What's in a Name?

Pull out your Hagstrom's, and page to where you can see the edges of Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn. Run your finger down the creek dividing Queens and Brooklyn, the Newtown Creek, and you'll find the red block letters. Blissville.

I found this marginal neighborhood in The New York Times nearly twenty years ago when looking for an apartment. The address I sought was a few blocks away from the creek. But anything is possible when studying a map. And so I imagined at least a peek of the canal from a window. I didn't realize that a few blocks could have been a few miles. The apartment faced front and back over a mish-mash of aluminum-sided houses.

But it had old wooden floors and light everywhere. The highway hummed in the background, but the streets outside were quiet, the neighborhood still. I took that apartment right then and there, and made my home in Blissville.