New York City has,
by some counts, five different Chinatowns. There's the famous one in Manhattan, Flushing in Queens, and two smaller Chinese neighborhoods in Elmhurst, Queens and along Avenue U in Brooklyn. The main Chinatown in Brooklyn is along more than twenty blocks of 8th Avenue in Sunset Park.
I started my run in Carroll Gardens, an Italian neighborhood along the South Brooklyn waterfront. It wa Italian, anyway, when I lived there in the late 1990s, in my first New York apartment. My wife and I were part of the early wave of "new people"—that's what the neighbors called us. As in, "It's disgusting you'd even sell ravioli with
fat-free cheese! That's for all the new people ruining this neighborhood!"* The new people pretty much run the joint now. Even Dennett Place—a narrow block in the shadow of the elevated subway tracks, with squat half-doors leading down to the garden apartments of cramped houses—had a couple of artists' open-studio shows this weekend. Back in 1997, it seemed impregnably old-neighborhood, and I felt mildly nervous and conspicuously non-Italian just walking down that block.
Between Carroll Gardens and Sunset Park is a mostly dreary stretch of 4th Avenue, and the historic
Green-Wood Cemetery, of which I could only snap a few glimpses from behind the fence.
This run was just over nine miles.
*Actual rant by the woman in front of me on line at Fratelli's pasta store, 1997. Her son came home with the wrong pasta.
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| On 8th Ave.: More fun than a basket of putti |
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| From Sunset Park |
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