9th Street Station.

I suppose if you asked my father, he'd say the same thing, so I don't know why I was got off guard. I guess it had to do with the fact that you'd only say something like that if you could remember a time when the neighborhood was grittier. It'd be something your parents would have told you ten or fifteen years ago (more, even), words of caution that were more like directives, but something that to me is just a sign of an older Brooklyn generation.

"That 9th Street station, it's dangerous. Don't get off here by yourself. Too many corners."

Seems sort of odd to say something like that now when 9th Street is the center of what's new and great about Brooklyn nowadays. But I don't think that was on the mind of the father I sat across on the Bay Ridge bound R train. He was talking to his teenage daughter, and while I wasn't necessarily listening to everything they were saying, his 9th Street Station comment just caught my ear in a way certain subway conversations do, and it made me think of my own father, and all the times I'd hear him say the same thing.

"You gotta be careful here, because, it's not a good station, you know what I'm saying?"

His daughter listened to his anachronistic advise, nodding her head every so often as the train came to a stop and all the new Brooklynites grabbed their hipster bags and buttoned their fashionista coats, some pulling out their knitted hats with the floppy ears--far from the threatening characters of a generation or two or three ago that would have given you all the just cause of offering the warnings this father was imparting on his daughter.