By VIVIAN YEEJAN
For years, the stretch of curb
outside the back door of Mike’s Pizza, on the corner of Myrtle and Tompkins
Avenues in Brooklyn, belonged, unofficially, to a man known to neighbors as Mr.
Wallace. They knew he always parked his Cadillac there to keep his walk home to
the Tompkins Houses across the street short.
For a few weeks in December, the gray
curb became known beyond New York.
It was where a man fatally shot two police officers as they sat in their patrol
car on the Saturday before Christmas. It was where a field of bouquets, police
patches, teddy bears, candles, holiday wreaths, signs, flags, bunting, menorahs
and T-shirts with defiant slogans had flowered. It was an ordinary city corner
that found itself the epicenter of an urban tragedy.
About two weeks ago, the Police
Department carted the memorial away. It gave some of the tributes to the
families of the slain officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, and added others
to the memorial at the officers’ station house in Downtown Brooklyn.
The intervening days have sanded
down the reminders of what happened at that concrete and metal corner in the
Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, the better for the business of living to
resume.
The investigators and the
out-of-town mourners, the mayor and the grieving families are no longer
outside, spilling into the Myrt 99-cent store for fresh candles. They have
receded to images on the TV playing Channel 12 in Mike’s Pizza. In recent days, the TV has
shown memorials for a more recent tragedy, for the attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris.
Those who live and work in the area
prefer it that way, the city’s troubles kept at a remove. They are tired of being
asked to make sense of a senseless act.
“Whatever happened out there,
happened out there,” said Bernadette Cruz, 35, behind the counter at Mike’s one
recent afternoon. “It didn’t happen in here.”
And so the traffic light changes.
The B54 bus wheezes. People pass, with phones pressed to their ears, with
children in tow, with groceries, smoking cigarettes. The doors of the bodega
and the Chinese takeout place and the pizza joint swing close, behind
successive waves of customers looking for sustenance, or maybe just for a
chance to loiter in the warmth: the breakfast crowd, the lunch crowd, the
families with little children and the teenagers who come by after school.
Above the bustle, a little, green
sign clings to the traffic signal pole: Fallen Officers Way, it read.
Drips of
blue, red and yellow wax from spilled candles blacken under a steady march of
soles. The brick wall of Mike’s is bare except for a small American flag, taped
above the cellar doors.
Just as
well, a few of those who live around here say. They do not need a memorial to
remember.
“I’ve
seen it go from where Mr. Wallace used to park to where two police officers
lost their lives for frivolous — I don’t know. This had no meaning,” said Kyson
Hawkes, 27, who saw the gunman, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, shoot the officers and run
away on Dec. 20. “There was no reason.”
Mr.
Wallace, once Mr. Hawkes’s neighbor in the Tompkins Houses across the street,
is long gone. Now the most regular visitor to the curb is Richard Clifford, 44,
of Freeport, N.Y., who delivers mozzarella and flour to
Mike’s. He is parking his truck there again, instead of across the street like
he had to when police officers blocked off a large swath of sidewalk for the
memorial. Part of the street was closed too, until early January, prompting
complaints from some residents.
Mr.
Clifford’s grandfather was one of two black men killed by a police officer at
the Freeport bus terminal in 1946, he said, as he taped a box of
flour he had cut open by mistake. “It’s still the same,” he said, “from the
’40s to now.”
But
inside the bodegas and the 99-cent store and the pizza joint, the proprietors
mostly look away when you ask them about the shots that rang out that Saturday
before Christmas, setting aflame tensions between Mayor Bill de Blasio and
rank-and-file police officers.
Structure of the Lead：
WHO-people
WHEN-. 23, 2015
WHAT-Racial discrimination
WHY-shot
WHERE-not given
HOW-protesters gathered in Midtown Manhattan
Keywords：
1. tributes：物資
2. concrete：混凝土的
3. bodega ：酒店
4. loiter：閒逛
5. linger：徘迴；縈繞
