Where It All Goes Down
Crown Heights, Brooklyn (New York City)
One of the Big Apple's most famous boroughs, Brooklyn is well known for its literary and artistic (and hipster) communities. If you're going to grow up to be a prodigy painter, there's pretty much no better place to be born than Brooklyn. This is because Brooklyn is full of fantastic things to draw:
In the spring, [Mama and I] sometimes went rowing in Prospect Park, not far from where we lived. She was an awkward rower, and she would laugh nervously whenever she fell backward off her seat from a skimming pull at the oars. But we went anyway, and often I took my crayons and pad with me and drew her as she rowed, and drew, too, the look of the water beneath the sky and the surface movements stirred up by her erratic oars. (7.4)
Asher is captivated by the busyness and color of New York City, and it serves as the foundation for some of his earliest paintings. Here he rhapsodizes about his city street:
I remember drawing the contours of that world…the wide street that was Brooklyn Parkway, eight lanes of traffic, the red brick and white stone of the apartment houses, the neat cement squares of the sidewalks, the occasional potholes in the asphalt; the people of the street, bearded men, old women gossiping on the benches beneath the trees, litle boys in skullcaps and side-curls, young wives in long-sleeved dresses and fancy wigs—all the married women of our group concealed their natural hair beneath wigs for reasons of modesty. (6.1)
As evidenced by this quote, Brooklyn is also home to one of New York's largest Jewish populations. And it has been for a long time: the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Borough Park and Williamsburg contain some of the strongest Hasidic communities in the city—they roll deep in these parts. The setting's sense of community provides Asher with a strong thematic background for many of his paintings.