Across the Universe | Desbrosses and Greenwich Streets — the Tribeca corner where the trucks used to stop

Desbrosses Street is four blocks long and named for a family that was farming here before the American Revolution. Where it crosses Greenwich Street you are standing in what used to be the wholesale food district — the produce and butter and egg trade that fed Manhattan out of low brick warehouses with loading bays cut straight into the pavement. The market moved to the Bronx in the sixties. The buildings stayed.

That is the reason a film set in 1968 came here. The production shot at Desbrosses and Greenwich, and this corner still carries the industrial grammar the decade left behind: Belgian block showing through worn asphalt, iron loading doors, canopies bolted to facades for trucks that no longer come. A few steps west the Holland Tunnel approach roars past on its own schedule, which is the one loudly modern thing in earshot.

Tribeca has money now, and most of these warehouses hold lofts and galleries. But the street cross-sections are unchanged, and the block is narrow enough that at street level you see mostly brick and sky. Early on a Sunday there is almost nobody here, which is unusual this far south in Manhattan and makes the place feel briefly like a back lot that happens to be real.

Walk down Desbrosses toward the river until it ends at West Street. Turn and look back east along the line of the street. The buildings step away from you in shallow tones of red and grey, and the perspective closes exactly where a camera would want it to.