Over the past two weeks we have been running stories aimed at the question, “Who is Brooklyn?” Today is the last day of the Bedford Avenue Project and although some features, such as the interactive map, will continue growing, we offer two final pieces written by the editors of the The Brooklyn Ink, Mike Hoyt and Michael Shapiro—who both, at one time, lived in Brooklyn and who both, eventually, chose to leave.
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By Mike Hoyt
Rent is why I came to Brooklyn and also why I left, though there is more to the story.
I am unlikely to forget the day we moved there, because it was the day before my first child was born, in June of 1982. We had been living in a dark and cramped fifth-floor walkup on the Upper West Side. The rooftop was basically ours in summer, which was lovely, but it was not a place to take a baby. We needed room, so we followed the subway lines out to where we might get some. We found a third-floor walkup in Carroll Gardens that made the place in Manhattan look like a closet. Beautiful tin ceilings, an ancient but airy kitchen, a closeline out the window over the fire escape. It was reasonable, too.
The landlord was rehabbing the building and behind schedule, but the pregnancy wouldn’t wait, and we were the first to move in. My wife insisted on carrying some of the small stuff, which may have triggered her labor. We went to a diner to feed the friends who had helped us, and after they left, she said, surprisingly calmly, “guess what?” The next morning, we would start a family. In Brooklyn. Everything was different.
My wife grew up in Sheepshead Bay, but even to her, Carroll Gardens was something new. And to me, a Midwesterner, it was the red-brick heart of Brooklyn. The neighborhood was solid Italian and we were not. We were the first of what would be a wave of gentrifiers, and we got a chilly reception at first. I’ve always thought that a Fourth of July fireworks extravaganza in the street right below us was staged for our benefit; it was as if a truckload of M-80s went into the celebration. But an infant in your arms soon melts that kind of tension away. Not too much later, another one was on the way, and the old women in the neighborhood claimed they could guess the gender by the shape of my wife’s belly. (They were right, too: another girl.)
Frank and Mary lived upstairs, a retired longshoreman and his wife. The landlord, we soon learned, had let them stay but had cut their apartment in half and installed a lawyer on the other side of a new wall. They would invite us upstairs to dinners, at which the first course was so delicious and bountiful that the other three were daunting. Every once in a while they blew off steam in a fight, in which the dialogue went this way:
Frank: (stage whisper) Mary! People will hear you!
Mary: (very loud) I don’t give a shit!
Frank: Mary!
Mary: I don’t give a shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.
And so forth.
We loved the neighbors and the neighborhood. The food shopping was a treat. At the “Pork Store,” cheeses and meats hung from above, and the smell of roasting coffee filled the air. At the pastry store, forget about it. Two of our children were baptized in the stately old churches nearby. Daughter number one learned to ride a new blue bike, with training wheels, around the busy block, hearing a great deal of instruction from me about the function of stop signs. We watched the old men play bocce in summer and the lights go up at Christmas.
We might have stayed, even with an expanding family, but the landlord—he who had chopped Frank and Mary’s place; he who the whole neighborhood despised, because he was an agent of the change that was to come—doubled the rent. The four of us, eventually to be five, found a nice little rental in Jersey, with a yard and a street full of neighbor kids running around. That place we came to love, too, but we still come back to Carroll Gardens to walk around.
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By Michael Shapiro
I was 21 when I finally left Brooklyn, and in 1974 that was considered late. Brooklyn was then a place to leave, especially if you were young and eager and searching for people just like you. My parents wanted to leave in 1952 and would have moved to Long Island had my grandfather been willing to help them with the $1, 000 down payment for a house in Syosett. He was sure that if they moved to “the country” he and my grandmother would never see us again.
My parents, as if trying to create some distance from the borough in which they’d both grown up, refused to join in the ritual of the Sunday dinners at Lundy’s, the vast barn of a restaurant in Sheepshead Bay. They aspired to Manhattan, which meant family dinners in the Village at places like the Ninth Circle Steakhouse and Monte’s, on MacDougal Street.
My Brooklyn felt like a great, flat, and lifeless place, where my friends and I longed for the day when we could drive, and, at long last, get away. It was possible to live in a tiny pocket of Brooklyn, and seldom step outside. I certainly did. My life was confined to the square mile that encompassed my elementary school, high school and alma mater, Brooklyn College, right across the street from Midwood High. Everyone I knew and loved lived within that square mile, a village in the city.
There was nothing cool about my Brooklyn and nothing especially cool about the rest of the borough, save for the occasional Bohemian apartment, like the one on President Street across from Prospect Park where my music teacher lived. A friend who lived in Park Slope avoided having people visit her home because she was embarrassed about living in such a down-on-its-heels neighborhood.
Brooklyn then was caught between two epochs: the time of the Dodgers when, as selective memory had it, the sun shone every day on a packed Ebbets Field; and the then-unimaginable Brooklyn where young people flocked to, of all places, Williamsburg.
And so it felt necessary to leave. Maybe you left for college, and did not come back and, or, you waited until you got married and left first for Staten Island and for New Jersey, returning on weekends to visit your parents until they left, too, for South Florida.
I left for graduate school, having lingered a little too long, perhaps out of inertia, or more likely out of fear of leaving my small, safe if stultifying corner of the world.
I did not find the leaving easy. But then leaving for the unknown and unfamiliar never is, no matter how thrillingly it is anticipated. I came twice to live, but did not stay long. My parents left, and settled where they’d always wanted to be: Manhattan.
It would be nice to be able to say that I missed Brooklyn. But I did not, certainly not the place I knew. Yet I felt, and still feel, a connection to the place, not as it was, but as I imagined it might have once been like—the sepia-tinged Brooklyn of kids playing stickball in the streets, the stoops filled with people, the Dodgers on the radio.
I do not recognize Brooklyn as it has become, the Brooklyn where my son goes to high school and my daughter goes to eat. I am a stranger there, having left long before it was fashionable to stay.
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