Food World Astoria
Part of the space occupied by Food World used to be filled by a bar called McGrath’s. I only barely remember that place. I never knew it, and never entered it, though I passed it every day on my march to corporate. When McGrath’s closed I had never entered a bar or pub in the neighborhood, spending most of my nights alone at home. I imagined bars to be dangerous places, and in some cases that assumption proves true, but over time I found myself sitting at the corner pub, whiling away my days with inane conversations and good laughs. At times I think I should transfer my social endeavors to church or poetry readings, but in the end I think it makes no difference.
I grew up in Florida, and in my town it seemed like bars were not good places. I think I was biased in this belief by media coverage or simply by my surroundings. Those places seemed like dens of iniquity, places in which bad things went down, things bad in ways I could not imagine or understand. These were not places of evil acts or murder but of dark and ghastly worlds, traps within traps that fed upon themselves. If you had asked me what I thought went on in those places I would have had no answer. In my mind I drew a picture of an amorphous cloud of people, their heads and shoulders only partly present, smoke and toothy grins glimmering in the gloom as the bodies darkly moved in a dance of the subconscious. It was not so much that what happened at the bar stayed at the bar (to paraphrase a tourism tag line for Las Vegas), but that what happened there was inextricably intertwined with the place itself.
After McGrath’s closed a few folks who had worked or drank there opened another place on the same street, about 4 blocks east. That bar set up shop in a space once occupied by a place commonly described to this day as a “crack house”. The present bar is a dive, but a good place in its way.
I believe that city governments should provide a listing of every business that has occupied a place. If the listing is not available at the front door then it could be found online, or by filing a request with the Department of Commerce. These lineages are the stuff of local lore in some places, with old timers and not-so-old timers happily rattling off a list of every place of business that once filled the space, and that rose from the ground beneath their feet.
This passing on of local heritage (some would say hyperlocal) is a point of pride for some people. The past use of a space is sometimes described as if it should be impossible to believe: “This pharmacy used to be a bike shop!” or “This parking lot used to be a cemetery!” The present use of the space is, like one’s relationship status, described with affirmative vigor, as if no other reality made sense.
I try to remember notable encounters involving this Food World, but they are few. One evocative memory comes from a cold, cold night in January, when a friend came to the neighborhood. He called when he got to the area, asking me for directions to where I was. He said “I’m looking at the Food World,” to which I replied, if “If you’re looking at the Food World you need to go to the right, under the subway, then on to …” That use of the Food World as a point of reference occurred 6 or 7 years ago. A similar reference to this Food World occurred a few months ago. A friend from back in school was travelling the world and we had planned for him to stay at my place for a couple of nights. He called when he reached the neighborhood. He told me he was looking at a fruit stand. I asked “Food World?”. He paused, I assume he looked around for affirmation that the fruit stand was at Food World, and he said yes. “OK, then,” I said,” you need to head west on 36th Avenue…”
He interrupted me, saying he had no idea of west, or east, or south or north, just that he was looking at the Food World.
I sometimes forget that I seem to be the only person I know who knows which direction I am facing at any given moment. I am not a directional savant. In my mind there is no needle locked in sympathy to the north, no spinning directional frames of reference on a watery pool. If asked, though, I can usually determine which way is north.
I did not always possess this instinct. Indeed, it is not even an instinct, but a deliberately learned behavior, one guided mostly by Manhattan island as a blunt guide to which way is up and which way is down. The Twin Towers used to be my always-visible frame of geographical reference, and I still look for them out of habit.
In the past I thought of direction as part of a romantic flourish. Looking east from the Daytona Beach I remember thinking “Africa is directly that way,” and that one day I would swim to Morocco. A sense of direction opened my mind to the farthest destinations, however unlikely my arrival there.
Does that sense of geographical direction extend to stationary space? Is space stationary? I see ghosts of bartenders wandering the aisles of a grocery store that opened where the pub used to be. In so doing I create a frame of reference equal to north/south/east/west, but those directions have no relevance. The earth beneath our feet is the same but the dimensions of experience create the stationary sense of movement and direction.
