Whole Foods, like Macbeth’s Birnham Wood has come to Gowanus! I read it in the New York Times. To the corner of Third Avenue and Third Street to be precise. I used to climb mountains there; stacks of Alpine blue barrels filled with toxic chemicals. I was thirteen. The crystals spilling out golden and emerald in my hands. Dumped there by one of the canal-side factories before they abandoned ship, or a wise guy named Honey, who, for a fee, would make medical wastes and other unwanted pollutants disappear into the glass green, shit-splattered Gowanus. Marty and Freddy, two black guys—actual brothers--from the Deep South, ran a gas station on the corner. Freddie was a great mechanic and a terrible gambler, so there was always a place for him among the bookies and loan sharks who hung out in the Capri Club on Carroll and Third Avenue. Freddie got shot one day. A credit default swap, I guess. He survived but the service station closed.
Across the street, the one historic structure in our neighborhood, a limestone mansion as architecturally dramatic as the brownstones above posh Sixth Avenue, until, of course, a local company took it for its headquarters and put linoleum on the steps of its stoop and fake orange brickwork on its exterior walls. Someone told me “George Washington slept there.” I believed it, though the history was off by at least 100 years. On Third Avenue toward Carroll Street stand the remaining walls of Washington Park, Brooklyn’s first pro-baseball stadium. I knew it as Con Edison truck depot.
Had they lived into their sixties, my mother, Gloria, and her three sisters, Mary, Marguerite, Dolly, and her two brothers, Sonny and Tony Giordano, sure would have been amazed to see Whole Foods arise on the canal’s fatal shore, though they could never shop there. They relied on “Farmer Jones” dim grocery on Carroll Street who allowed them to pay “on time.” There was Angioletti, a proto-Whole Foods, peddler who’d call out the names of fruits and vegetables in singsong Italian as he passed by on his horse-drawn wagon. They all died of cancer. The Giordanos lived on Nevins and Carroll, less than 50 yards from the Gowanus, now a Superfund site. When the tide was high, and the stench intolerable, their cellar would flood and my Uncle Tony, the family plumber, would wade into the toxic wastes. He developed brain cancer.
Across the street, the one historic structure in our neighborhood, a limestone mansion as architecturally dramatic as the brownstones above posh Sixth Avenue, until, of course, a local company took it for its headquarters and put linoleum on the steps of its stoop and fake orange brickwork on its exterior walls. Someone told me “George Washington slept there.” I believed it, though the history was off by at least 100 years. On Third Avenue toward Carroll Street stand the remaining walls of Washington Park, Brooklyn’s first pro-baseball stadium. I knew it as Con Edison truck depot.
Had they lived into their sixties, my mother, Gloria, and her three sisters, Mary, Marguerite, Dolly, and her two brothers, Sonny and Tony Giordano, sure would have been amazed to see Whole Foods arise on the canal’s fatal shore, though they could never shop there. They relied on “Farmer Jones” dim grocery on Carroll Street who allowed them to pay “on time.” There was Angioletti, a proto-Whole Foods, peddler who’d call out the names of fruits and vegetables in singsong Italian as he passed by on his horse-drawn wagon. They all died of cancer. The Giordanos lived on Nevins and Carroll, less than 50 yards from the Gowanus, now a Superfund site. When the tide was high, and the stench intolerable, their cellar would flood and my Uncle Tony, the family plumber, would wade into the toxic wastes. He developed brain cancer.
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