...of a rough area

The car crossed Tenth Avenue and went past the first small grocery and then the truck lot lying empty. He saw two cars parked on the sidewalk, shrouded in torn blue tarp. There was a stray dog, there's always a lean grey dog nosing into wadded pages of a newspaper. The garbage cans here were battered metal, not the gentrified rubber products on the streets to the east, and there was garbage in open boxes and a scatter of trash fanning from a supermarket cart upended in the street. He felt a silence descend, an absence unrelated to the mood of the street at this hour, and the car passed the second small grocery and he saw the ramparts above the train tracks that ran below street level and the garages and body shops sealed for the night, steel shutters marked with graffiti in Spanish and Arabic.

[Cosmopolis, DeLillo, D.]