On Franklin Avenue, around Quincy, midst brick and mortar corner walk-ups separated by rows of asymmetrical two and three storey houses is one high, stately home made of wood, for which reason alone would make it stand out were it not for the six or seven chickens who live in its front yard. They have their own house in there and the yard is their domain, it being, well, a chicken-tended dirt surface, free of rocks, and mostly free of fallen feathers, except for a few which are hard to spot because of their earthen color.
It is one landmark you might pass as you walk from the Franklin Avenue Station to Bedford Avenue and Greene Street where is a shop called Candy Colored Girl where live more birds of differing species, and no chickens.
The walk takes enough time to feel deeply the bite of a 50° spring day when the wind is blowing hard enough to lay over the daffodils or make a close-hauled sail exciting.
Candy Colored Girl is the domain of Nora Young, the person with an eye for birds, but unlike the Franklin chickens, these Bedford birds have stopped preening themselves as they are dead, and the subject of photographs which when seen will remind you of Victorian black and white funerary art, but here they still wear their beautiful and brilliant plumage, in living color.
Equally beautiful frocks and Nora’s attitude make this corner of Bed-Stuy vibrate—but oh, those tortoise shell shades!
