Bensonhurst is still on the map. The buildings are standing, the el still throws its pattern of light and shade across New Utrecht Avenue, 86th Street is busier than it ever was, and the bakeries are still baking. Almost nothing here was destroyed. That is what makes it a harder place to write about than most. What went was not the architecture. It was the arrangement: that the man in the hardware store knew what you needed, that the doctor came up the stairs with a black bag and sat on the edge of your bed, that the ice cream man let a seven-year-old pay tomorrow because he knew the child would be on the same block in the morning and so would he, and that everybody on two hundred feet of one avenue knew your face. Thirty-four chapters, built out of the only material left, which is what the people who were there remember. Sunday dinner and the argument about what the thing in the pot is called. The bakeries, the delis and the olive loaf question. The pizzerias. Taeng Fong and the glass pineapple. The candy store, the egg cream and the Charlotte Russe. 86th Street and the two blocks of it that were yours. Korvettes, Caesar's Bay and Nellie Bly. The Marboro, the Loew's Oriental and the Benson. Walter, who pushed an ice cream cart on foot and let children pay the next day. The johnny pump. Coney Island and the whole day gone. The parish, the nuns and the eight years in between. Lafayette, New Utrecht and the pool in the basement. First jobs and working papers. The doctors who came to the house. The West End line. The Verrazzano going up outside the window. The Marlboro Houses. The summer of 1977. And where Bensonhurst actually ends, which nobody agrees about. Where the neighborhood disagrees with itself, about which corner a place stood on, about when it changed, about whether the thing in the pot is sauce or gravy, this book says so and takes no side, because the disagreement is usually the truest part.