DUMBO

What's it gonna take to spend more time in New York City? I have to, on three counts: Adam and Kelly, my obsession with returning to my ancestors' past, and the sheer excitement of new ideas (like a media company wants a piece of the Rwanda project).

On Reason Number Two: I did not walk to Hudson Avenue yesterday, when Adam and I visited DUMBO. So much of the surrounding area has chi-chi-ed. Amber-lit bars stuffed with vintage chairs and hardware. Sleek, spare storefronts teasing young couples with carefully placed, just-cool-enough furniture and clothes. These are the nouveaux rich, needing pet bakeries, chocolateries, pris fixes restaurants with white tablecloths set inside tall brick warehouses, carefully preserved.

I did not want to see what had happened to Hudson Avenue, our son's grandfather's birthplace, a cobble-stoned street sliding down to the East River. I want to remember it like I saw it in 2006 before the explosion of high-end housing and shops: a simple, nearly dilapidated three-story frame dwelling, next to a row of others looking just like it. Last I checked, they cost $500,000 each. Adam tells me that this area, Vinegar Hill and DUMBO is the priciest part of Brooklyn.

What do the stock analysts and surgeons make of this: On Front Street, a local rich developer has built a large room for a large restored carousel, his wife's pet project. I stood there transfixed. It retains all it its old-world grandeur: the carved seats and horses, painted in pale pastels, even the music playing in the background.

Except, it's a diorama. One stands behind red ropes and the only the play button is fitted inside your imagination. Pale-faced Irish and German-American women in long skirts covering the hind ends of the horses, their straw hats with ribbons whipping about, stout old women with brooches and white handkerchiefs sprouting from their bosoms, sitting in the fixed carriages, their smiles taking them back, back, to when they jumped on and jumped off carousels as children.

I want it to be true that my grandparents take Petra and Theodore and Fred to whirl on this carousel, only blocks from home. Why? What am I hoping for? Everlasting life?