Dream Log: Huge Little Italy

I dreamed I was in Little Italy in Lower Manhattan in the 1970's, but in my dream, Little Italy was much bigger, covered much more ground, than the real one.

I went into a restaurant which belonged to the family of a friend of mine, which by itself covered about as much ground as the real Little Italy. I came in off the street into a conventionally-sized dining area painted white, in which a dozen or so heavy-set people were seated, all facing away from me. A door in the back of this dining room led to the main part of the restaurant a semi-private place -- you didn't need a membership, but it was good if you knew somebody -- with many more rooms, some big, some small, and with halls and staircases going up and down, going on and on, with other dining areas which were not strictly separated from food-prep areas. Once past the white dining room in front, the colors of the walls and floors were earthy: a lot of varnished wood, a lot of red-brown paint. Here and there young couples sat and embraced.

Exiting the back of the restaurant, and making a couple of right-angle turns in alleys, I emerged into a large park. The whole area, like the semi-private part of the restaurant, looked lived-in and worn, but solid. The grass in the park was a little bit scruffy. Only a little bit. It looked more comfortable than messy, like a sofa which was obviously old, but not yet full of holes.

As I walked on, I saw at one edge of the park, to my surprise, a row of small houses, looking very much like the houses in some neighborhoods in Queens, New York, and in a hundred other cities in the US, but most unusual, to say the least, in Lower Manhattan. Then I looked a bit closer and saw, through the front windows, rubble piled up inside the small houses, and right away I understood that they were about to be torn down and replaced with something very different, and I thought that that was somewhat of a shame.

Further on, there was a building in a stage of collapse, about ten stories high. One exterior wall was completely gone, and there was no construction or demolition going on inside and the building was not roped off, and people were coming and going.

In this abandoned building were many items there for the taking, including some rather rather nice furniture, old telephones, lamps, file cabinets -- and many large high-ceilinged rooms were quite full of books. I naturally spent some time looking through these. I was quite disappointed, not as much because of the physical condition of the volumes, a bit dampened by long exposure to the open air, as by the texts they contained. Many of the books were bilingual, English and German, and seemed to be offering English texts for natives speakers of German, and German texts for native speakers of English, and offering generally unimpressive texts in both languages.

After I gave up the search for interesting books, I walked on and came to another park, where a group of young people were tossing footballs around -- American footballs:

They let me play catch with them.

After a while I moved on again, until I came to a place with a good view of the skyscrapers in the financial district, including the old World Trade Center twin towers, which at that time were still quite new. I stood looking at the skyscrapers for a while, thinking about the small houses nearby which were about to be torn down, and how in New York City buildings were always been torn down and built. and then I woke up.