When I first arrived in New York, in the early 80's, I knew Long Island City only from the window of a Brooklyn-bound cab, speeding down the FDR through the Manhattan night with Joe Jackson's "Stepping Out" playing in my head. From that vantage-point my only inkling of what LIC was about was informed by the outlines of rusted and weather-beaten factories which rose black against the eastern sky, dark and unlit shapes of floating rail barge piers at the their feet and the soaring PepsiCo bottling plant with its 1940's neon sign in script above it the only source of light. Had I been like many New Yorkers, my acquaintance with the neighborhood would have stopped there.
I am a curious sort, however, and one summer day when I was still new to the City I found myself up early and walking the streets of Sutton Place when I was overcome by the smell of freshly-baked semolina bread, its scent wafting over the East River from a factory somewhere from beyond the PepsiCo plant.
I found myself compelled to follow my nose over the bridge. When I alighted from the elevated 7 train onto the eastbound platform at Court House Square, I surveyed the area to the south. Below me, in the early morning light the north-south streets, half-lit by the newly risen sun, cast long shadows to the west and glimmered in the puddles of rain water left over from the previous nights showers. The air was clear and clean, and the smell of fresh bread seemed to be coming from one particular area of the cityscape below me. I watched from my aerie as a fleet of white delivery trucks left a sprawling two-story tan brick building with industrial windows, even as a line of workers, each clad in a blue shirt and pants, entered at another door to start their mornings labors.
Each truck that emerged was shiny and bore the name of the Gordon Baking Company in fancy script, and both the script and the condition of the trucks evinced the bakery's pride in its products. From my perch, looking down, it seemed as though I was gazing at a city from another time, the post-war years of the early 1950's, maybe, a New York that had left two world wars and the Great Depression behind it and was preoccupied by the prospect of making things.
I descended the stairs of the elevated and made for the bakery plant, hoping that they might have some sort of retail operation at which I could buy a loaf. I hadn't had breakfast yet, and the smell of bread had awakened in me a desire for eggs, bacon and home fries at a diner. Arriving at the plant, I paused before a large doorway from which I could see the humming activity of scores of workers tending tall slicing and packaging machines, all connected by snaking metal rollers and conveyor belts which stretched back through the plant to the windows on the other side of the block.
Not being the shy type, I asked one of the workers where might it be possible to buy a loaf of their bread? He gave me the once over, as New Yorkers will often do when they encounter someone who they can't figure out asking such a question, but then must have decided that I was on the line because he told me that they delivered to a bunch of grocery stores in the City, naming two, the Food Emporium and Sloan's. I asked him, instead, if there was a decent diner nearby. This time his eyes lit up and he said, sure, there were three nearby and told me the name of his favorite one and how to walk there. I thanked him and he tipped his hat at me as I left.
I have not spent much time in Long Island City since that day, long ago. The neighborhood these days, like much of the rest of New York, is unrecognizable from the City that I knew when I first came here thirty-six years ago. While there are still neighborhoods in Manhattan that have retained much of their character from my first years here, almost all of which is due to their having been given landmark protection, much of the City has changed so much that I can sometimes feel like a stranger in my own home. I am able, however, to conjure up that earlier City, in neighborhoods that I either lived in and experienced on a daily basis, or, as with Long Island City, which appeared to me as if in a febrile dream on a summer day, long ago, when men in pressed blue uniforms drove shiny white delivery trucks through rain-mirrored cobbled streets while the smell of freshly baked bread wafted through the buildings on an early morning breeze.
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