That last part is what I will remember. And the light that coruscated through the leaves:
Is that—what I will recall—the difference between cycling in midlife and those rides where counted miles?
Today, after pedaling Tosca, my Mercian fixed-gear bike, down through the Bronx, Harlem and the Hudson River Greenway to Battery Park, I decided to zig-zag through Lower Manhattan. I chanced upon a bike lane I hadn’t seen before because I was in a part of town where I hadn’t been in a while: the eastern end of Grand Street, in an old part of the Lower East Side.
I knew that the neighborhood, like so much of the city, has been changing rapidly. Still, I wasn’t prepared to see this:
When I first moved back to New York, I lived a few minutes (by bike) away. So, naturally, I went there when I needed, I believe, a tire. The man who helped me—as it turns out, the proprietor himself, Frank Arroyo—was friendly in the way of someone meeting a new neighbor and chatted with me about my bike (I was riding my Peugeot PX-10, if i recall correctly), bikes in general, the neighborhood and “what brought you here’; he wasn’t referring only to his shop.
I continued to patronize, or simply visit, his shop for, among other things, a reason I understood only much later: We were both building our lives in the city. For him, it meant starting a business that became, I dare say, an important part of the community. Kids got tneir first bikes and adults bought their first grown-up bikes there. Tourists and participants in events like the Five Boro Bike Tour rented from him. And countless people brought in repairs or bought used bikes from him.
That is why his shop closing—due to his passing late last year, as it turns out—is so sad. I’d heard that he contributed to a neighborhood theater and various charities, volunteered at all sorts of events, and encouraged his employees to do the same. And he managed to do it all, from that location, for nearly half a century: He started when hardly anyone else wanted to be in the neighborhood and became one of its mainstays. At the time he opened the shop, children and grandchildren of poor Jewish and Italian immigrants squeezed into the blocks between the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges gave way to Puerto Ricans (like him), artists and, later, young professionals, all trying to gain a foothold in this city and country.
As I lived in the city—especially during the year I worked as a messenger—I learned about other shops. Frank never seemed upset that I was patronizing places like Bicycle Habitat, Toga and Stuyvesant: He knew he was running a family- and community-oriented business, not a “pro” shop. (It was an authorized Schwinn dealership.) Still, I would stop in and buy something, on principle, whenever I was over that way.
The closing of Frank’s is, therefore, not only the end of a bicycle shop and repair business. It also represents what is being lost in this city, especially in Manhattan: small, independent businesses that serve communities, whether in the sense of geography or shared interests (I think now of the Gotham Book Mart, which I still miss), started by a member of that community and stayed through thick and thin. While I hope it doesn’t happen, I expect that the space will be rented to some business of which the world doesn’t need another (like a boutique or over-priced coffee shop). Or, perhaps, when the neighboring businesses leave, whether or not voluntarily, the buildings will be converted or torn down for condos or co-ops unaffordable for the kinds of people who start businesses and build neighborhood institutions the way Frank did.
Sometimes someone can just tell, “You’re not from here!”
Here in New York, if someone asks how to get to “Hew-stun” street, we know that person is a tourist, or just moved here. That downtown thoroughfare shares a name with Texas’ largest city. Or so it appears. Actually, it’s named for William Houstoun, a member of the Continental Congress and 1787 Constitutional Convention. He was the son-in-law of Nicholas Bayard III, who owned a farm (!) that covered much of what is now SoHo and the Lower East Side and has a street named for him. At some point, the second “u” was dropped from “Houstoun.”
So how does a real New Yorker intone it? HOW-stun. Apparently, that’s how the family pronounced it.
So why am I giving you a pronunciation guide to a downtown street? Well, during a ride the other day, I got a similar lesson.
The Bronx is full of short, but sometimes surprisingly steep, climbs. One winds up West Tremont Avenue just south and west of Bronx Community College. It was just enough to make me glad I “wimped out” and took one of my geared bikes instead of my fixed-gear. I wasn’t out of breath but, for a moment, I thought I was dreaming or hallucinating when I saw this:
I grew up at 573 Dahill Road in Brooklyn until I was 12. What, I wondered, was this barbershop 35 kilometers (22 miles), and even more years, away doing with the name of my childhood stomping grounds?
Oh, and I hope not to sound racist—and I mean no disrespect to the skills of the clippers I saw the other day—in saying this, but nobody in my old milieu (where they didn’t use words like “milieu”) would ever have gone to such a place because, well, no such place would have existed there. Our barbers were middle-aged or older Italian men who cropped the locks of men like them and their sons.
I brought my bike into the shop. Haircutters and patrons alike looked at me quizzically: I obviously wasn’t there for a “fade” or cornrow. “Can I help you?” a slender man with a trim beard queried.
“Mamí, man’s haircut here,” one patron admonished me.
“Yo lo sabe.” Señora Provine, my old profesora, surely would have been appalled. Then again, I’m not sure anybody in the Bronx speaks the way she or, for that matter, any of my English teachers, taught us. And those guys, I’m sure, knew “I’m not from here” even before I opened my mouth. I even could’ve understood if they didn’t believe that I’ve been living in the Bronx, albeit in a different neighborhood, for 2.5 years.
To explain why the sign on the shop caught my attention, I pulled up images of my childhood home and the street sign on my phone. “¡Mira! Yo vivida allí. La Calle Dahill.
I pronounced it Day-hill. Just as anyone in my old milieu, where they didn’t use words like “milieu,” would have said it.
A customer overheard. “This place. It’s Duh-hill.”
I should have known. Duh-hill. Da’hill. I missed the apostrophe implied by the space in that sign. Just like Da’Bronx, not The Bronx.
Just 5 kilometers (3 miles) from my apartment. But I definitely wasn’t from there. At least we had a good laugh.
