Yesterday afternoon I meandered through back streets of central Brooklyn and Queens. It still amazes me that even after riding those byways so many times over so many years, I still find things I hadn't noticed before.
In a still-ungentrified part of Bedford-Stuyvesant, when I chanced upon one of the best names for a house of worship.
I can't help but to wonder what services--and the music-- are like in a place called "Rugged Cross." I also wonder who came up with that name. Could that person have been thinking about the kinds of lives so many people in the neighborhood have lived, and still live?
Or could that person have anticipated what someone would paint directly across the street from it?
You can't paint something like that if you've grown up on Park Avenue and 72nd Street or Fisher Island--even if you watched every single Pink Panther cartoon!
A couple of miles away, in Bushwick, I had to search for the name of this church.
Even if I hadn't found it--Saint Barbara, by the way--I would've remembered the wonderful carvings and towers on it.
The building next to it seems to have been a rectory or convent, or to have served some other church-related purpose. Now it's the Bushwick center for El Puente, an organization that, for nearly four decades, has worked to keep young people from becoming tragic statistics. Its founder, Luis Garden Acosta, understood something that, I believe, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were coming to understand just before they were assassinated: Social justice comes with educational and economic equity.
I am not religious, but I understand that for many people who live in neighborhoods like the ones surrounding Rugged Cross and Saint Barbara, their churches were places where they could find refuge from the hardships they faced. Knowing that, it's not so surprising to find a very urban murals across the street from one church, and next to another, in the heart of Brooklyn--and to have the privilege of seeing them on an afternoon bike ride.
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