Taking advantage of the warm fall, Andrea and I spent a recent afternoon in Crown Heights. Our expectations were modest, to the degree we had any; all we really knew about the neighborhood was that it’s gentrifying, as discussed in a New York Times article, but of course it is. Welcome to New York, as Taylor Swift wrote.

We took the 4/5 to Franklin, but in my mind we were actually on the A/C, which is farther north, so after leaving the station we headed south on Franklin Street. Besides a sweet store called Owl & Thistle, the area mostly looked like gentrification wasn’t even a gleam in a developer’s eye. That’s not a complaint! Check out this signage. We loved how orderly the supermarket signs are (until the person responsible lost focus).

And even though Tribeca can claim a couple of pedestrian bridges, we can’t ever resist one. This bridge, at Carroll Street, had a lovely view of the tracks.

Andrea soon convinced me that we should really be heading north. After a dawdle inside tiny, adorable Hullabaloo Books, we were hungry, and the few restaurants on Franklin (burgers, bagels, etc.) didn’t appeal on this particular day. A block east, on Bedford, we landed at a New Orleans–style establishment called Catfish. It felt more like a bar, and not an uncool one, but the food (vegetable scramble for me, catfish po’boy for Andrea) was actually rather good.

We drifted east, then back south to the Kingston Station. (In other words, I didn’t pay attention to street names.) In that time—90 minutes? two hours?—we mainly looked at buildings. The architecture wasn’t as consistently charming as Bed-Stuy to the north, but it made up for it in variety.

At some point in my life, I’d like to have a porch.

And a castle, if I’m making a list. (Every neighborhood in Brooklyn seems to have a castle!)

Or maybe a bell tower….

Crown Heights—at least the part we explored—was possibly even less commercial than Bed-Stuy, and the shops and restaurants we did come across were generally of the pre-gentrification type. I thought we’d find more like King Tai, an impossibly cute cocktail bar. (Seriously, look at its website.) And the menu for Colina Cuervo, an Ecuadorean café on Nostrand, that was posted in King Tai’s window left us wishing we had considered it for lunch. There is a downside to avoiding pre-trip research.

Nearby, we discovered a splendid Christmas display. A passerby told us that it’s much better at night—no doubt!—but then we wouldn’t have been able to appreciate the freaky little lamb.

Toward the end of the walk, I remarked how it had been a half hour since we saw anyone white. I don’t know about Andrea, but I kept imagining that locals, seeing us take photos of things like the foliage, church signs, and a very amusing mural, probably assumed we were gentrifiers plotting a takeover. But what’s the alternative: never leave Tribeca?

Previous Field Trip posts:
• Spuyten Duyvil
• New York Botanical Garden
• Bed-Stuy
• The New Whitney Museum
• Bushwick-ish
• The Rockaways
• Greenpoint
• S-Cruise by Smartboat
• Wave Hill
• Governors Island
• F.D.R. Four Freedoms Park
• Litchfield County, Conn.
• One Wall Street
• Behind the Scenes at Grand Central Terminal
• The Howard/Crosby Microneighborhood
• Federal Reserve Bank of New York
• East River Ferry
• Museum of American Finance