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Up and down the avenue lies the history of the neighborhood, of New York, of much of the nation. In the window of a drugstore that looks preserved from the 1940s, boxes of Whitman's Samplers, chocolates, are stacked beside a cardboard cutout of a vanilla ice-cream soda. Down the avenue: a pizzeria, Ryan's bar, the Klassy Klothes Boutique. One restaurant seeks at least two populations: Comidas China Latinas y Szechuans. A clothing store, "For Latinos," shows its original name, Glass and Lieberman, embossed in the sidewalk. On other streets, other identifications: German, Polish, Korean, Finnish, Norwegian. The Scandinavians are the neighborhood elders, vestiges of the time up through World War II when Sunset Park's harbor bulged with freighters and warships.
"Half the neighborhood is Hispanic. Most of those who come to the center are Hispanic, but by no means all. Mallory is Irish, of course. Every nationality we work with has its special troubles on top of the general human variety." Geraldine (Italian) indicates the scope of her purview with a sweep of her arm. "We have a whole world here."
The world of Sunset Park holds 98,000 people, one-third of whose families live below the poverty line. The neighborhood is shaped like a dog-eared rectangle, slightly over a mile wide and 2.6 miles long. Upper New York Bay creates the western boundary, across the water from which the financial towers of lower Manhattan stand bunched together like a bouquet of steel pipes. The eastern boundary is Eighth Avenue, the land rising steeply as one moves inland from the harbor. The southern boundary at 65th Street separates Sunset Park from the middle-class neighborhood of Bay Ridge. Across 17th Street, at the northern boundary, is Park Slope, a newly fashionable area where the high price of housing has driven many poor from their homes. Geraldine and Mary Paul fear this may happen in Sunset Park.
One other boundary exists inside the neighborhood. The Brooklyn-Queens + Expressway, an elevated highway, extends over Third Avenue, dividing Sunset Park from itself. When the BQE opened as the Gowanus Parkway in 1941, the life under the highway was shadowed away: meat and vegetable markets, restaurants, seven movie theaters, all disappeared, along with the people. Now, to the east of Third Avenue, middle-income families, both Hispanic and white, are refurbishing brownstones with elaborate cornices and carvings. Between Third and the harbor, however, are tenements and abandoned houses spread out among bleak whitish factory buildings and the Lutheran Medical Center. On Third Avenue itself, the BQE makes a continual shushing noise, with traffic racing from Staten Island on the southwest out to the other boroughs. The vast stout legs of the expressway straddle the avenue like a gigantic millipede, around which lie stacks of dusty automobile tires and junked cars. Human life is furtive, barely visible. Under the legs of the expressway, hunched figures scavenge in metal garbage bins or simply lean against a pillar and stare.
"There's Billy." Geraldine points out a slinking figure in a black ski cap, with a gash-scar running from the corner of his right eye to his chin. "I've known him since he was a kid. Now he's an addict, a pusher too, probably." She shouts, "Hi, Billy." The figure, startled, uncoils, waves brightly and moves on.