Once again, Richard Grayson takes us on a wild ride on a bus line in Brooklyn.

One of the weirdest bus routes in Brooklyn stops around the corner from
me.  It’s the B24, officially the Greenpoint/Kingsland Avenue route,
and it’s the only bus line that connects two adjoining Brooklyn
neighborhoods with an incredibly roundabout route through Queens over
an interstate highway.  It’s a pretty short ride from its beginning in
Williamsburg to its end in

Greenpoint, about 35 minutes – and today I discovered that I can
actually walk it faster because the bus route resembles a boomerang.

When I got on at the Williamsburg Bridge Plaza bus station on Broadway,
I asked the driver if anyone in their right mind actually takes this
bus from here to Manhattan Avenue.
He smiled and said, “Yeah, you can get there much more directly if you
just transfer for the B43, but some people do prefer the scenic route.”

"Okay,” I said.  “I just didn’t want you to think I was crazy.”
I needn’t have worried, because that role was taken by one of the other
passengers who got on at the first stop: a group of about fifteen
middle-aged whites and Hispanics, with one young Hasidic man.  We had
barely gone up the few blocks of Rodney Street, along one side of the
highway where Moses parted Williamsburg when a male voice shouted out:
“FUCK DISNEY!”

After we turned on Metropolitan Avenue, the same voice shouted out: “FUCK THE DEMOCRATS!”
I couldn’t discern who it was and braced for the next shout, wondering
who else would be singled out for opprobrium.  But it never came.
Whoever it was – and I thought the Hasidic man was staring at me as if
he assumed I was the theme park-hating Republican – for the rest of the
ride this person remained as quiet as a mouse (presumably not Mickey).

Metropolitan Avenue between the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and Graham Avenue is my current stamping grounds, so I pretty much ignore the sights I see every day: my 24-hour laundromat, the Korean grocery where I shop when I’m too lazy to walk to the supermarket, the Brick Theater Company (I enjoyed some of the productions in its recent Pretentious Festival – no, that’s not a criticism, that was its name).  We pass a car on whose back window is written with whatever that white stuff is: RIP GRANDMOM 1917-07/10/07.  A lot of people get on and off by the Graham Avenue L station.  Presumably some of them are transferring to the B43 bus for the shorter, non-scenic route to the hub of the Greenpoint shopping district.  Of course there’s plenty of shopping right on Graham here, in the heart of gentrifying Italian Williamsburg.  (On Sunday I kept walking back and forth between the hipster-filled concert at the McCarren Pool and the Giglio Festival closer to my house; the crowds at each event were quite different, but after awhile Jerry Vale and the Octopus Project began to sound rather alike to me.)
A few blocks east of Graham (also called Via Vespucci over here) on Metropolitan Avenue we make a slight turn onto a short stretch of Maspeth Avenue, for two blocks that probably win the prize in the highly competitive category of Brooklyn’s Ugliest Collection of New Luxury Condo Buildings.  One of the monstrosities under construction appears to be complete but so structurally unsound that outside girders have recently been erected to hold the building together and keep it from falling down.  I knew we couldn’t get that lucky anyway.
The Hasidic man, realizing we’re not going down Metropolitan Avenue to Jamaica, gets off at the next stop.  The bus driver explains that at the bridge he should have gotten on the Q54 and tells him where to transfer.  “Lots of people make that mistake,” the driver says.
We turn on Kingsland Avenue, alternatively named for a few blocks Grandparents Avenue.  Huh?  We pass the hulk of the long-abandoned Greenpoint Hospital and the Cooper Park Projects.
There’s a great documentary by Christine Noschese called Metropolitan Avenue originally shown two decades ago on PBS’s P.O.V. series that shows the decline of this part of Williamsburg/Greenpoint – the Northside – as budget cuts and racial tensions exacerbated ongoing decay.  It’s hard for newcomers to trendy “East Williamsburg” to imagine that this neighborhood appeared to be dying not all that long ago. Noschese’s film shows how the area’s working class women of different ethnic backgrounds – Italian, Polish, African Americans from the Cooper Park Projects and others – joined forces to lead the fight to save this community.
On the film you can briefly spot Agnes Grappone, who stands with her daughter and son-in-law Phil and Diana Mule when, in a roll call of neighborhood groups, they call out “Conselyea Street Block Association.”  Agnes was the grandmother of my lifelong friend Nina Mule, and I am now living in what was Agnes’s house, in the apartment where I visited her in the 1970s.

Not that many years ago I was with Agnes at the Long Island nursing home as she lay dying a few months short of age 100.  My dear landlady and friend, her daughter Diana or “Dee,” passed away rather suddenly at 84 last month, and we’re all still bereft.  A beloved local elementary school teacher, Dee had over 350 mourners at her funeral at the church she attended all her life, and condolence cards are still coming in as I collect the mail every day.   She was born in the house I now live in, and every time I open the front door I still expect to smell her delicious Italian cooking.  An extraordinarily generous person, she will also be missed by the various charities and environmental, civil rights, civil liberties, feminist and liberal groups which still send her an average of two dozen letters a day.
Kingsland Avenue runs north to Greenpoint proper, but the B24 turns right at Meeker Avenue, the street running alongside the elevated Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, at this area’s only suburban-style fast-food joint, a freestanding McDonald’s with a parking lot.
And in a few blocks we enter onto the BQE, one of the few examples of a non-express city bus going on a highway, in this case officially I-278, but basically just the short hop over the Kosciuszko Bridge to Queens, with Newtown Creek below us.
But what a view of the Manhattan skyline.  In the foreground Long Island City’s odd lone skyscraper