Coulda

Linus Gelber

For a time, there was a humming and a buzzing about bringing a trolley to Red Hook, Brooklyn - an area notoriously hacked from the main body of Brooklyn by Robert Moses when he built the BQE (Brooklyn-Queens Expressway), a deep-trench highway that isolated the neighborhood from the rest of the borough.

At one point Bob Diamond, a Brooklyn booster and activist, acquired a couple of trolley cars and presided over a short segment of track laid along the waterfront, in front of the big warehouse that was about to become a Fairway market.

The City paid a little attention, and then stopped, and then thought about it some more, and finally declined, last year, to pursue the project. Meanwhile, Bob Diamond's orphaned streetcar wagons sat marooned on their tracks, and with no one to make them run, they have fallen into a sorry state of repair.

I'm down wandering Red Hook with Jess, on a sunny chilly day, and we stop to gaze and to think about folly, and how nice it would be to have a trolley we could ride out here to enjoy the waterfront. When dreams die in New York, sometimes they do it out in the street, where all the world can watch.


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