Thomas Wolfe wrote a story called "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn." The site in this picture could have been haunted by the people he was talking about. The paradox of any large city is its strangely recurring emptiness, which is jarring to the sort of person for whom the city is a dynamic and (therefore) productive organism. This particular Brooklyn had already seen to its productive side and was currently enjoying the comatose state that is possibly necessary - just as sleep is to us. Brooklyn is vast and various - a place of dead ends and dynamic hold-outs. The Williamsburg-to-Greenpoint neighborhood in this painting was - and possibly is - still alive, both in its residential corridors and in its ancient, but clinging, industrial base. I would walk around and still see the sort of work-roughened faces Manhattan didn't produce anymore. The talk had a grainy quality to it, like what you would hear in an old newsreel. Of course, the artists and the designers and the party people were already trickling in. If you walked up the street toward the river, you'd find artist's lofts stuck between places that made plastic shoes, barrel-staves, blow-hole covers - all manner of things you thought had disappeared from the worktables of an America that was embracing high-tech with a vengeance. Today there are probably more artist-lofts than ever, though I suspect that the traffic in "goods" has not yet ceased. The dead know Brooklyn for sure, but it's not just a haunted place. No, not by a longshot.