SMELL: Bushwick’s Tortilla Triangle

When I first heard about the Tortilla Triangle, a confluence of tortilla factories in Bushwick, Brooklyn, I imagined it would greet me with a cloud of masa-scented air, not unlike swimming into a warm spot in a lake. A recent article in Edible Brooklyn magazine described the area this way: “Stepping out of the Jefferson stop on the L train is an exercise in olfactory entrancement…. The warm minerality of cooked corn stretches the block, and you can almost float on the curls of aroma into the factory, dreaming of the brown-specked tortillas that await you.”

In my experience, however, the scent of the Tortilla Triangle proved much less buoyant, and only discernible between 4 and 10 p.m., when the tortilla factory closest to the subway, Tortilleria Mexicana los Hermanos, at 271 Starr Street, rolls out its tortillas. The four other tortilla factories in the “triangle”—Tortilleria Buena Vista, at 219 Johnson Avenue; Tortilleria Plaza Piaxtla, at 915 Flushing Avenue; Tortilleria Chinantla, at 975 Grand Street; and Tortilleria Tenochtitlan 2000, at 952 Flushing Avenue—are not really close enough to each other to create a neighborhood smell, and even if they were, the truck fumes of Flushing Avenue would be strong enough to overpower it.

Nevertheless, I was enticed, and one weekday night at around 8 p.m., I surfaced from the aroma of the summer subway—hot tar, cinnamon-spicy disinfectant—onto the sidewalk of Starr Street, where I sniffed the air in anticipation. There was indeed a faint smell of toasted corn, dry and sweet, emanating from Tortilleria Mexicana los Hermanos, just a few paces down the block. Mexican music jangled from an open garage, where two men loitered next to a forklift. Adjacent was the makeshift café: a serving counter, a stack of laminated menus, a portrait of the Virgin Mary draped in a garland of fake flowers, and a few tables topped with miniature cacti where hipsters hunkered down over tortillas heaped with meat, beans, queso fresco, crema, shredded lettuce, and salsa.

Glass walls afforded a view of the production line at the back of the garage: a conveyor belt with a big orange bucket of dough at the center, manned by about five people and overseen by two enormous gilt-framed portraits of phantasmagoric seaside cabins. Two workers collected the hot tortillas as they spun out from between the metal rollers, another counted out a stack and plumped it against her forearm before handing it to a fourth worker, who slipped them into a plastic sack, pressed out the air, and twisted it closed. She handed the packet to another man, who stacked it in a cardboard box at the end of the line, which would presumably end up on the forklift I’d spotted near the entrance.

Wanting to experience the Bushwick tortilla in its purest form, I asked for two plain tortillas to go. The women behind the counter looked bewildered. “You mean two packages?” they said, dangling a still-steamy packet. No, just two plain tortillas, I repeated. The women furrowed their brows and mumbled among each other. I am sure I heard murmurs of “loco.” Finally they flipped two tortillas onto the grill and toasted them, then wrapped them in a sheet of tinfoil, waving away my offers of money with “Nada, nada.”

Outside the factory, standing by a fire hydrant, I unwrapped the foil and took a bite. The soft, chewy edges gave way to a sweet, soft middle pocked by air bubbles. The flavor was definitely bland, and would have been improved by some salt, not to mention cheese and salsa, but it was of a piece with the Tortilla Triangle itself, whose distinct but unobtrusive scent continued to waft around me in the evening air.

SIGHT: Manhattanhenge

“Papa, what’s staring?” asked the little girl perched on her father’s shoulders, looking out over the crowd of heads and cameras beneath her. Apparently she had learned the single rule of Manhattanhenge, the semiannual alignment of the setting sun with the east–west grid of Manhattan’s streets: don’t stare at the sun.

I had heard that the ideal spot for viewing Manhattanhenge was Tudor City Place, a tiny thoroughfare between First and Second avenues whose virtually traffic-free overpass directly above Forty-second Street offers an unobstructed view west across the island. On this clear, breezy Sunday evening, May 31, about fifty people had gathered on the bridge, with stepstools and cameras and tripods, to capture the spectacle. At 8:17 p.m., the full sun was due to slip into position, centered right above Forty-second Street, suspended for one perfect minute before sliding below the horizon.

“Staring is when you look at one thing for a really long time. Here, let’s look the other way for a minute,” the girl’s father said, turning them around to face the East River, where a lavender sky, wisped with clouds and dotted by a lone helicopter, offered a peaceful counterpart to the blazing spectacle to the west. At 8:03 p.m., the sun was still slightly to the south, or left edge, of the grid, but as the minutes passed, it slid into full, blinding view, limning the edges of buildings and casting the Hyatt hotel flag, a fire escape, and even the Chrysler Building’s fierce plumage into shadow.

Since I had not thought to bring a stepstool, I struggled to find hole in the crowd through which to see the sun, and finally located a relatively consistent passageway between one man’s ear and another’s jaw (the setting sun actually illuminated his beard stubble quite beautifully). The spectators appeared to be mostly native New Yorkers, families, couples, and two lackadaisical policemen monitoring the scene and snapping shots with their iPhones. At the peak moment, an elderly Eastern European woman let me stand on her footstool, steadying my back with her palm. At last above the crowd, I had a clear view across Manhattan. The sun’s rays radiated perfectly toward me, like an open hand, creating a golden corridor above the hush of taxicabs and buses trundling over the gentle humps of Forty-Second Street. A few old-timers in the crowd began comparing this year’s event to those in the past. (“Remember back in 2004, when it was a little cloudy? Oh, that was a good one, that was a real beauty.”)

A minute later, the sun’s orb disappeared, leaving only a peachy glow on the horizon. The crowd dispersed. As I descended into the sunset street, I felt a sense of peace and camaraderie unusual to this part of town. One woman crossing the street paused in the crosswalk, halting several lanes of traffic to snap a photo, before dashing into McFadden’s Saloon. Another couple was taken by surprise by the unusual glow to the east. “Oh! There’s the sun!” one said, pointing. I turned to look at them. “Oh! Not you,” they said, laughing. “The sun! The sun!”


Manhattanhenge will happen again on Saturday, July 11 (the half sun on the horizon), and Sunday, July 12 (the full sun), at 8:25 p.m.
For more information, see http://tinyurl.com/qetuwy.

MULTISENSORY EXPERIENCE: Thursday-night bow-hunting league at Queens Archery

Find this inconspicuous garage on a suburban street in Flushing, surrounded by row houses with chain-link fences and gardens, and rent a bow, arrows, and a quiver. Take your place among the bow-hunters in camouflage, shooting at a projection of game: deer, bear, moose, rabbits. Don’t be intimidated; raise your bow and aim, focus on your breath, gauge the tension of your fingers on the arrow, and let your worries dissolve for an hour or so as you lose yourself in the rhythms and focus of repetitive precision.


Bow-hunting may not be every New Yorker’s cup of tea. It’s illegal in the five boroughs of New York City (the recent arrow shooting of a Bronx woman notwithstanding: http://tinyurl.com/cwjfyk). But, as they say, if you can find it anywhere, you can find it here.

During the bow-hunting season, which runs from October through December in the New York metropolitan area, most of the league members hunt in Long Island or Westchester, where rifle hunting is not allowed. The league is also an opportunity to swap hunting tips, prime game-spotting sights—and, of course, stories. At the moment all the members are men (including some fathers and sons), though women are encouraged to join.

Martha Lizzio, the owner of Queens Archery, and her husband, Al, got the idea for their virtual bow-hunting league fifteen years ago. They acquired their first images of wildlife by surreptitiously photographing the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History. Like a seasoned hunting team, Martha kept watch for security guards while Al snapped the shots. Back in Queens, the Lizzios converted the photos into slides, which they projected on the white back wall of the range, carefully lining up the animals’ vital organs with the soft target spots built into the wall. Now they’ve gone digital, and Al downloads and adapts the pictures on his computer. The animals don’t move or make noises when shot (as they do at certain other shooting ranges, like the small range in the L.L. Bean store in Freeport, Maine), but the images of turkeys beneath fall foliage or wolves prowling frozen tundra are realistic enough to bring out the latent hunter in these men. The Lizzios have also set up a wooden scaffolding in the range to simulate a tree stand, so the hunters can practice shooting from different heights. Such is these men’s skill that after the image fades, one can see almost all the arrows clustered in the same spots on the wall.


At Queens Archery, the smell of Entenmann’s coffee cake and fresh-brewed coffee might not compare to autumn leaves and doe-in-rut buck lure; the sound of Lite FM might not summon that first crack of a twig that signals the approach of prey; the dry snap of pulling an arrow out of a wall might not compare to the pride and gratitude of extracting an arrow from the still-warm body of an animal. But the dozen or so men and boys who don their jeans and T-shirts (SPORTSMEN DON’T MESS WITH THE BEST; WHITETAIL HERO; HUNTING FOCUS), dust off their arrow cases, and converge each Thursday night are a testament to the determination of New Yorkers to conjure any world the city is lacking, and that “if you build it, they will come.”

TASTE: Coffee-cart breakfast

Why, I had always wondered, would New Yorkers choose to buy their morning coffee and bagel from a sidewalk cart? The streets of every borough are practically paved in the inexpensive, fresh-out-of-the-kettle bagels for which the city is known, and good-quality coffee is equally easy to find. Sure, there’s something appealing about the convenience of the carts, but often they draw a line as long as that in any Starbucks, and meanwhile force their customers to wait outdoors in heat, cold, and traffic fumes. Moreover, the bagels always looked to me like startled captives, smushed against the plastic windows, the cream-cheese-filled holes gaping out like rows of eyes. Nevertheless I couldn’t deny their indomitable New York spirit, the drivers invariably friendly yet efficient, and moreover with the gumption to rise before dawn, hitch the cart to the back of their family minivan in the outer boroughs, and haul it up onto the sidewalk to face the people and the morning.

So a few weeks ago, I decided it was time to try a coffee-cart breakfast. I’d been tempted to take the subway from Brooklyn into Midtown, where, I figured, I’d find the most authentic carts. But then I realized one of the attractions of the breakfast cart is that you pass it in the course of your commute, so I selected one on Court Street on my way back from the gym. It had the requisite steamed windows and much-amended price list, the rows of bagels and hulking, sugar-encrusted doughnuts, a basket of hardboiled eggs, and boxes of Lipton tea and Swiss Miss. And to my delight, the woman in front of me in line was not only wearing sneakers and pantyhose but gym socks over her pantyhose, and when the coffee man said, “Coffee?” she replied in a Brooklyn accent, “Yeah, wid milk no sugah.”


When it was my turn to approach the window, I experienced a moment of stage fright. I wanted to simulate the curt decisiveness of the regulars. But instead I smiled and asked timorously, “Um, I’d like a bagel with cream cheese, please--” “Whakind.” “Um, plain, I guess, and a coffee--” “Milksugar?” “Well, do you have cream?” Shake of head. “Then just a little bit of milk, please.” “Twodolla.” A humid paper bag slid across the window toward me.

I carried it home and laid out my purchase on my desk, since that seemed to be another part of the ritual. The bagel was rubbery, and chilly to the touch. The slab of cream cheese looked as if had been hacked directly from the brick. When I bit in, the bagel immediately sprung back into shape. Furthermore, the underside was marked with the perforations that indicate breads baked in industrial ovens. It had none of the yeasty, hot-water-and-salt flavor of a signature New York bagel. The coffee was similarly disappointing, in its WaWa cup with a flip-top lid that tickled my nose with each sip. Yet with the sun streaming in the window, buses honking below, and my wad of coffee-stained paper napkins by my side, it occurred to me that even without a java jacket and a creamy “smear” of cream cheese, this breakfast was as authentically New York as the one I’d grown accustomed to, and I felt as ready as ever to begin my day.