I nearly always felt safe in Greenpoint, a Polish-Italian neighborhood whose ethnic differentiation was partly determined by the Bronx-Queens Expressway, which cut one side off from the other. Just as well. The Italians didn’t like anybody – but Italians, of course.

On that: Italian-Americans are among the most appearance-conscious people I have ever known. Greenpoint was no patchwork-quilt of rickety wooden buildings, old brick facades, and the occasionally gleaming renovation. Almost every structure attempted to look like every other structure. In Greenpoint, the unifying element was siding. Only the most wretchedly unsuccessful merchant failed to slap siding along his aging facade. And I don’t believe I ever saw a residential building that lacked a socially acceptable second sheathing.

Frost Street was very typical of all the streets in Greenpoint. At the sidewalk level, not much happened aesthetically. The Italians gardened in the backyards, which were lovingly tended and seasonally opulent. The sidewalks were clean and wide – which is to say, perfectly all right. No special care was given the trees, but they survived – as they didn’t in other places. And the buildings were uniformly stuck with that homogenizing skin which made them no better or no worse than anything else. A pity. Underneath this skin one might find woodwork that was vaguely Russian in character, with folk-type patterns that represented stars and other geometrical forms. Greenpoint had been Jewish and the immigrants who grew and prospered there had moved on. One of the world’s great artists, Jerome Witikin, grew up on my street, Graham Avenue. His father was a glazier who had a shop on the other side of Metropolitan. The BQE took the Witkin home, as it did many others. It was also worsening the lives of everybody who was incautious enough to breathe. I’d wipe soot off my windowsill routinely. (And with a dry rag. If there was any moisture on it, the stuff would smear.) It had all come from the cars that passed, quite audibly, at about window-level a few blocks away. The BQE can be seen in this picture, a sort of mirage amidst the eerie haze - product of a slow spring rain. To paint the picture, I slanted the easel downwards to keep the canvas dry. The strategy worked only in part. The night was so moisture-laden that I really didn’t finish the picture as I normally would have. Yet I’m glad I didn’t. The thinner paint film seems to lend itself to the dripping veils of color.