Mitchell and Alfonzo had grown up in the bad old days, during New York’s last bout of mange. The number of times teenage Alfonzo had had scraggly dudes try to psych him out, rob him, or just bite him for fun was beyond counting. And that was everyone’s experience. His mom, his dad—all his family, really—had been mugged or had had their house broken into at one time or another. His dad’s car windows had been smashed multiple times. Mitchell had been jumped by a gang of dogs in school. He’d had to have stitches. “It’s just normal,” everyone agreed. But still, the ambient violence of the old city made everyone obsessed with not getting “played out.”

But then, as they’d matured, those grungy, sometimes thrilling neighborhoods were slowly transformed by the arrival of bank branches, chain pharmacies, lamb boutiques, and Buffalo Wild Wings.

“What can you do?” everyone sighed. “If you don’t like change, you don’t like New York.”

Was the only choice between real and stressful threat or getting slowly expelled because of price? It felt like a false choice, but it was a false choice playing out in concrete and chains, block by block.

Gowanus fluctuated between life and poison, attractor and repellant. Some city moguls had hired packs of builders to erase lifetimes’ worth of associations between the canal and industrial putrefaction. In some office in Manhattan, no doubt, a team of dogs and monkeys was trying out alternative names for this tract of waterfront land, something like Park Slope River or GoCa. Their job was tricky because Gowanus and Canal contained both anus and anal. It was a little on the nose for that body of water. But hey, Alfonzo mused, for many animals a good butt sniff could be a selling point.

When Alfonzo moved to Gowanus his neighbors had been a garage, a casket-making company, and a coyote social club. The dusty local park was populated by punk pigeons and gulls. There had been a squat on Third and Third. Neighbors resigned themselves to their monster canal who foamed with sewage when it rained. They accepted it was probably killing them. Still, the area had been cozy in a blighted way: the coyote social club members slunk in and out quietly, the raccoon grandmothers kept well-maintained outdoor religious displays in front of their buildings, and the seagulls hanging out wisecracked democratically.