The beige stones of the Clocktower Building gleamed white in the bright morning sun, the haze of summer already burned off the sky, leaving behind a rich blue backdrop for it all. For generations of Brooklynites, the Clocktower was a landmark—the tallest building in Brooklyn, by design. Now it was dwarfed in the cluttered downtown skyline. For decades it had been a bank where Olga’s grandmother kept her accounts. Until recently, when the conversion to condos was complete, Olga had used its grand bones as the backdrop for lavish parties, guests dancing on the beautifully mosaicked floors, the teller windows serving as bars. The parties had bothered the residents though, and now, like much of the retail space downtown, the former bank sat empty, luxury apartments stacked on top of it. A precarious Jenga game. In fact, the only reason anyone noticed the bank at all was because it contained an entrance to the subway, where Olga now ducked belowground.
Only five stops separated Olga from her neighborhood of origin. As a teenager sneaking off to clubs, or as a recent college grad commuting to her first couple of jobs, she never gave them any thought, that extra distance that separated her from the buzz of Manhattan. Yet now, from as close as downtown Brooklyn, the old neighborhood felt far. Remote. The process of getting there something that required preparation. Time blocked off. A calendar invite, even.
It was such a beautiful day, she decided to walk a bit, so she hopped off the train at Thirty-sixth Street, noticing the hipsters exiting at the same stop. （Were they hipsters, even? Olga thought. Weren’t these just yuppies by another name? For surely, with such ubiquity of style, they were no longer technically hip.） As she suspected, at the top of the subway stairs the group broke right, heading west to the waterfront mall that had sprung up there, eager for a day of poking through vintage clothes and eating poké bowls. She shook her head. How had Prieto ever thought this development would be good for the neighborhood? Olga broke left, heading uphill, east towards Fifth Avenue.
Sunset Park had two main strips of retail, each of which ran from the park, at the corner of Forty-first Street, south to Sixtieth or Sixty-fifth Street, depending on who you asked. What no one debated, though, was which belonged to whom. Fifth Avenue was the bustling Latino strip, while Eighth Avenue offered one of the best Chinatown experiences New York had to offer. Olga had grown up just off Fifth, and while some of the stores had changed and the restaurants had become more Mexican than Puerto Rican, she was comforted by how little, in the way of energy and spirit, was different. There were, inevitably, children’s clothing stores, furniture shops still offering bedroom sets by layaway, and dollar stores whose awnings teemed with suspended inflatable dolls, beach chairs, laundry carts, and other impulse purchases a mom might make on a Saturday afternoon, exhausted by errand running with her kids. There was the sneaker store where Olga used to buy her cute kicks, the fruit store Prieto had worked at in high school, the little storefront that sold the kind of old-lady bras Abuelita used to wear. On the sidewalks, the Mexican women began to set up their snack stands. Mango with lime and chili on this corner, tamales on that. Until the Mexicans had come to Sunset Park, Olga had never tried any of this food, and now she always tried to leave a little room to grab a snack on her way home. Despite the relatively early hour, most of the shops were open, music blasting into the streets, granting the avenue the aura of a party. In a few more hours, cars with their stereos pumping, teens with boom boxes en route to the neighborhood’s public pool, and laughing children darting in front of their mothers would add to the cacophony that Olga had grown to think of as the sound of a Saturday. In the distance, the pale green arch of the Verrazano Bridge, its arms gracefully splaying outward in embrace, presided over it all.
She walked a block past her own to Más Que Pan, her favorite bakery in the neighborhood, its windows full of lavish buttercream cakes the likes of which her clients had surely never seen: multitiered wedding cakes with a dozen plastic bridesmaid and groomsman figurines descending spiral staircases; a Ken-like doll wearing nothing but a Speedo lying in repose atop a cake intended for a bachelorette; a Barbie doll torso wearing a bridal veil popped out of a cake, her gown fashioned from mounds of cream. This one, Olga imagined, was for a bridal shower. She ordered a coffee and a buttered roll knowing that the coffee would come with frothed hot milk, the butter whipped and sweet, and that the two things would cost her $3, the price having risen a dollar in the past decade. There was no need for this snack—the idea that there wouldn’t be food at the house was utterly ridiculous—but this was comfort food. Ritual eating she needed to do to know that she was back home.