South Brooklyn Profiles: Adrian Bacolo

Adrian Bacolo
Adrian Bacolo, lanky and wound up, asked if we could take a walk up to the promenade in Brooklyn Heights. He was living for the summer in a studio apartment with his parents, and suddenly he needed to break out of the small space, unfurl the energy and muscle power kept under wraps in that basement apartment where I found him carefully ironing his shirts. "I love ironing. I'm like my mother that way. I like to get it just right."
Adrian's father, Mauro, grew up in Carroll Gardens, and works as one of only a handful of landscapers for Brooklyn parks, a job he's passionate about: he'd like to catalog all the species** of trees in Brooklyn on a web site. "He's always had interests outside of the neighborhood," Adrian says. (Once Mauro wanted to design a pond for a park, but being a realistic Brooklyn boy, he worried that someone would steal the pump. His solution was to create what he calls a "faux pond," a small trench lined with pebbles suggesting a once prodigious water source gone dry.) Vicki, Adrian's mother, pursues her own love, fabric and fabric design. She once had a business designing and sewing wedding dresses. Adrian, who might look sullen to a distant observer, is in fact an easy conversationalist, candid and filled with his own enthusiasms, writing for one. He wants to be a magazine journalist and has a lot of interest in pop culture. He spends hundreds of hours each semester editing and writing for his college paper.
I suggest we go to Peter's, the ice cream parlor on Atlantic Ave., which I'm surprised he doesn't know about, doesn't even remember it in its long ago incarnation on the south side of the street as a tiny shop with the unmistakable feel of left over hippie, feel good vibes. Adrian, who actually grew up in Park Slope, feels detached from Carroll Gardens even though he has cousins and family friends all over the neighborhood. He doesn't feel particularly connected to Park Slope either: he went to the Berkeley-Carroll School since kindergarten where his friends came from all over Brooklyn. Adrian is white and his four best friends in high school, Kwame, Elliot, Adam and Andrew were black. When he comes home for the summer on breaks, Adrian tries to get his old Berkeley-Carroll friends together, but he thinks they don't care so much. He wonders if race is a factor in breaking them up. He's not so sure; now that he's a junior at the University of Delaware, he finds that the white and black students rarely spend time in the same cliques. "I noticed it the minute I walked into the cafeteria." His closest friends in college are white and female; Kwame's college friends are primarily black.
And there have been other adjustments to college: when Adrian visited his ex-college girlfriend's family in Bethesda, MD, he found the family's focus so different from his own. Her father asked him what Mauro and Vicki made of the New York senate race, what Adrian himself thought. "I said, to be honest, they don't follow it, and I don't either." He felt uncomfortable; politics wasn't part of his family's conversation and he didn't like being asked, but he wasn't resentful. He understood that was what interested her family: her father, who runs a catering tent business, keeps a picture of himself with Bill Clinton. He broke up with her at the end of the school year. I asked if his ex-girlfriend, whom he described as lacking "street smarts," felt badly at not having that kind of saavy. "No," he said, "It's not important to her; she won't need it in her world."

The Project

Links

Home

This project is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Development Fund of BAC/Brooklyn Arts Council, Inc., which is made possible with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.