Mark E. Smith
I’ve spent my time on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Park Avenue. I’ve parked my van in the garage that serves 720 Park Avenue, the building with the highest concentration of billionaire residents in the world, where the cars around me were Bugattis and Hennesseys – cars that cost more than homes. And, I’ve played with my kids in the park along 5th Avenue, where the only guardians around us were au pairs wearing designer clothes, carting kids around in Mercedes and Porsche SUVs. It’s seemed both comfortable and unfathomable to witness such wealth.
However, Park Avenue doesn’t stop at the Upper East Side. No, it picks up again in Brooklyn, among the poorest congressional districts in the United States. And, in my experience, among the wealthiest, too. See, in Brooklyn, wealth is everywhere. You can stop anyone virtually anywhere and they’ll point you in the right direction, offer you a bite to eat, carry your bags. The African Americans, Hasidic Jews, Latinos and Caucasians live, for the most part, as brothers and sisters – race, religion, ethnicity, social economics don’t matter on the streets of Brooklyn. If you’re there, someone will help you out, sharing what they know, giving you what they have.
Park Avenue, from Manhattan to Brooklyn, has taught me that wealth isn’t about what you have. Rather, Park Avenue has taught me that true wealth is about what we share.
PowerchairDiaries 
Marvelous post today, Mark! You rocked the intro to draw us in and knocked us out with a profound truth. Thanks.
Very nice sentiments in this post. Just want to point out that there’s no parking garage at 720 Park Avenue (I grew up there and know this for certain). And there’s no bridge connecting Park Avenue with Brooklyn. To the south, Park Avenue ends at 17th Street, where it turns into Union Square East, which then turns into 4th Avenue at 15th Street. To the north, Park Avenue terminates at 138th Street, where it merges into Madison Avenue.
Trains from Grand Central that run under Park Avenue do cross a railroad-only bridge into the Bronx, not Brooklyn, just north of 132nd Street.