia Ozick’s New Yorker essay, “The Synthetic Sublime” read, “More than any other metropolis of the Western world, New York disappears. It disappears and then it disappears again; or say that it metamorphoses between disappearances, so that every seventy-five years or so another city bursts out, as if against nature—new shapes, new pursuits, new immigrants with their unfamiliar tongues and worried uneasy bustle.” In Through the Children’s Gate, Adam Gopnik expressed this phenomenon another way: “There is always a new New York coming into being as the old one disappears.” Which is also true of ideas: hundreds of writers and thinkers have stated this same simple fact in their own way countless times before, because my sense of loss, and the City’s fundamental dynamism, exists on a continuum of loss and gain stretching back through the modern waves of immigration, to the Indians who lost their land to the Dutch. I shouldn’t have needed to traipse all the way down Delancey to discover this, the obvious truth of countless New York books and movies. But it wasn’t truth that I was after.
I’d assumed I was trying to educate myself about my origins, yet only after circumstance deprived me did I realize my true goal. I wanted to feel that I finally belonged to this city, to relate as something other than a fleeting, one-time commuter who forged his own fabricated rootedness from other peoples’ stories. I wanted to feel that there was more to my connection here than an aging bloodline. If I could touch some part of the old metropolis—a house, a street, a brick—just one iconic building like the ones on nearby Pitt Street—I could truly inhabit the triptych of my family mythology and tell myself, and everyone thereafter, “That is where I’m from.” Instead, all I had was another clichéd Gotham story—the failed pilgrimage—as well as the old one: my grandmother, daughter of immigrants.
I left Cannon and walked toward Kossar’s Bialys, past rows of drab projects, determined to flush the disappointment from my mind with some traditional baked bread.
I never mentioned the trip to my grandmother. Instead, when I got back to Arizona, I started writing down everything she said about her New York years. Dates, place names, surnames of relatives she couldn’t remember anything more about. During lunch in the food court of Fashion Square Mall one afternoon, she mentioned a few streets she’d lived on in Canarsie and Brownsville, so I handed her a napkin from Panda Express and had her write them down.
As she aged and dementia further eroded her memory, every bit of information seemed increasingly important. Personal history has an ugly myopic side: details that mean everything to you mean nothing to others. Fine, you think during someone’s longwinded story of third grade show and tell, I’m glad that happened to you, but what does that have to do with me? Even I, invested in my grandmother’s history, found a few of her stories too personal to relate to, others full of narrative dead ends and incomplete details. Yet I clung to them. These fragments were now my mementoes of her, no different than photographs, and my interest in them only partially derived from what they reflected about our family. I also liked to magnify their importance, to think that her stories contributed in some small way to a larger historic portrait of the city I now wanted to belong to.
Memories such as this:
“My mother used to take me and [my younger sister] Helen shopping on Pitkin Avenue [in Brownsville]. Pitkin was where the shops were. We would browse the windows and my mother would ask, ‘Okay, what would you like?’ And I’d tell her, ‘I like the dress but not the top,’ and she would remember. She didn’t take any notes. She’d buy material—‘remnants,’ it was called; they were cheaper than material sold by the yard—and recreate them from memory. I would get to high school and girls would say, ‘Oh, did your mother make that too?’ She was a beautiful seamstress.”
And this:
“My father worked for a company called American Home Equipment, as a collector. They sold silverware, plates, pots, and most people bought on an installment plan. His job was to collect the money. He would go all over the city and collect the twenty-five cents in buildings in the Lower East Side, in Brooklyn, Manhattan.” Many of his customers were poor. “He always felt bad for these poor people. They apologized for not having enough money to make the payment. He would give them more time, then come back. He learned Italian from working with the many Italians that lived in the neighborhood.” After work, the family would meet him at the trolley two blocks away. “Mom said, ‘Bring an umbrella.’ No one had cars in those days—the average person—except my friend Rita. They had a house, not an apartment, which was a big thing back then.”
And this:
“My father was an intellectual. He could have been a teacher, worked for a bank. He was self-
educated. He helped us with our homework—composition, history. He would sit down when I was having trouble with a problem or something and say, ‘Okay, Silvia, now what’s the trouble?’ and have a look.” Even though he lacked a formal education, he was well-read. “He knew history, geography, math, especially geography.” This innate curiosity led him to vagabonding. “He wanted to see the world. So he would go off for weeks at a time. My mom called him a hobo.” When asked what specifically her father was doing, where he slept and where he traveled, my grandmother shrugged. “He was just traveling around—hitchhiking, riding different trains. He would write frequently to say hi and tell his whereabouts.”
And:
“My mother always called him a hobo, but he was very smart. He always read the paper,” especially the local Jewish paper, probably The Forward. “I can still picture him in his chair, reading the paper. Or at night, sitting at a table doing the numbers from his job.” Grandma and her sister Helen slept in the same bedroom. “We would often talk and goof around at night while he was downstairs trying to do paperwork. He’d come into our room with a strap and say, ‘Okay, keep it down or you’re going to get it.’ He never hit us, but when he spoke, you know he meant it.” There were few residential elevators in those days, so, “My father had to climb up stairs, in these old apartment buildings. He was out in all sorts of weather.” He died at age forty-nine from cancer of the larynx, but he first got sick at age forty-seven. “Lost his voice, from the smoking. He was never sick a day in his life until that.”
I reread these stories and feel like I know my grandmother not just as a grandmother, but as a person. But would anybody else care about these details besides me?
Granted, her family’s move from the Lower East Side to Brooklyn is the classic story of immigrant upward mobility. Aside from enjoying a life with more comforts, moving across the River was the first step toward becoming middle-class Americans, to becoming “assimilated.” Brownsville was a noisy place, but it was better than Cannon Street. Such was the immigrant’s eternal hope, that the next neighborhood, however loud or crime ridden, wouldn’t be as bad as the previous one. You could see this arc in the numbering of addresses in the note she scribbled, a qualitative improvement outlined 1 to 4:
1.—Sterling Pl.
2. 438? Saratoga Ave
3. Park Pl 1800?
4. Sterling Pl. => Eastern Parkway => Canarsi—Quonset huts
The arrows in the last line suggest the larger pattern: movement away from slums, toward some vision of Eden: from Cannon to various apartments in Brooklyn, to a two-story house in semi-rural Flushing, and eventually, to a mid-century ranch house with a large xeriscaped yard, swimming pool and orange trees in Arizona. She’d forged a comfortable life. Somehow I’d become intent on tracing our lineage back.
A year passed in Arizona, then two. In the winter of 2009, I booked another trip to the City. I wanted to spend a few days there before heading up to grad school in Vermont. This, I decided, would be my time to visit Flushing. At dinner one night, I told my family the news.
“The house in Flushing?” Grandma said.
“In January?” said Sheldon.
My mother was excited. “Take pictures for me. I haven’t seen it since, well, since 1969.”
“Flushing?” said my mom’s cousin Marty. He’d recently moved to Phoenix from Brooklyn after retiring from teaching math, and he came to my grandma’s to spend time with the family and read her paper. “Now it’s all Chinese. You wouldn’t even recognize it.”
On a yellow stickie, my mother drew me directions: a cross showing 188th Street running south from its junction with the L.I.E. Above it she wrote “near the Fresh Meadows Shopping Center,” though we both doubted that it was still there. “From the end of the subway line,” she said, “you take the bus to Utopia Parkway. Then you walk to 190th Street and 48th. It’s pretty easy.”
“The 7 train will take you right there from 42nd street or Jackson Heights,” Sheldon said. “The old IRT. Your grandfather used to ride it from work in Manhattan every day.”
Instead of directions, Grandma said that in high school, she’d befriended a girl named Gurty. Gurty was also Jewish, but she’d fallen in love with an Italian kid. Grandma eventually got married, had kids and moved to Flushing. She and Gurty kept in touch but saw little of each other. One day she was walking around the neighborhood and ran into Gurty. They asked each other: “Do you live around here?” They both said: “Right down the street.” It turns out Gurty lived on 190th, too. She still lived there.
“You should visit her,” Grandma told me. “You can stay there if you like.”
Even though I arrived in January lacking adequate winter clothing, I set out on the 7 train toward Flushing. I’d researched the area. It was a diner’s dream.
During the 1970s and ’80s, Koreans and the Taiwanese composed the bulk of Flushing’s population. Its few Chinese restaurants were Cantonese. Thanks to immigration from all parts of Mainland China, Flushing now housed the second largest Chinatown in the City, second only to the one in lower Manhattan. Among its many restaurants and food stalls, visitors could find items from most areas of China, including dishes that were difficult or impossible to find in the rest of the US. It had cuisine from Fujian, on the southeast coast, food from Qingdao, on the northeast coast, from Wuxi near Shanghai and Harbin in the northeast. So diverse were the neighborhood’s offerings that The New York Times called Flushing “the best neighborhood in New York for tasting the true and dazzling flavors of China.” I wanted to taste them all, even if it meant stuffing myself with multiple, gratuitous meals and carrying take-out boxes back on the subway. Here was another reason I had come to love dense Eastern cities over the spacious, suburban monoculture of my native West: learning about new cultures without leaving the continent.
As the subway car shook atop the elevated tracks, I thought of all the dishes I would eat. A few websites claimed that the basement food court in the Golden Shopping Mall sold Flushing’s best dumplings, Sichuanese street food, and hand-pulled noodles. How any place as blandly named as the Golden Mall could boast such incredible food confounded me, but that was where I headed.
When I exited the 7, I stepped into a bustling streetscape. Bright banners overhung cluttered storefront windows, their Chinese characters trailing vertically alongside melting sleet. The sidewalks were packed, the skies grey and brooding. I pulled my jacket collar up and scanned the shops for the Golden Mall’s address. After circling the block multiple times, I still couldn’t find it.
Everyone I asked for directions either shook their heads without speaking or answered in broken English. I finally found a post office where the beleaguered clerk pointed me back to 41st. There, under a nondescript canvas overhang, a small set of stairs led into the basement. A hive of hallways unfolded before me. Stacked boxes of produce lined the walls. Doorways, corridors, a woman in a paper hat laying pastries in a bakery case—I navigated the maze until I found the food court.
Despite its name, the court was not a spacious room ringed with restaurants. This was a cramped den loaded with plastic folding tables. People sat shoulder to shoulder, hunched over steaming bowls. The food stalls were shallow aromatic brood cells, fronted by a counter and a couple people tending stoves. I was the only Caucasian there.
After a few passes, I found what I hoped was the stall I’d read about in The Times. It sold liangpi, a cold noodle dish from Xi’an that included four separate sauces and came topped with cilantro, sliced cucumber and bean sprouts. A man stood pounding noodles on a table coated with flour. A woman wearing an apron nodded in a way that suggested she was ready for my order. I said “Liangpi” as well as I could, but she stared back. I smiled. She smiled. She pointed her pen to the list of menu items and said a few word in Chinese. The entire menu was written in Chinese, though in which of the country’s seven recognized dialects, I couldn’t say. I pointed to a nearby photo of what I hoped was liangpi and said, “Qng,” “please,” one of
the two Mandarin words I knew. Then I added “Xièxiè,” “thank you,” the other word I knew. The clerk scribbled my order with a smirk.
I sat beside a man eating noodles. All around me, people slurped noodles and sipped tea. Something about the sound and intensity of their movements lacked the neurotic quality of my Uncle Sheldon’s eating habits, a quality I always associated with neurotic, Jewish New York. Were this my grandmother’s dinner table, such behavior would have embarrassed me; here, I relished it. It was novel, and I respected any culture that recognized the way slurping improved a food’s flavor by aerating each bite.
When my dish arrived, it didn’t look like the way I expected. It was soup. I’d clearly ordered the wrong thing. In fact, I probably never found the right stall. But no matter. The broth was some of the most complex and flavorful I’d ever tasted, better than most phō, and just as delicious as the guay tiew Thai soups I’d discovered on my last New York trip. I slurped and slurped, sprinkling my shirt with tiny fat globules, then lifted the bowl to drink the broth. “Xièxiè,” I said before leaving. The clerk waved. I weaved between tables and went back above ground to consider my options.
It was late. The bus route I’d mapped to the Flushing house was too convoluted to be useful at this hour. The distance was too far to walk, the air too frigid. My best bet was a cab, although in rush hour traffic, a ride would be expensive. It seemed wasteful to come this far and not visit the house, even tragic, yet part of me didn’t want to go.
After the disappointment at Cannon Street, I wasn’t eager for another letdown. And really, what was there to see? My grandmother’s birthplace was gone, and even though my mother’s childhood home still stood, what did I expect it to show me? The Jewish-Italian Flushing wasn’t the Flushing of these Chinese residents any more than modern Flushing was my mother’s.
The winter air stung my face. Yellow cabs lined the street. Instead of walking towards them, I walked the other way, away from 190th and an idea which would remain, like so much of this city to those of us who never really lived here, a myth. Maybe one day I would move back east. Maybe I would actually live in one of the five boroughs. But whatever happened, Cannon, unlike Weehawken and York and all those other little obscure streets, would forever remain the center of my New York, shrunken, immaterial Cannon, a half block that even lifelong residents have never heard of, the one with a lifespan as short as its acreage, its face changing year to year, like my own.
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