Crossing

Nonfiction

Ripley Butterfield

Brooklyn Bridge, N.Y.

[A photo from the early 20th century of men in large hats crossing the bridge you grew up near but never cared much about. The image is mostly blank, toneless sky, with just a sliver of bridge beneath it. There is a subway car running adjacent to the walkway. That’s strange, because the Brooklyn Bridge only carries cars and pedestrians today. As a child you looked through the window as your train crossed the Manhattan Bridge or Williamsburg Bridge, thinking, there’s the bridge people can’t stop fussing over. In school you read something about the immigrants who died building it. And an elephant walking across, to prove its stability. You must have walked across the Brooklyn Bridge once or twice, but no memories of this are available. Horses and carriages occupy a third lane on the bridge in the photo. Behind the profile of these figures are the flat tops of early high-rise buildings. Today downtown Brooklyn is Manhattan’s mirror and rival. Your friend Eva often complains about how different the vista has become from her parents’ roof. The worst example is a sky-high black chrome monster right next to Junior’s diner on Flatbush and Dekalb. It belongs on the set of a bootleg Batman film. It fills the airspace, shadows the street, dominates the corridor between your house and Eva’s, visible from the B38. Yet, you never noticed it. Wait, you asked once, since when has that been here? It had been years since construction ended. Do you never look up? From a bridge, you searched the shiny outcrop of downtown for the offensive building. Nothing. The carousel at Brooklyn Bridge Park, the ice cream shop, condos, cars. The world of the photograph is in one point perspective. There is nothing but what there is.]