At a Crossroads

Myrtle, Central & DeKalb is Bushwick’s then, now and will be

At 5 a.m. on a small corner of a famous city unceasingly buzzing with activity, all is quiet except for the sound of a closing door, and the occasional train overhead. By streetlight, you can see an intimation of a man dressed in black with a head of thick black hair. He locks the doors of the Bushwick Public House, the bar that sits on the corner of Myrtle and Central Avenue. He walks around a corner and out of sight. There is silence but only for a moment.

At this intersection there are two mornings and they nearly touch each other. As the street empties of people finished with their last drinks a new set of morning goers takes over. The eastern horizon slowly turns a shade of green and a few people pass the intersection, some only briefly, urged forward by the train they hear coming. Others have time for a cup of coffee and a walking meal. It is 6 a.m. and there are two options for coffee, the Sunrise Deli and OMG Pizza, directly opposite each other on Myrtle Avenue.   

Traffic begins to busy the intersection with sounds. Two yellow school buses hum as they wait for the traffic light to turn green while a third school bus passes across them. Every five minutes or so, at a lull in the traffic, a different kind of humming can be heard from starlings ­–maybe a hundred of them – perched on the unused station house above.

Eventually, a small man passes, pushing a shopping cart as tall as himself over the designated crossways. He walks over the road between DeKalb and Central Avenue, then over DeKalb and Myrtle and once more over Myrtle and Central to land right under the Central M Station stairway. At this time of the morning, he may be the only one not jaywalking diagonally across the roads. With a striped red umbrella and two large orange plastic coffee containers, and some cups, he becomes the third coffee option on the intersection. The air is icy, the coffee vendor huddles his neck into his puffed jacket and keeps his hands deep in his pockets as he stands waiting for customers. 

At 7 a.m., people walking in pairs—more specifically mother and child pairs—replace the solo walkers. A mother chases her child who is whizzing down Myrtle on a scooter. Elsewhere, a little boy with a bag so big that it looks as if he may topple forward holds his mother’s hand as they cross the road. These pairs use the crosswalks diligently. A mother and daughter run to catch the B38 Bus that is easing back into the traffic, they miss it. Nearby is parked a dark green Chrysler; from the back of it you can hear a woman’s voice greeting the displeased pair with a friendly “hello sweetie.”

At about 7:10 a.m., a Manhattan-bound train approaches on the elevated track, boasting a big M on the front of it. It passes the unused station house and a black cloud of birds flies off it into the grey sky. It is at this moment that you realize you have not heard the birds in a while; there are no longer the small lulls of silence. It is rush hour at the intersection.

 At 7:30 a.m. on the dot the crossing guard jumps out the back of the parked Chrysler throws away the empty coffee cup from the Sunrise Deli and eases her way into the middle of the intersection. She blows her whistle three times and takes a position in the middle of it all; her rush-hour show has begun. It is clear that she is a neighborhood favorite. She immediately gives a lady on the sidewalk a big hug and walks her personally across the street. By the time she is back in the middle of her intersection she spots a white car and goes over to speak to the driver she knows. When a B38 bus drives by she waves hello to the driver and all the while she is singing, and making sure – with a loud blow of her whistle and a ‘let’s go sweetie’ in a tone that implies only absolute care – that her crossing pedestrians are getting to the other sidewalk safely. No one dares to cut through the middle of the intersection now.

The traffic guard stands in the middle of a six-way intersection where Myrtle, Central and DeKalb Avenue meet under an elevated railway and over storage houses, music venues, and lines and lines of electrical cords and pipes. People will tell you that this space is in transition; this is true for the whole of Bushwick in which it resides. Since Peter Stuyvesant charted it in 1661, Bushwick’s main theme has been transition. Michael Sheehan, an old MTA driver, will tell you how dangerous it became in the late 1970s, while William Jetter, the barber, will tell you about the business boom in the early 2000s, and Raul Valencia, a bartender, will speak about the shift in his clientele from students to young professionals over the past three years.

The first train stopped over Myrtle Avenue at its new station, named Central, on December 19, 1889. The elevated station had platforms covered with beige canopies framed in a metal, which was painted a rich green. The noise of the north and southbound trains rattling overhead has been a constant part of the crossway’s ambiance ever since.

Now every five or so minutes the rattling M train will interrupt the conversations of smokers standing in front of the huge window of the Bushwick Public House. Directly opposite, the train will stop the chatter of people eating falafels on the benches outside OMG Pizza, coincidently located in the bottom of a building that closely resembles the shape of a pizza slice. You won’t hear the voices of the two old women crossing the street, or the singing traffic cop

guiding them over. And just for a moment, the train passing the tracks overhead will drown out the bachata music that seeps out the blue-lit restaurant called Caribe and the bass notes thumping out of a parked car.

But on Saturday the 23rd of March 2019, the M train does not run, and there is a deafening silence. This will happen every second weekend this year while they repair the tracks. It is 10 a.m. and the streets are not busy. Instead, we hear new sounds. The Sunrise Deli has the sounds of sizzling meat, a knife hitting a board three or four times a second, a paper packet being folded, a shout from Abdul to Nicholas at the counter as a sandwich in white paper is flung in the air, and caught, a sudden jangling of coins, the words “next, yes.”

Back outside the sounds of a heavy metal door being pulled up announce the opening of the Little Shop of Soil, the brand-new boutique plant shop across the road. The intersection has many of these little stores opening amongst its older businesses. The Bushwick Public House opened in 2015, while across the road on Myrtle Avenue, Fly Guyz Barbershop opened 18 months ago, and Little Shop of Soil, has only been open for a month and a half. This is reminiscent of the business boom in Bushwick in the 1800s before the neighborhood was burnt to the ground in the 1977 riots that followed the great New York City blackout. Mike who moved out of Bushwick more than 30 years ago remembers driving the MTA 7 bus through these areas, “you would go past east Brooklyn and the entire street was leveled, there wasn’t a building in the block.” 

***

On an April afternoon – 2 p.m. on Monday the 25th – the intersection is all about business. As you descend the stairs of the Central M station, a black chalkboard on an A-frame propped up on wheels advertises a room for rent, $1700 per month. The next day it has gone down to $1680. If you hang around until around 7 p.m., you will see a man wheel away the sign down Central Avenue, eventually turning on to Harman Street. As he does, another man is handing out flyers to a comedy show down the road. He stands outside the Fine Fare Market, a grocery store on the intersection next to six dispenser machines that promise transparent plastic balls filled with different things. 75, 50 or 25 cents will get you toys, stickers or bouncy balls made wondrous by their packaging.  

And among the intersections’ colors are the murals that overwhelm the sidewalks of Bushwick. Standing in the Bushwick Public House – looking out onto the intersection through the huge window – murals surround you. The entire belly of the pub is covered in mermaids, stern faces, jungle foliage, and fish scales. Two more murals face you on the other side of Myrtle Avenue. One has two eyes, each with their own pair of long legs and feet in sneakers looking at each other with the caption “eye to eye.” The second is the face of a serious-looking child, eyes painted to look up at the overhead train, ears trickling water droplets. To the left of these and towards DeKalb Avenue, three lime green pallets on metal door grates are ready to be painted but remain blank for now. The green walls belong to the flower shop; the entrance is on the other side facing DeKalb. Next to it, a wall fashions a mural of a lady with a red flower for a head, wearing green overalls. If we cross the road to OMG pizza, its pizza-shaped wall boasts a giant anthropomorphic pizza monster. It is grotesque enough to make you stare, but one may slowly start to appreciate the wormy-looking pizza man depicted on the wall, in a suit, holding a cigarette.

***

To some nervous locals, the murals serve as a barometer indicating the neighborhood’s next transition. For an area constantly going through change it is hard to determine what it means to be local. In the 1980s ­– as Mike drove through Bushwick – he watched neighborhoods change in front of his eyes, and yet he would drive past little pockets of areas where communities survived despite influxes and outflows. William Jetter, the self-proclaimed “Brooklyn Baby,” registers demographic change just by seeing who lands up in his barber chair, noticing that in the last five years, more people have moved into the neighborhood than locals who have stayed. Growing up, William struggled to find a barber in Bushwick who could cut his hair. That wouldn’t be a problem now.

The Bushwick Public House is less likely to be considered a local on the intersection, and yet before you could find a barbershop in Bushwick, you would come across bars strewn across sidewalks. In1869, there were so many German breweries here that the 14-block neighborhood became known as “Breweries Row” until the early 90s, when Prohibition caused most of the breweries to close. Raul questions the idea of what it means to be a local in Bushwick, “I don’t know how you qualify it, like are they local because you own a house in the neighborhood or because they are renting a place in the neighborhood, or local because they happen to here for one or two years.” Locality is complicated in a neighborhood overwhelmed with ephemeral moments of history.

On an early spring Friday evening, the intersection is magic. It is 7 p.m. and deep orange sunlight bleeds through the overhead tracks, creating dramatic shadows on the sidewalk and road. Between the tracks and the ground, a buzz of energy slowly builds. Relieved crowds of people disembark their trains, descending stairs to the street below leaving their week in the city. People are more likely to stop now at the intersection, maybe to pop into the Fine Fare Market to pick up some groceries for dinner. Sometimes they will wait, as the cashiers call up to a window by the roof prompting a man to throw a small bucket – attached to a string and filled with money –to the cashier who takes the money and transfers it to the register before the bucket is yanked back up towards the window.

People seeking food, drinks, or sometimes just a place to stop and talk open the doors of the businesses exposing the intersection to the music in pulsations of volume and pace. Through the doors of Fly Guyz Barbershop, Fall by Nigerian singer Davido is playing, three men are sitting on a very large white futon positioned in the middle of the small barbershop. Two barbers meticulously work on their clients’ hair and beards, spending a great deal of time washing, cutting and styling. The men waiting do not seem to be in a rush, the barber is open until 10 p.m. and they sit casually, enthusiastically speaking about this weekend’s big gig. If William the owner is running very late, he isn’t shy to send his clients to the Bushwick Public House across the road for a beer while they wait. The slathering of Lucky Tiger message oil from a large white tub is the sign that the appointment is nearly done.

***

Back on the street, the intersection gets dark quickly, and soon the harsher light from cars and LED signs promising cold beer, coffee and ATMs replace the soft dappled sky light shining through the tracks. Some businesses like the Sunrise Deli still use the iconic neon signs, bringing to the intersection a nostalgia of the 70s in New York. Before neon lights, early in the 20th century, the intersection flickered with the earliest electric streetlights. And during an even earlier time evening would be marked by the arrival of the lamplighters carrying long poles with wicks. At dusk, they would walk along the sidewalks, lighting each street lamp.

The thought of this reminds us that as drastically and quickly as the intersection changes character throughout the day, it will change over the years. A new residential development that recently went up a few blocks down from the intersection is expected to bring 250,000 new people to the neighborhood, and the intersection will have to adapt. The latest addition to the crossway – only four days old – is the Citi Bike rack, installed at the corner of Central and DeKalb Avenue. “That’s just the nature of things,” Raul says, standing behind the bar he has stood behind for two and a half years. “You try avoid the change for as long as you can but ultimately things change. So do neighborhoods.”

***

When it gets too dark, people retreat from the streets into the warm light of buildings. It is 10 p.m. and music thumps in the Bushwick Public House. When inside, it is too loud to hear the train overhead. Instead, you feel it as it rattles along the tracks. The train is more intrusive when dark. Momentarily, it will light up the entire 6-way intersection. From a high chair by the window of the pub you can watch the train by its reflection that moves over four slim windows, across the road above Fly Guyz Barbershop. These windows are otherwise dark, their inhabitants either asleep or out. 

If you stick around for long enough, you could witness a duel, not by drunken patrons or aggressive New Yorkers. Bushwick – as Mike describes it – is not like it was in the 70s when at night one would have to keep an eye behind their back in case of trouble. On the sidewalk tonight, two men find themselves in the midst of a sword fight.

Earlier that evening, Shmuel Chayempour walked into the Bushwick Public House. He is a stocky man with a thick black beard, wearing a white shirt. Knotted fringes – known as tzitzit – come out of his black suit pants, and a small round kippah balances on the crown of his head. Coming from a religious Jewish family, Shmuel is used to people staring at him for the way he dresses but these days in bars at night they stare because of the two large black swords that hang by his waist. If you went up to Shmuel in the busy pub to question him about his swords, he wouldn’t say much, instead he would hand you one and tell you to come outside.

The door of the Bushwick Public House opens; it lets the sounds of the pub onto the street before shutting behind Shmuel and an intrigued man now with a sword in hand. The street again is quiet bar the voices from smokers, and a car passing every few minutes. The men start to fight, and suddenly the sounds of the heavy swords making contact echo throughout the intersection. The aim is to hit the bicep, chest or side stomach, while at the same time making sure you don’t get hit, the score slowly crawls towards six, the typical end goal.

Three jazzy looking old timers open the door of the pub again filling the sidewalk with music. They are wheeling large bags of instruments to a parked car nearby. Their gig in the basement of the Bushwick Public House has just ended. They move carefully around the sword fighters not especially surprised or perturbed because they – like our sword fighter – are regulars. Finally, Shmuel strikes the bicep of his opponent, marking his final victory. The duelers shake hands, a train clatters past and lights up the sidewalk like a theater at the end of a performance. After a spar with Shmuel, you would understand why every Saturday he brings his swords out. To duel outside a pub late at night is invigorating. The sword fight may be remembered tonight by the intersections’ night goers but won’t be known to the coffee vendors and the morning rush of school children and mothers.

At 4 a.m. a voice – most likely Raul or another bartender on the late night shift – will shout, “last call.” The sounds of smacking swords will stop, excited voices will dissipate and the music will die down until the only sound that can be heard is the locking of a door and the quiet steps of a bartender. Then maybe silence … but only for a moment.  

The author battles Shmuel