Alternate Worlds–Dumbo

January 24th, 2008 Posted in Alternate Worlds, Dumbo

Notion of alternate worlds. Not time travel just similar worlds existing at the same time but not easily accessible, one to another. The ways across are at borders. There is a moving over a line to another place–through short pathways with a start and a finish, through revolving doors, through empty pipes, through crawl spaces, through mountain climbs, through elevators, through road, rail, sea, or air trips, through river crossings, through sprints across swimming pools, through eating a light meal, through going to sleep and waking up, through a night of drinking vodka with a group of Russians, a loss of consciousness in one place and regaining it in another.

In sociology, description focuses on one setting with its social order and process. Whatever the unit is–a tribe, a group, a city, a religion, an organization–it becomes the center of attention. The issues: how it works now including how it changes.

We are suggesting another center of concern, the shift in order and process in two (or more) contiguous (in time, space or whatever) units with a border between. Crossing involves a change in the experience of social order and process. It is particularly startling when the transition is sudden and unexpected.

Examples.

(1) As I write this the border between Gaza and Egypt has been breached and large numbers are passing back and forth. Journalists and propagandists are describing the new social order emergent and transient. I am suggesting that this is an alternate social reality under construction. The situation has parts: the two sides of the border, the actual people in the crossover who are participating in and making the different forms of order. A conceptual model fits the event based on either the cracking or the bypassing of the block. At the level of the model we have a class of events that in detail are dissimilar but in overall form are a match–the fall of the Berlin Wall, the flanking of the Maginot Line, the illegal migration over the Mex-US border, the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

(2) Space cadets enter a space ship and await launch. This is a crossing of a line. They become an isolated crew and immediately and concretely form a separate social order. A barrier is set instead of upset. Similar situations–the crew aboard ship, the miners in their pit, the religious retreat, campers in the woods, Utopian communes in formation. Another possible transform model.

(3) In any city there are always distinctions among neighborhoods. These can be traced to origins and process but once established they become a vivid form of encountering a change in social order for any individual traveler across the cityscape. Another possible model of the distinction of alternate social spaces.

In the notes that follow I and a companion visit a real estate puff of a neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. We are trying to discover the social order emerging (or in place) by walking in and through whatever it is. Through a crude notion of time I emphasize that once across the border, there is no going back. Admittedly the dramatics are exaggerated.

Any change and we can call it an altered state. And in reality–something we all ignore but know anyway–biological time, the on-going experience of living, actually means that we cannot go back.

DUMBO
Going to Dumbo. The neighborhood in Brooklyn, recently invented by real estate dealers, located down under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Bo and I starting from an East Side Manhattan neighborhood walked down to the bridge’s Manhattan side at the Bowery and Canal and boarded a B51 bus that dropped us off at its first stop in Brooklyn. I thought Bo knew the way but he didn’t except the general orientation that we had to look under the bridge, so we walked down toward the East River veering to the right, I following Bo’s lead not paying much attention to the future, the-next-step-and-then-what? Like when I was a child walking with my grandfather, giving myself up to the magic. I now understand we were in a lock, a way through to an alternate place-space. Yes today it is Dumbo.

There were some guards, piratical looking fellows, if you sensed them in time you would veer off, but for us they suddenly materialized and we bluffed our way past, pretending that we were local. I think there were nine of them, lounging in and around two disreputable cars. Close up they were more savage-looking than anticipated and I walked hidden behind Bo who set up our counter front (we pirates too, we invisible) and we got by.

Then under an overpass, the wrong one, and a turn to the right and two little bodega-type luncheonettes, one take-out, the other with sidewalk tables. Men eating. Workers. Industrial area, like you expect of waterfront Brooklyn. Giant buildings. Entrance bays. Piles of cardboard and paper twenty feet high, paper bailed into six by six by ten feet box shapes. A gas tanker, oval cross-section.

I am primed to see the artists. Few people on the streets. Artists? Dressed on the weird side, hair coiffed in impractical ways, you know the kind, you can not lie down, head on a pillow without destroying the world.

We start to play who are locals and who are tourists, but Bo quickly becomes angry. “Are you saying that I’m not local?” he huffs. He thinks we are in the same place back over on the East Side where we started. He doesn’t realize that we have gone through a connect, a lock, that we are in an alternate place, that we can’t go back.

Something about the space made by the buildings, the color. It is overcast and dark. Red brick, yellow brick, a long tunnel like street framing in the distance the Manhattan Bridge in a light fog edging to pale blue. A cross-over in the air, suggesting a roof over the street from one building to another, and the bridge slanting off and sensing the Brooklyn Bridge just behind.

Now we are at the river. Consolidated Edison on our right, massive, stretching off down the street along the river, with the paraphernalia for making electricity jutting out into the river. Surrounded by barbed wire fence. A building nearby offering space for rent. Bo notes the small overhang covering the entrance held up by crudely carved small pillars. Meant to be an artistic touch but of no grace. No grace anywhere here. No people on the street. We argue: which way to walk? Where is the center of Dumbo?

A fading map on the side of a large building, a company advertisement, one side of it splashed over with brown-black paint. “See,” Bo interprets,”the center is between the two bridges.” The other way, northward, stretches out and on and on.

So we turn toward the space between two bridges, see a man sitting outside a half shuttered garage carving an elephant, “Elephants are us?” I think. “Elephants are Dumbo,” says Bo.

“May I take your picture?” “No.”

Giddy-up.

This is the only person we talk to all day in this almost voiceless space except for a cab driver, with a frantic passenger, who stops us and asks where he is. All we know is Jay Street and we seem to have lost that. I wanted to ask him where Dumbo’s center was but with a slight shake of his head Bo silenced me.

Then we found it, The center. Right across from a deep construction site with jack-hammers and mechanical scoops. Three upscale stores, very large. A hardware store, a bar and restaurant, a working upholstery shop. Was there a dry cleaner? And across the street a pizza shop, very fancy, a coffee cafe at the corner and tucked away behind it a sushi shop.

One old building being converted, half the windows out. And around the corner by the river a scrawny park and an old, by New York standards, massive but short building that is sealed. Across the street from it is the back of the building containing the big stores. Turns out that behind and above these stores is a factory now converted to apartments.

Nearby, subway trains crossing the Manhattan Bridge make a very strenuous racket. Dumbo is episodically very noisy.

There are more people around now. On the street, a few seated at lunch in the bar.

Dumbo is not what I expected. I shouldn’t be disappointed. The whole of Brooklyn is unexpected. People like Bo and myself futilely looking for the avant-garde in an upscale fantasy. Bo is right, you can’t tell the natives from the tourists because there are no natives.

We find two ways out. An F train under a three or four story air-intake. The other is the B51 going toward Manhattan. Bo’s transfer is no good. No free return.

Strolling out we pass some people in the street making a film. They must be poor students, they have no lighting equipment. “Maybe it’s nighttime,” says Bo. The scene they are shooting: nine pirates are running hell bent–the very same uglies guarding the gateway into this place.

^^^^^

You can’t go home again. Only the dead know Brooklyn. We see the foot-prints of a down-country boy.

^^^^^

Dumbo Street Scene