In 2002 I lived in an apartment on East 7th St. between C and D, which is one of those magical multitude-containing East Village blocks that that, at least then, was just old tenement buildings, no prefab towers.  I hadn’t been in a lot of apartments at that point in my career of living in New York and I assumed that probably every other apartment on the block was nicer than the one I lived in, which actually might have been the case. Well, there was nothing so horribly wrong with the apartment, really — it was just much too small for three people and all of their clothes and scavenged art objects and smoking habits and boyfriends.

During the time that I lived in this apartment I had a recurring dream.  I would wake up in my bedroom and go out into the common area where I’d find that the wall opposite the door to the tiny bathroom had sprouted a new door, the same way a damp log might sprout a toadstool overnight.  Then I would open the door and walk through it.  At this point the dream would branch out into a series of variations, none of which were all that interesting.  My subconscious isn’t any less hacky than my conscious mind in terms of inventing fictitious scenarios.  In one version of the Secret New Room Dream, the Secret New Room contained a sunny kitchen table with a vase of tulips and a newspaper, and the date on the newspaper was ten years in the past!  That was how viewers of my dream would be able to tell that I had time-traveled.  Good one, brain.

Anyway, you can make a case for this dream’s being a quintessentially New Yorky dream for two sort of conflicting reasons.  1) is the obvious Style Section reason: in a town where you often find yourself close enough to strangers to smell their personal aromas and where sometimes the only place where you’re alone is the bathroom, your number one fantasy is of course finding a secret space.   2) is the less obvious: You find secret doors all the time in New York, actually.  You walk a different route than usual and suddenly you might as well be in a different world.  There’s all this new stuff and your mind has to re-index the map it has made of whatever neighborhood you’re in.   That stuff exists now where there used to just be grey fog, out beyond the border of what used to be the whole universe.

I was thinking about this yesterday when I walked Doree’s dog Lee to a park that’s just on the other side of the BQE from my house.   I live just at the edge of what can be credibly called “Clinton Hill” and not “Navy Yard,” and in the 7 months I’ve lived here, I’ve only walked and biked in the direction of Clinton Hill and beyond (south) and Williamsburg (west).   The map in my head of the other direction (north) was like one of those Saul Steinberg New Yorker maps and it read: BQE. Orthodox Jews.  Storage Space.  Other Stuff. East River. Manhattan.

It turns out that the Other Stuff — keep in mind that this is three blocks from where I live and I’d had no idea it existed — includes Steiner Studios, which is the biggest soundstage on this coast and they made Baby Mama there et cetera.  The entrance to it is very grandiose and imposing!  Their website says that the campus includes “a rich, historic back-lot, with buildings preserved from the Civil War and World War II, and an open campus environment with winding drives, expansive fields and abundant landscaping.”  Also you can have your super fancy wedding there, there’s a ballroom and a roofdeck with crazy views of the three surrounding bridges and the Manhattan skyline.  You can see some of the historic buildings as you walk down Flushing towards the dilapidated ad hoc dog run in Steuben Playground.   There’s a tantalizingly low fence with big signs that say GOVERNMENT PROPERTY NO TRESPASSING.

While we were romping around in the snow I started smelling a delicious toasty bread smell.   I wasn’t having a stroke: there is a baked-stuff factory across the street from the playground.  As Lee and I left we walked past it and the workers were loading cartons of bagels the height of a two-story building into the back of a giant truck.   On the sidewalk, a huge flock of pigeons had gathered to eat the crumbs they’d just swept out onto the grimy snow.

It smelled like fresh bagels and car exhaust and melting snow, and as we walked by a million pigeons flapped off into the blinding snow-reflected sunlight.  What an awesome city.  I’m not being sarcastic.

Also in this factory/vegetable warehouse/rustic Navy Yard bar area it is extra bizarre to walk down Washington Ave. between Park and Flushing and find this weird Potemkin village there that I guess is for the benefit of Steiner workers. It includes a Chase branch, a fancy furniture store, a Cuban restaurant named ‘Mojito,’ and a brick oven pizzeria.  Seriously I had no idea.   That is what’s behind the secret door:  a Cuban restaurant (they serve brunch!)