Behind the Scenes of: 

A BIRDHOUSE IN BROOKLYN

Lucy’s father had been a subway traveler. Workbag in hand, he inhaled one of many morning Chesterfields while treading a subway platform in Astoria. If he had to, he’d step beween the cars for one last drag before he got to his stop. The shop was on east 34^th Street in Manhattan. It was a cramped loft space, up one flight, in a five-story brick tenement, where he bent over a cluttered worktable splashed with shards of gold leaf, attending to the delicate labor of restoring antiques. The shop, or rather the memory of it, was somewhere inside of a multiplex cinema beneath a towering block of luxury apartments.