Since moving to our new apartment, I have heard rumors about the Magic Block.

“You have a car?” my landlord/next door neighbor Johnny asked the day we moved in. When I nodded, he leaned in, Stan the Man With the Tan Van-style and said, “There’s a block here where you don’t have to move your car for street cleaning.”

Obviously intrigued, I checked out the block. It looked like any other street in the neighborhood: brownstones on both sides and the big “P” and sweeper sign which signified no parking street cleaning hours. On close inspection, it might have been dirtier than some, but there was no indication that the sweepers skipped over this block. I went back to Johnny and asked him why people don’t get ticketed on the block (and why it doesn’t get cleaned for that matter).

At first, it looked like Johnny might give me a straight answer, but then, as if thinking better of it, he flipped the palm of his pinky-ringed hand and said, “Why look a gift horse … ?”

I’m sure I could have pressed him further, but this is an old Italian neighborhood. So I figured when in Rome …

And though I didn’t doubt Johnny, I still couldn’t quite believe that the posted street cleaning rules and the consequences of disobeying them did not apply to that single block. So, when I happened to be out wandering the neighborhood during the block’s posted hours, I’d walk over and take a peek. Sure enough, cars would be lining both sides of the street, none with a ticket on its windshield.

But I still couldn’t bring myself to park there. The non-ticketing gods would recognize my ’91 Camry as the interloper gentrifier Yuppie mobile it was and write me a big, fat ticket. And, even if they wouldn’t, it just seemed too odd to leave my car sitting there, in plain defiance of the laws of parking nature, a veritable sitting duck. There’s nothing so lonely or so shameful as the lone street-cleaning-rules-defiant car parked on an otherwise emptied street side. I was simply too jaded a parker to believe in a Magic Block.

Then last weekend, as Andy and I drove up our block, we found Johnny on his stoop waving to us. We stopped the car and he approached, so we rolled down our window. “You’re not going to the hospital now,” he said, eyeing my gigantic belly. When we laughed and said no, he said, “Okay, good, ’cause I just saw a spot on that block I told you about.”

Andy and I thanked him profusely, exchanged what-the-heck looks, then made our way to the Magic Block. Just as Johnny said, there was indeed a vacancy.

“What do you think?” Andy said, looking at me. “Should we try our luck and go for it?”

“Why not?” I answered. Street cleaning, if it happened, wasn’t for another couple of days. I could do some further reconnaissance and still have time to move the car if necessary.

The next day, I waddled over to Vinnie’s, the pizza parlor across the street from my building. The usual posse of old Italian men were sitting outside and, as my grandmother would have said, kibitzing. That morning there were three of them.

“You still haven’t had that baby yet?” the one in a Yankees cap asked me.

“Soon, I hope,” I told him, and I meant it. “In the meantime,” I said, “I have a question,” and asked them about the Magic Block.

“Who told you that?” asked the one smoking a cigar.

Figuring it best to keep things vague, I shrugged and said, “I don’t know. I just heard it.”

The old men looked at one another. Then the one who hadn’t spoken yet asked, “You parked there now?” I nodded and said I was just about to move it. “And believe me, it’s not so easy these days,” I said, patting my bump. “I keep having to move the seat back so the wheel doesn’t hit my belly.” This was true, and I knew a little sympathy couldn’t hurt my cause. “Leave it parked there,” Yankees cap said and nodded.

“Are you sure?” I asked, scrunching my nose to connote a sense of nervousness.

“Leave it parked there,” the cigar-smoker said. “If you get a ticket, bring it to us. We’ll take care of you.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” I said, smiling and shooing my hand. At this point, it would be worth the price of the ticket just to see if the Magic Block was indeed magical. “But knowing you feel that way makes me much more confident. Thanks,” I said, waving and waddling away. And I heard them say, “Don’t mention it.”

The following morning, smack-dab in the middle of the street-sweeping times posted on the street signs, I headed over to the Magic Block. Would my car be sitting there, blissfully, no tell-tale orange envelope tucked behind its wipers? Or would I find it alone and humbled, with not only a ticket but also the Sticker of Shame stuck to its passenger-side window: “This street could not be cleaned because this vehicle was improperly parked.” I held my breath as I rounded the corner.

What I found was a glorious sight: a street with cars blissfully parked on either side, as if it were not posted street cleaning hours (just to be sure, I checked the clock on my cell phone). None had a ticket; not even mine. I returned home with a spring in my waddle.

“So how’d it go?” Yankees cap called out from across the street at Vinnie’s.

“All clear,” I said, smiling. Even in today’s New York, there’s still such a thing as magic.

The Brooklyn Chronicles, a work of fiction, appears each Friday. Previous installments are available at www.nysun.com/archive_chronicles.php. The author can be reached at kschwartz@nysun.com.