On Broadway, Brooklyn Style

We live only a few blocks from Broadway in Brooklyn. It runs diagonally from the Williamsburg bridge eastward to Broadway Junction. There is an elevated train track running directly over this part of Broadway for the J, M and Z subway lines.

It can be a bit intimidating at first, walking along Broadway under the el. It's loud, it's dirty, and in some areas it's dark, but it's an interesting darkness, being in the shadows of green steel. There are grocers and strange doors and abandoned shops and loud people. People stand around yelling in Spanish or unloading clothes into department stores.

Pigeon poop runs along in a straight line beaneath the ledges of the tracks above, following the curves and direction of the trains. I am always careful to walk away from these areas.

Buildings line the street, some are businesses on the ground level, but above are apartments with views looking out to the side of the tracks, or looking down on them from above. I would hope for the tenants sake that the sound of the street and the trains becomes a kind of white noise.

There are fascinating old buildings with interesting architectural details, but these buildings are now 99 cent stores or nail salons. The attractive details are partially covered by neon signs for pizza or tacos or shoe stores. The green steel posts with bolts and rivets and pipes and rust are impressive and I can't help but wonder what the street was like 100 years ago when horses and buggies were traveling Broadway of the early 1900's. What kinds of shops lined the route, or what kinds of farmland? What animals grazed here? Brooklyn used to be entirely made up of farms, with many of today's streets named after the early settlers.

Lately I've taken to walking along part of this route for a few of my favorite blocks. It makes me think that this is what all of Manhattan used to be like just 20 or 30 years ago, nevermind 100 years ago. It's bustling, it's dirty and loud. You can feel the trains coming before you can hear them, and when you do hear them, they rumble along picking up speed at increasingly loud levels.

When I'm under the tracks I really feel like I'm in New York. This is part of the New York I thought about before I'd ever even visited. There are other areas in the city that are just like I would have imagined and just as interesting, but along parts of Broadway it feels like the real thing. It's a bit of rush to walk along this route, and my pulse feels like it's beating at the same pace as the J trains overhead.