

In my neighborhood, the first thing you notice are the kids running around, they buzz like a bunch of bees in a hive on the playground at the end. There’s lots of trees too, but they are skinny from too many people carving on their trunks.  There’s a skyscraper about two blocks down, it’s projects from a long time ago and the city should probably tear it down soon, but there’s hardly enough room for all of us, where would the people who live there go.
My house is pretty normal for the area. We have a nice kitchen and a tiny little back yard, and kids run through the yards because most of the fences are gone or in bad shape, so they’re easy to climb. Houses around here are old but still nice, not like the next neighborhood over where your feet go through the stairs if you stomp too hard. I got my own room right now, but I used to share with my sister.  There are a few houses that probably used to be pretty grand, but the big ones got carved up into duplexes or apartments a long time ago and nobody has the money to buy them and put them back whole.  Most of them are like mine though, most everything on the main floor, maybe half an upstairs and a basement for storage.  
At the end of my block, there’s a bodega.  It’s nice to have around since the big grocery store is about a mile away and takes forever to get around.  It gets cold in the winter, so walking down to the bodega for some milk and a frozen pizza is easy, even when there’s snow.  
We live near a busy street, and people use our street to walk on instead of walking down on the main road because all that traffic kicks up dirt and you always get wet if there is snow or puddles.  We get people riding and walking up and down all the time. 
We also live on a one-way street, but you can always tell when somebody isn’t from the neighborhood because they always drive the wrong way up the street.  Seems like nobody looks at the wrong way signs at the corner and they turn in anyway.  My neighbor lady likes to sit on her porch and yell at people driving the wrong way up the street. 
Last thing about my neighborhood is there’s a school made out of red bricks about three blocks away from my house, and the school has a nice park next to it, different from the playground near the projects.  I went to that school and so do all the kids in my neighborhood. There’s a statue of Teddy Roosevelt out front because the school is named Roosevelt School. I guess the thing that you need to know is that the school is old, they built it in the Depression, I think.  And that the statue of Teddy Roosevelt always has graffiti on it.


