The BQE

We’re standing outside Katie’s studio, waiting for the car to come pick us up and take us to our storage locker. A couple blocks uphill from us, I can see the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, one of Robert Moses’s great monuments to his vision of car culture for the city - a huge elevated expressway that cuts through the heart of the boroughs, with almost no regard for the neighborhoods that subsist underneath it.

From where we’re standing I can see - high above the broken down cars and graffitied garages, above the piles of trash and broken sidewalks - rivers of cars flowing up and down the BQE, turgid and slow one direction, swift and streaming the other, both ways shining and flashing in the sun. 

“You know, we can see them up there, but they don’t even think about us down here at all,” I say, and Katie looks up at them flying by, and nods.