The taxi ride to Manhattan after the first shuttle flight of the day from Washington puzzled me. Why did scenes that should have been familiar from 30-odd years before seem so new and strange? I was the Brooklynite who had grown up on the buses (and before them the trolleys) and the subways of the city—and at the same time the rube from the Midwest gawking at this enormous, polyglot, multihued jumble of humanity. Part of the strangeness came because much had changed. In the early morning haze, I was riding by endless lines of storefronts with the tin shutters completely covering them. Surely they were brought here by immigrants from somewhere, maybe Latin America. At least they looked more like imports from that part of the world than anything I could recall from the old days.

The sense of Central Park’s incongruity was different than I remembered from the 1940’s and 50’s. It isn’t that the greenery seemed out of place among the concrete, but rather that its pristine freshness was out of keeping with the decay through which the taxi had just taken me—decay that was palpably worse than midtown used to be. This disjointedness was not lessened by the awareness of dangers that exist in the park and the certainty that no folly I retained so late in life would induce me to enter it after dark.

After finishing with my Manhattan appointment I entered the subway at Columbus Circle and took the train to Brooklyn. There was a pang of recognition as the various stations rolled by until I arrived in a part of town that wasn’t familiar to me. The person I was to visit there had advised me that the neighborhood was too bad to walk through, and I telephoned as instructed. I waited until a young woman came by in a blue station wagon. We drove to the office, and my guide unlocked the door to the building so we could enter. At my question she explained that a woman from overseas had been mugged on their driveway in broad daylight a few months earlier. Also, vagrants looking for handouts were liable to wander in off the streets any time. My hosts preferred the bother of constant locking and unlocking to the possibility of something more unpleasant—perhaps much more unpleasant.

Our meeting went well enough, and for lunch my hostess drove us into nearby Queens where we ate at a delicatessen under the El. The deli wasn’t quite what I remembered, but I had no complaints. I marveled at how people could live in apartments alongside the tremendous racket from the trains. Then it occurred to me that we also live right under the flight path of airliners climbing and descending at the Minneapolis airport. Yet that doesn’t seem as difficult to live with.

My business finished, I had a few hours until my flight left, so I followed the script I had considered for several weeks. After being dropped off at the subway station again, I took the train back toward Manhattan and got off after a few stops. Then I walked to Utica Avenue and boarded a bus toward my old neighborhood. In a few minutes we came to Eastern Parkway, which marked the border of the area I had known well from childhood. The bank was still there at Utica and Eastern Parkway, but the cafeteria where my parents had taken my brother and me for the occasional meal out was gone. And the old Robert Hall store on the other corner had disappeared, probably when the chain went belly-up some years ago. From that point for the next few miles Utica Avenue was almost a solid line of shops and teeming humanity. It is streets like this that make cities interesting, and their absence that explains why suburbs seem so bland to many. The old Carroll Theater, which I looked for expectantly, had become a gospel tabernacle. On the right the White Castle, to my surprise, was still there. Further on, the Rugby movie house was boarded up. (Later on, in the taxi back to La Guardia, we passed the old Pitkin Theater, which is now a furniture barn. Doesn’t anyone in Brooklyn go to the movies any more?) I alighted from the bus a few feet further on at Church Avenue. On a blazing July day, the temperature was well into the 90’s, and the humidity must have been almost as high. That, at least, hadn’t changed.

The Silver Rod drugstore was still in place on the corner, and across the street was the Greek cafe where I had had so many middle-of-the-night plates of ham and eggs. I walked along Church Avenue and then turned right at East 53 rd Street, following the path I had taken during the junior high school years, trudging home from P.S. 232. The single-family houses, mostly arranged in long attached rows with the occasional free-standing one, interspersed with apartment buildings, looked just as they would have after more than 30 years. I passed by Jackie Robinson’s old house—just past Snider Avenue, believe it or not. All right, then, Snyder Avenue.

Turning left at Beverly Road I walked one more block and turned left again to gaze at P.S. 244, where I spent the years from kindergarten to the sixth grade. Then back down East 54th Street and my old block. I found that most of the neighbors’ names had slipped my memory. There was a boy named Dennis who had lived on that corner. Further on was the house of the Lombardi brothers. And across the street from them stood the big house with a spacious lawn in which for a time I had the privilege of playing; it was almost a mansion for that part of the city. The name of the policeman’s son on the right I could not recall, and a few houses beyond was where I lived since my parents bought the place in 1937, when I was two, until I left—with great relief—for the Army in 1954.

The spindly sycamore tree that my father had planted in front of the house and kept erect with an elaborate circular fence, rubber stays, and guy wires was now somewhat misshapen because of lopsided pruning. But it had grown very large and stretched over to the other side of the street where it joined the top of another tree, forming a green archway over the blacktop. Our house was part of a row, joined on both sides with others mirroring it. For some reason, people called them bungalows, although they bear scant resemblance to the India-inspired design going by that name in the Midwest. The paint could have used some touching up, but the steps and associated brickwork against which we used to play stoopball looked as if they had been renewed. The house had the same novel improvement as most of the others on the block: a metal awning over the front porch, high over the steep driveway and the underground garage. Home on leave from the 82nd Airborne Division, I used to show off by jumping from the brick wall off the side of the porch and climaxing the 12or 15-foot fall with a paratrooper’s roll on the patch of grass between our property and the house next door. These house fronts now sported a number of air conditioners, not common at all 30 years earlier.

Next door to our old house, and sharing a wall as well as a tiny lawn with it, was Alvin Toffler’s, now similarly awninged. I remember him in warm weather sitting in the backyard reading, very tall and very thin. He was a college student—Columbia, as I recall—and I was some five or six years behind him. There was that stab of awe and envy of an awkward kid, as I looked at the suave Ivy League type, with his books and his pipe and his blond girl friend. I wonder if he thought his life was as idyllic as I imagined it, and what he now thinks of those days.

I stayed out there a long time, walking back and forth, wondering if I would be challenged by a nervous householder, or perhaps by a policeman. Finally, I continued on, to the end of the block. The corner grocery was still there, but Harry and Bess—the childless couple who ran it when I was growing up—would be about 100 years old by now. Around the corner on Clarendon Road, the dry cleaner by the old grocery was gone, and next door to it, in place of the candy store—read soda fountain, you outlanders from the other side of the Hudson—was an Eglise Evangile. How could it be French? I wondered. Maybe some Haitians had moved into the neighborhood. Continuing across Clarendon Road I studied the houses of friends from the old days, then walked around the block and headed back on East 53rd Street in the direction from which I had come. About a block from the old candy store, I heard some French wafting faintly toward me from a group of men playing cards in a driveway, and when I saw the eglise again it seemed to fit better. I tried to see my old backyard, with its two apple trees, from a side alley which used to be accessible to the public but now was blocked off, and also from alongside of a house on 53 rd Street that was behind it, but it was hopeless. To my surprise, the numbers of East 53 rd didn’t match the numbers on East 54th, and I was unable to tell where my house was from the next street.

After one more turn around the block, and one last look at the street on which I had lived from the age of two until I left for good at 19, I walked a block to the grandly named King’s Highway to catch a cab to La Guardia Airport. It was a main thoroughfare then, but not so impressive now that the cities are full of freeways. It took a half hour for a taxi to come by, and then it was an ordinary black sedan with an almost invisible emblem on the side. I wondered if this was an attempt to get around the licensing laws that make it impossible for honest immigrants to start a business while at the same time making it hard for people to get transportation.

One reflection remains. When Jackie Robinson moved to our neighborhood upon joining the Dodgers, his was the only black family there. Walking home from P.S. 232, I used to see his children playing in front of their house, and it always seemed odd—a violation of the de facto segregation that characterized so many New York neighborhoods. With all the changes wrought by the years, the segregation remains. Since I had first entered the subway to catch the Utica Avenue bus until I entered the taxi on King’s Highway, only three faces of the many hundreds I had seen were white—two behind the counter at the Creek restaurant and one old woman maundering alone on Church Avenue. Some day I would like to see an analysis of this phenomenon, marred neither by ideology nor guilt.