And now we're going to the Lower East Side ...

There is a sanctity about life on edge on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a roughness where people struggling to make the next month's rent will fight for territory with the homeless nodding off on stoops and in doorways. At the same time, you can see the layers of years of Giuliani gentrification, laid on like latex paint over an ancient but thick oil base, worn thin now as the economy recedes like the tide going out. Soon the new facades will start to weather. Soon they will blend into the color of deferred maintenance that's been the tint of the Lower East Side for more than a hundred years.

This place was, after all, one of the first melting pots of New York City, a place where Italians, Jews, Chinese, and Irish fought each other for every block of pavement, carving out their neighborhoods and guarding them with thousands of vigilant eyes. Even today, where the family-owned corner Rumanian bakery on Second Avenue stands across the street from the Palestinian deli, the grandchildren play in the street oblivious to the war their parents are fighting with each other on the other side of the world. In the Lower East Side, the people learn to make peace with each other just to live another day.

You can walk through the East Village of late night clubs and bars, of head shops, of storefront social services, and tenements to get to the Lower East Side. You cross First Avenue to get to Tompkins Square Park and you're there. The Old Neighborhood where your grandparents first arrived and tried to make a life between the broiling summers and the bone-chilling winters. You're there.

I didn't need any more coaching from the publisher, having clicked off my cell phone when I reached the subway. I'd been talking about extraterrestrials and the crash of two hapless space ships over forlorn patches of desert sixty years ago. But my mind was on this neighborhood and a return to the spot where my own family landed, pilgrims with fringes in the corners of their garments, over a hundred and twenty years ago. Extraterrestrials might have been my business, but this was home country and the memories of little ragged kids stealing off pushcarts rose up from the sidewalk like the midday heat.

The Pioneer Theater, where the alternate press was gathering to hear the news about Roswell and the Walter Haut affidavit, was just blocks away. There's going to be air conditioning and maybe a slice of pizza, a bag of popcorn, and maybe even a beer or two. But I had to linger, even though I knew I'd be late. The street names were just too familiar, the storefronts looked too much like the yellowed thick daguerreotypes that I'd seen in my parents' box of old pictures, the sounds, though in languages I could not make out, were too much like the sounds of kids everywhere.

Roswell could wait, the publisher could wait, the press conference could wait, I was being abducted into the past, sucked into the haze of a collected memories by an entire generation who fought through the Great Depression, won the war, prospered in the peace, looked at my generation's coming of age with shock and awe, and were now dying off like dried leaves.

There, right across First Avenue was a tiny park. Could I see two children there, incongruous in their long overcoats as they chased a coal truck down the street to pick up the lumps of coal falling through the loose transom? Could I see back to the beginning of the last century? I could. I would.

Bill Birnes