A year in the life of an essential American
Opinion by Abigail Pesta, Photographs by Jesse Pesta
The stretch of Grand Avenue where Onesimo Garcia works in Brooklyn is not exactly grand. It's a desolate warehouse street, in the shadow of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, where cars roar overhead. There's a monolithic self-storage place on one end of the block and a trio of empty warehouses on the other, waiting to be demolished. It's a street where film crews like to stage scenes of drug deals going down. It has that look — all grit and graffiti. But there's also a tiny garden, growing in a square of dirt carved out of the sidewalk, where sunflowers and roses bloom in the summer.