everywhere, ghosts.
tracing three centuries of family in new york city.
We’ve very nearly made it to Halloween. Despite a month of heated discussions on the subject, our family hasn’t quite landed on the neighborhood where we’ll be knocking on doors. Do we stay loyal to our old neighborhood traditions or join new ones in this place? Plot out a route that lets us hit two neighborhoods in one night? Moan and whimper under the covers with bags of Snickers? Of the many big feelings we’ve navigated since moving, feelings about trick-or-treating routes are some that I failed to anticipate. (Personally, I’d go anywhere that passed out Butterfingers, but I’m afraid those places are sorely lacking.)
I can send this letter all thanks to the folks who are paid subscribers. If that’s you, thank you. If you’ve been considering a subscription but haven’t yet taken the leap, I would be honored if you considered it.
Really, my attention has been very focused on a different kind of Halloween-y wayfinding.
I’ve been compiling a map of ghosts.
My map began as a handwritten list of street numbers and names pinned to a board in my office. In the darkest depths of our apartment search, I would walk off my anxiety about finding a place to live by traversing the city to catch glimpses of old family haunts. Oh, just communing with the ancestors, I would joke as I loitered outside apartment buildings and sat on strange stoops. I figured a quick prayer inside Trinity Church where a great grandfather and uncle sang in the choir couldn’t hurt. A visit to the Prospect Park mansion where a great great grandfather swept the front porch for the Parks Department could be helpful, I decided. On most days I would pass the apartment on Court Street where a three times great grandmother spent her final years. Every single time I walked past I looked up to the second story windows and made a wish.
Eventually we landed not terribly far from that Prospect Park mansion and down the street, just two blocks, from a boot-making four times great uncle. When we signed our lease, I received a note from my best friend since six:
Your new [apartment] is down the street from the one my great great grandmother, born in a Russian shetl in the 1870s, owned in the 1930s and 40s. I’ve been creating a map of everywhere my family lived in the city and this is one.
She included a screenshot of her personalized Google map, where indeed, a few blocks away from our new building, her great great grandmother had made her home. Like me, this friend is raising kids back in the city after our grandparents left to raise families on the Connecticut shoreline. I got immediately to work on turning my own scribbled list of addresses digital.
