The slate sidewalk was blue-gray and smooth and it rang when you walked on it. Flagstone cut from the quarry and laid flat on the dirt and every slab was a different size because the quarry did not know what size the sidewalk needed. The slate sidewalk was the floor of the neighborhood. The slate sidewalk was the living room of the street.

The rain made the slate sidewalk shine. The dry sidewalk was gray. The wet sidewalk was black and it reflected the buildings and the sky and you walked on a mirror. The puddles in the slate sat in the low spots where a hundred years of feet had worn the stone. The puddles were maps of where people walked. The stone remembered the traffic.

My mother said you could tell the age of a neighborhood by its sidewalks. New neighborhoods had concrete. Old neighborhoods had slate. Rich neighborhoods had brownstone. Poor neighborhoods had whatever the landlord could find. Our block on Avenue C had slate on one side and concrete on the other. One side was older than the other. One side rang when you walked. The other side was silent.

The slate cracked in winter. The water got into the seam and froze and the freeze split the stone and in spring there was a new crack and the crack grew wider every year. The crack was a clock. The crack told you how many winters the stone had survived. Some of the slate on Bleecker Street has cracks that started before the Civil War. The stone has been counting winters longer than any person on the block.

They pour concrete now. Smooth and gray and silent. The concrete does not ring. The concrete does not shine in the rain. The concrete does not crack along seams because concrete has no seams. Concrete is one material pretending to be a surface. Slate was a hundred stones agreeing to be a floor. I miss the ringing. I miss the sound of a neighborhood that still had a voice.

See also: Slate Roof, Cobblestone