Brooklyn Heights

Brooklyn Heights is recalled as both a real neighborhood and the center of an imagined future: a walkup, a striking view, and ordinary city routines shared by two people expecting their life together to grow. Remembered after that future has been broken open, its everyday details become unusually precious.

Setting and view

The couple lived in a walkup on Cranberry Street in Brooklyn Heights, across the river from the Seaport and the Financial District. From their windows they could see the skyline and bridge, a view the speaker compares to the cityscape seen in movies. The apartment’s outlook made the wider city seem close at hand, while the couple’s life inside it was made up of small, repeated routines.

Daily life and the future they expected

The speaker remembers getting an egg-and-bacon bagel each morning at a narrow deli on Montague Street, reached by walking down three steps. There was usually a line: people heading to work, impatient for coffee served in blue-and-white Greek cups. The speaker’s husband called from the train platform, where he could get only one bar of reception, to ask what he should bring home for dinner. Their choices—Indian food or pasta—belonged to a life composed of small meals and familiar exchanges.

At the time, the couple were stressed and waiting: he had finished his dissertation and passed his oral examinations just as the first cases hit Newark. He taught as an adjunct at Hunter, loved his students, disliked the department, and was waiting to become faculty full time. They were also waiting to have children. In retrospect, the speaker sees that suspended period not as a prelude to the real future but as a happy life in its own right, even though its fullest promise had seemed to lie ahead.

A beloved city and its imagined children

The speaker says she loved New York City and wished she could live two lives: one in Brooklyn Heights and another in the East Village. Her imagined city life included Yankees games, Off Off Broadway, poetry slams, getting lost at the Met, and visiting artists’ retrospectives. She also remembers eating Sabrett’s hot dogs with sauerkraut, grilled onions, and mustard, and walking along Court Street to Carroll Gardens and back.

The folding tables along the route, where hawkers sold scarves, children’s books, and watches, held a particular promise. She imagined buying her future children their first books there, for two dollars. That small plan gathers the neighborhood’s larger significance: Brooklyn Heights is remembered not only for what the couple had, but for the ordinary, shared future they expected to build there.