act-dog

Passage A is from the essay “A Windstorm in Downtown Brooklyn” by Robert Sullivan, and Passage B is from the essay “Down the Manhole” by Elizabeth Gaffney, both from the collection Brooklyn Was Mine, edited by Chris Knutsen and Valerie Steiker (©2008 by Chris Knutsen and Valerie Steiker). Passage A by Robert Sullivan The Hebrew word for wind is also the Hebrew word for spirit, ruah, and when I look at the wind I look at something immeasurable, spiritlike, a climactic feature of a soul or souls. Try as I may, I still can’t predict 5 the wind in downtown Brooklyn, nor can I even imagine how the wind blew when Walt Whitman stepped out on the corner of Cranberry Street that is no longer there, or how it will feel when downtown Brooklyn is redeveloped, or “utilized.” I can feel it though. Espe10 cially I can feel the vortex, which draws me, calls to me. When it is windy elsewhere in New York or the world and I am far from the vortex, I think of it, imagine the swirl. Often I walk my daughter, who is eleven, through the vortex on her way back and forth to school, 15 even though it’s a little out of our way—after years of forced wind-watching, her older brother walks alone now, noticing, I hope, the wind on his own. On Saturday mornings, if we go to the farmer’s market, we buy doughnuts and cider and sit on the benches in Colum20 bus Park at the steps of Borough Hall, and wait and see what the wind will blow up. We face the CourtMontague Building and a London plane tree whose branches are notable among Brooklyn trees for their lack of plastic shopping bags. The wind rips the bags 25 away. Six years ago, I was with my son, who was ten at the time, and we were on our way to his school when I saw an entire stack of newspapers go up into the air, a trashy celebration! We were on Court Street, just about 30 to the corner of Montague, when we passed a newsstand. The man selling the papers was doing a pretty good job holding down copies of the Times and the Post considering he had the not-so-good idea of setting up a newsstand inside the vortex, but he was having trouble 35 with the Daily News, which eventually escaped, almost the whole stack, and was then whipped quickly and frantically into the vortex. In a second, the corner of Court and Montague had headlines all over it, the pages several passages in this test. by several questions. choose the best answer to each corresponding oval on your may refer to the passages as doing flip-flops, and then floating out into the street. In 40 another second the sheets of paper began flying up, up, up. My son and I stepped back from the building and waited and watched as, at last, one sheet slowly climbed all forty-two stories of the Court-Montague Building. (A couple of days later, the newsstand relocated two 45 blocks away.) Passage B by Elizabeth Gaffney My parents, as artists, were eager to have their children out discovering beauty in the pedestrian, complexity in the mundane, and they understood child psychology pretty well. Looking for these things underfoot, 50 where few expected to find anything of value, was just the right kind of fun and worked better than yet another trip to the MoMA. We didn’t have to behave. We were allowed, nay required, to touch. My parents believed that embedding beautiful designs in the asphalt and the 55 sidewalks was a quintessentially democratic, political act. When we went out, we considered not just manhole covers but fire hydrants, alarm boxes, street and traffic lights, signage. They were interested in urban renewal and preservation, and so the ideas of street furniture 60 and the livability of the street were important to them. We rated what we saw, and talked about why we did or didn’t like it. To me, the very idea of street furniture was thrilling—it conjured images of nestling in the cushions of imaginary street-corner sofas and jumping 65 on nonexistent double beds. My mother in particular was also a history buff, and so the connection of the manhole covers to Brooklyn’s past was important. Most of them were old; we tried to figure out exactly how old from the names on them and the wear they had under70 gone. Some were rubbed so smooth there was nothing to make a rubbing of, and my mind boggled to think of the forces that could scrape such heavy metal down to nothing. When my mother explained that the metal wheels of horse-drawn vehicles wore the street down 75 harder than modern rubber tires filled with air, I was catapulted into a new understanding of a previous era. The past had never seemed very believable to me, until then. People might have gone around riding horses and wearing bonnets somewhere out West, say where Little 80 House on the Prairie had transpired, but not on the streets I inhabited. But thanks to manhole covers and several stretches of street still paved with Belgian blocks, not asphalt—also pointed out by my mother—I could suddenly fathom that Brooklyn had been some85 thing different once too. History had happened here. Passages A and B: From BROOKLYN WAS MINE, edited by Chris Knutsen & Valerie Steiker, copyright © 2008 by Chris Knutsen & Valerie Steiker. Used by permission of Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.