Two months ago, Canadian wildfires singed the sky orange in my hometown of New York City. At times, you could actually smell—and see—smoke from the burning trees.
Such sights and smells didn’t enshroud the ride I took yesterday. I pedaled Tosca, my Mercian fixed gear, along familiar streets from my neighborhood to Brooklyn. While my nose didn’t detect the scent of incinerated wood and my eyes didn’t pick up ash or unusual hues on the horizon, I could sense the aftermath of a fire before I literally encountered it.
On Sunday, a fire destroyed a row of stores at the intersection of Lee Avenue and Hooper Street, by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Most of the stores were closed, which is probably the reason why no one was hurt even as the stores and their contents were destroyed.
Still, such a disaster is particularly devastating for the Hasidic enclave of South Williamsburg. For one thing, the stores and the spaces they occupied were owned by members of the community, who were also nearly all of those establishments’ customers. For another, some of those stores sold the clothing and supplies kids will need as they return to school, But most important, those stores catered to the specific needs and religious mandates of the community, particularly in food and clothing. (As an example, Halakhic law forbids the mixing of fabrics.) Those needs and requirements are sometimes difficult, if not impossible, to meet in other stores.
Anyway, I continued my ride. Sometimes it’s seemed as if I’ve been pedaling through smoke all summer.
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