The Brooklyn Navy Yard becomes a threshold in Devorah’s sense of what lies beyond Williamsburg: from its waterfront, she sees Manhattan not as an abstraction but as a brilliant city close to home and still out of reach. That contrast turns a view across the river into the beginning of her decision to go there alone.

Setting and View

Curious about the artists gravitating toward Williamsburg’s north side, Devorah ventures toward the waterfront. At the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the full Manhattan skyline opens before her, shimmering across the river in the clear daylight. The view catches her breath: the city seems magnificent and near, yet separated from the neighborhood where she lives by more than distance.

Her attention moves from the skyline to the contrast between the two places. She wonders why anyone would leave Manhattan for Williamsburg, which she sees as dirty and constraining, and what the neighborhood can offer besides the freedom to disappear into a self-imposed ghetto. The question registers her ambivalence: the artists’ arrival has drawn her toward the waterfront, while the city’s visible allure exposes the limits of her own surroundings.

From Looking to Leaving

The encounter at the Navy Yard leads into a practical plan. Devorah resolves to venture into the city by herself and studies subway, bus, and regular maps in the library, trying to memorize them. Her fear of getting lost is bound up with a deeper apprehension: that entering the city might mean being drawn into something she could not escape.

The departure that follows gives that apprehension a physical counterpoint. As the J train starts across the elevated tracks toward the Williamsburg Bridge, Devorah looks down at Williamsburg’s dirty, sludge-colored rooftops and feels tall enough to rise above the neighborhood’s flat indifference. Leaving feels unexpectedly good, an exhilaration strong enough to make her want to leap from pole to pole in the subway car. The Navy Yard’s view thus marks the shift from imagining the city across the river to moving toward it.