The Buicks of Court Street

Linus Gelber

As I walk up Court Street toward the subway, I spot a nice mid-'60s-model vintage car; always a nice bit of a walking treat on a bright warm day.

Next to it is another, and next to that another, at which point my brain, which has been elsewhere, begins to form a rough theory. "Hey," it says. "Something's going on."

As it turns out, Columbia is filming Men in Black 3 in and around Brooklyn Heights, and the year is 1969. The cars are not the lovingly primped and polished models you'll see in auto shows, but rather (at least in theory) the sorts of cars that would have been on the street in the course of a day, back then. They're lined up neatly, nose-to-tail, along three blocks of avenue below Borough Hall, and the neighborhood loves them.

"There's just one thing about this that is completely unrealistic," I comment to one of the security guys stationed here and there to make sure we don't love the cars too hard. "Oh?" he asks. "What's that?"

"Well," I say, indicating the neat rows of cars. "No one in New York has ever parked this well. Ever. Couldn't happen."

"Hmm," he says.

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