A Neighborhood on Speed

I recently spent the better part of a year away from New York. Upon returning, the first thing I noticed was that an Artichoke Pizza had replaced neighborhood stalwart Northeast Kingdom. I immediately felt a pang of loss, a surge of nostalgia for a place where I had literally never eaten, but whose existence meant something to me symbolically.

That’s the experience of New York—a flurry of change that leaves you in a perpetual state of looking back to yesteryear, of talking about the good ol’ days, of marking yourself as belonging because you remember that restaurant, that bar, that food cart … This cycle, which is already happening at a dizzying rate in New York, feels like it is on speed in Bushwick; it’s an unregulated merry-go-round, whose careening loop has undeniable casualties.