Revisiting Brooklyn
"To look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first time or last time. Thus is your time on earth filled with glory."
I read "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" a long time ago while growing up in my Third World country of origin. Never had I even imagined that I would one day live in Brooklyn, albeit briefly. A line of Anne Sexton’s poem titled “Rumpelstiltskin” inscribed on a panel at a Brooklyn Heights street made me wonder about this living the moment attitude in a borough where anyone can "waste something once in a while and get the feeling how it would be to have lots of money" while pouring a cup of coffee down the sink. "Poor thing: To die and never see Brooklyn".
Brooklyn is in the southernmost portion of Long Island, the southeastern part of New York. Long Island consists of 4 counties namely: Kings County which is more commonly called Brooklyn, Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk. Long Island is bounded by the Long Island Sound on the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east and south, and the East River and Lower New York Bay on the west. Once home to Canarsie tribes who fished and lived in the former marshland until Dutch colonists displaced them in the early 1600s, Brooklyn got its name from Breuckelen, a town in the province of Utrecht in Netherlands.
It took 14 years and some 2 dozen reported deaths before the first bridge that connect the little island of Manhattan to Long Island is completed. The iconic Brooklyn Bridge was designed by John Roebling but soon after its construction started, he died of the tetanus he contracted when when his foot was crushed in an accident on site. Washington Roebling, John Roebling’s 32 year old son and partner became the chief engineer. Soon himself impaired of caisson disease, Washington had to delegate to his wife some on-site engineering tasks while he supervised the construction of the bridge through his binoculars from his home in Brooklyn Heights. Caisson disease is also known as decompression sickness. A caisson is a water tight retaining structure used as a bridge pier and constructed by digging a deep hole into the river and filling it with concrete.
The iconic Brooklyn Bridge diffuses itself into DUMBO, short for Down Under Manhattan Brooklyn Overpass. MBO is Manhattan Brooklyn Overpass before it became part of laughing “my butt off” (LMBO) or rolling on the floor laughing “my balls off” (ROFLMBO) in the urban dictionary. MBO is actually Manhattan Bridge, the second bridge that was completed in 1901 connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn. DUMBO was coined to ward off real state agents trying to cash in on artsy potentials of the Brooklyn waterfront which used to be an industrial area that starts right off the north side of Brooklyn Bridge and ends way past north of Manhattan Bridge. Today, DUMBO is a trendy hub of high end restaurants, cafes, and art galleries with a waterfront that highlights the most picturesque and unobstructed views of the Manhattan skyline.
"Brooklyn is no different than any other place," said Neeley firmly. "It's only your imagination makes it different. But that's all right," he added magnanimously, "as long as it makes you feel happy."
Brooklyn may not be different from any other place but to this inglorious wanderer, it is special and almost poetic! Standing at the Brooklyn Heights Promenade with my Babe as a foreign bride fourteen years ago, I had my first glimpse of Liberty Enlightening the World. There at the “air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame“ is the “New Colossus”.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lighting, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon hand
Glows world-wide welcome, her mild eyes command
The air bridge harbor that twin cities frame
“Keep ancient lands, you storied pomp”
With silent lips “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breath free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Emma Lazarus wrote the sonnet in 1883 to help raise funds for the construction of the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal or the base for which the statue is mounted. The statue was created by a French sculptor and is recognized as a universal symbol for freedom and democracy. The twin cities referred to in Emma Lazarus' poem was Brooklyn and New York City. Brooklyn became an NYC borough in 1898.
Life began at Brooklyn and so did this blog. Thank you, Babe!
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