Running the Walker's city: To Brownsville via Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights and Crown Heights. Returning through Bedford-Stuyvesant

To best view the slideshow, click on the black border first, then the blue play button. If you click the green play button or the photo first, you will be redirected to my Picasa page. It's a bug I hope Google fixes soon.

The morning before this run, I re-read a big chunk of A Walker in the City, Alfred Kazin's 1946 memoir of growing up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. The terrific opening lines capture the style of the whole book—psychologically and sensorially vivid, constantly locating his Brownsville on both the geographic and social maps:

Every time I go back to Brownsville it is as if I have never been away. From the moment I step off the train at Rockaway Avenue and smell the leak out of the men's room, then the pickles from the stand just below the subway steps, an instant rage comes over me, mixed with dread and some unexpected tenderness. It is over ten years since I left to live in "the city"—everything just out of Brownsville was always "the city."

I've captioned some of the pictures with lines from the book. I like being able to point to some of the history of the places I saw, as well as to how sticky Kazin's prose proved to be—how it can still resonate as you look at a neighborhood generations removed from the memory. But today's Brownsville is from separated from Kazin's by more than time; the immigrant Jewish community of his boyhood is almost entirely gone, and Brownsville is now mostly black and Latino. So I wouldn't like to give the impression that I'm trying to invoke some richer past while pointing my camera at the ghosts left behind. Brownsville is unmistakeably a tough, poor neighborhood—it always was—but the place I saw while passing through is very much alive and worth seeing on its own terms. (If the streets in these pictures sometimes look a bit empty, bear in mind it was a 28-degree Sunday morning.) The "downtown" along Pitkin still and the former pushcart market on Belmont still have more foot-traffic and commerce than most American downtowns outside of NYC; on the side streets, many of the tenements have been replaced by a a lot of public housing, but also rowhouses built by the Nehemiah Plan, a grassroots, church-backed effort to build houses for low-income homeowners.

On the way to Brownsville, my run passed by the Pratt family mansions in Clinton Hill and traveled most of the distance along Eastern Parkway. The parkway was planned by Olmsted and Vaux, and according to the Parks Department, they coined the term "parkway" for it. It cuts through Crown Heights, home to a large Caribbean community as well as Chassidic Jews. I'm not sure why, but the day of my run, it also had the most visible NYPD presence I've ever seen outside of Times Square or the financial district. (You'll see some of that in the pictures.) The run back is through Bedford-Stuyvesant, including Stuyvesant Heights, which has some of the most beautiful brownstone blocks in the city. I ended on the campus of the Pratt Institute, and took some pictures of the art.

The run was about 12 miles. Up next: a run all the way up the West Side to the Bronx and the Hall of Fame of Great Americans.