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Throwing A Party on Atlantic;'It Wasn%u2019t Supposed to Happen%u2019%u201cThe p a v e m e n t w h ere vou a re sta n d in g w as s u p p o se d to be like th e S o u thB ro n x a n d p e o p le w e r e n 't s u p p o se d to fig h t fo r it like m a n ia cs . .BY L. J. DAVIS%u201c ...Even the traffic seemed muted. The buildings along the avenue looked bleak and uninhabited and curiously small, especially when contrasted with the immense expanse of pavement; the street did not exist to serve them, they existed to define the street and for no other purpose in the world. At the far end of one perspective was the big brown Ex-Lax factory; at the end of the other, the great pale slab of the M en%u2019s House of Detention. In between, Kent was alone...%u201d1 wrote that in a novel about ten years ago. It was right, as far as it went. In those days, Atlantic Avenue was as good a metaphor as any for the desolation of the spirit and the dark night of the soul. Atlantic Avenue was bad news.Three years ago 1 said that Atlantic Avenue looked like a truck route blasted through the middle of a seedy Victorian village. Things were looking up.Listen, talk about your miracles, the 1969 Mets aren%u2019t a patch on Atlantic Avenue. The 1969 Mets had Gil Hodges and Tom Seaver and Mrs. Payson; Atlantic Avenue was just a hunk of unlovely real estate down which a lot of cars drove furiously until they got to the Arab quarter, where their drivers got mad at all the trucks. It was not exactly what you might call a hostage of fortune.Listen, le t%u2019s not get carried away. It%u2019s still a hunk of unlovely real estate. It%u2019s still too wide and the buildings are still too low and Carolyn Spieler%u2019s trees aren%u2019t tall enough to soften its sharp edges and this Sunday a quarter of a million people will walk up and down it and have themselves a whale of a time. This is an event on the order of the loaves and the fishes.Carolyn Spieler%u2019s trees.I suspect that most of the people reading these words have never heard of Carolyn Spieler, pay no attention to her trees, and believe the nifty little shops dropped from the sky one day when God was in an especially good mood. This is the usual fate of your real pioneer; everybody remembers Bat Masterson and nobody gives a hoot about the sod busters, but a few of us old farts still remember Carolyn Spieler and her damn trees as we sit around the stove down atH ubert%u2019s, yarning about Injun fighting. Dum fool woman spent a whole year planting saplings all the way from the harbor to the depot. By comparison, old Don Quixote was a piker.And a rueful laugh laughed he. Not too rueful, though. We were all crazy then, crazy in a way it is hard for someone who has his heart set on a Dean Street duplex to understand; we were not chic then. A revival neighborhood in those days was the place where the wagons were circled, and there are still some of us who, like veterans of Crispin%u2019s Day, who are entitled to stand wherever the nameWaldaba Stewart is mentioned - words that cross fne average pair of lips about as often as %u201c passenger pigeon,%u201d because Atlantic Avenue turned out to be the road to the graveyard of the poor m an%u2019s political career.It is an old battle now and I fear I am rambling like a senile cavalryman, but once upon a time Atlantic Avenue so little troubled the councils of the mighty that a state senator of that name thought he could borrow it for his own use. boy, was he ever wrong. You would be amazed at what happens if you take 500 people and put them in the middle of Times Plaza andtell them not to move. Stalled cars? You never saw so many stalled cars in your life.Few of us had a very clear idea of what we were doing, of course; it was sort of like fighting with Mom when she wants to clean out a drawer of junk. It was ours, and we figured that someday we might think of something to do with it.We have gotten beyond all that, worse luck. The Brownstone Crescent and Atlantic Avenue, its very ugly duckling, are part of the conventional wisdom of the cny these days and it all looks like it was supposed to happen, like Chicago. At least for the time(Michael Cuiccio Photo)being, we seem safe from the schemes of grackle-brained politicians and their ilk, and on Sunday we will throw a party for the city and everyone will come. This is good and nice and as it should be and it was never supposed to happen in a million years. The pavement where you are standing was supposed to be like the South Bronx and people w eren%u2019t supposed to fight for it like maniacs, and no lady was ever supposed to have planted a single tree.