His cluttered store selling nautical bric-a-brac was a last link to Lower Manhattan’s seafaring history, before giving way to a tide of “shopping mall” stores.
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On my daily walks up and down the middle section of Broadway, which runs south of the northern perimeter of Brooklyn, I pass stores built in the two-story vinyl and brick Bushwick style stores that cut keys or buy pawned goods, and several that sell washer-dryers and stovetops. The first one I pass is home to nine cats who move in and out of the shop carelessly, in contrast to the furtive shoppers in their masks; the third houses about seven large exotic parakeets, who cannot move in and out but whose screeches bleed out onto the sidewalk. At the corner bar on the next block, every conversation is routinely interrupted every seven minutes by the J train hurtling overhead. The built environment of Broadway is active and breathing; it has voices and smells, it calls for active encounters.