From my window I can see the latest remodeling of Carroll Park. The
low cement walls of the new bocce courts haven't been painted yet; the
basketball court is now just soft brown dirt. The bordering trees
have been reinforced with wooden stakes. When this renovation started
in August, a garden I had been working on was bulldozed, as were all
the border gardens, even the Louis Valentino garden, the one at the
northwest corner of the park dedicated to a fireman from the
neighborhood who died on duty. During the year, flowers appear next to
a plaque about Valentino on dates that seem random to an outsider but
must have private significance -- a birthday, an anniversary --
occasions I'd have no way of knowing.
Although I've lived in South Brooklyn for more than eleven years,
there are still so many unknown dates and lines of demarcation: an
invisible net of street names, churches, schools, stores, people that
have a value and history I'm blind to, the very same places and
people I've passed for years. Sometimes I get inklings of it: the
family connection between the liquor store owner and the funeral
director; the woman I used to see on Carroll Street who ran one of
the old movie houses on Columbia Street; the old boundaries between
Italians and Irish; the current ones between African Americans and
Italians. The purpose of this project is to make some of those webs
visible and to understand a small amount of the local history that's
taken for granted by the people who grew up here. Yet I hope not to
add to the cottage industry of Brooklyn nostalgia: South Brooklyn
Profiles is also about the ways people define themselves now in an
area quickly becoming upper middle class.
More directly the idea for the web site came from several recent events
that, it seems to me, are as much a result of the spasms of sudden growth
as any other reason. Two years ago when a young man was killed in tiny
Carroll Park, many in my area felt the death was not indicative of problems
in our neighborhood since the man had been a drug dealer. In short, his
death was viewed as an anomaly. Yet, as rents climb and an area of Smith
Street is dubbed Restaurant Row by a local realtor, I have to wonder about
how younger people from the neighborhood, often lower middle class, view
the area: do they feel displaced? Or, in their estimation, does the new
prosperity of the neighborhood offer them possibilities?
At the same time, the area's older people, many who worked here as
longshoremen, are in tenuous positions, living on fixed incomes as the
neighborhood cost of living increases. Last summer an elderly couple I
knew walked around the neighborhood with distracted looks asking if
anyone in the area had some "rooms" --they had to leave the apartment
where they'd raised their son because the building had been sold and
the rent was adjusted to market value. But I also wanted to talk to men
and women here about the neighborhood's past -- the days before the
Gowanus Expressway divided some part of the neighborhood, when Columbia
Street, covered in pushcarts, was the commercial center of the area,
recollections of the Luna and Happy Hour, two popular movie theaters,
and the social clubs organized around whatever town in Italy you or
your family came from. I was curious too about the remnants of older
vending traditions here: a man who travels through the neighborhood
offering to sharpen knives; another who, until this past year, drove a
pickup packed with fruit and vegetables which he sold from the side of
his truck. A set of brothers owns an underwear shop with a sign posted
on the wall behind the cash register: Please Don't Be in a Hurry.
In short, I had first been thinking of the web site as a portrait of an
Italian American neighborhood in transition. This has obvious interest to
me since I am both Italian and an outsider -- I grew up in New Jersey,
never in Italian neighborhoods -- trying to figure how much of Brooklyn I
can claim as my own. But this neighborhood has long been more racially,
religiously, and ethnically diverse than a walk down Court Street might
first suggest. I've tried here to speak with a wide range of residents who
reflect that diversity, though I was often stymied by people's suspicions
about the project and where it would be "published." (In several instances,
people would be interviewed but not photographed. I compensated by taking a
photo of their store or their favorite locale.)
On a search for subjects for this web site, I went into the Court Street
Pastry Shop, one of the great employers of South Brooklyn teenage girls,
and started talking with a friend's young sister and her co-workers about
the neighborhood, particularly the changes on Smith St. One of the girls
said things had changed a lot because of the white people who had moved in.
She said, "I don't mean the Italians. I mean the other white people from
Manhattan." They're used to paying high prices, she said, so here it's
cheap for them. She explained that she knew about real estate since her dad
owns buildings and all.
I'd never heard this distinction between white people and Italians made
so baldly before, but I wasn't so surprised. A few months earlier a man
who saw me picking out prickly pears from a grocer's outdoor display
told me, "I thought only Italians ate those." At first, I thought he
meant that anyone who looked like a neighborhood outsider couldn't also
be Italian. But perhaps he meant just what the pastry shop clerk was
telling me: my clothes and demeanor looked white middle class, not
Italian.
Words connected to race and ethnicity haven't been the only way class comes
to the fore in my neighborhood. I've heard a lot of my neighbors use the
word "liberal" meaning again the expatriates of suburbs across the nation
who fled to the comforting town-meets-city streets of Brownstone Brooklyn:
me. At various times, I've heard the liberals accused of not keeping their
apartments sufficiently clean, allowing their children to run wild,
ordering only two cookies from the Monteleone Bakery, when old timers would
order by the pound. The complaints seem funny or unfair sometimes,
altogether true at others. (Although I don't have children, I admit I am
guilty on all other counts.) But some of my neighbors who have lived here
all their lives have serious worries about the influence of outsiders
ruining, or even changing, what after all, is their home. Several young
women told me, for example, they couldn't understand why Carroll Park's
playground had been renovated a while back. What was with those big purple
elephants and the sprinklers that indicated the four points of the compass?
The playground that they could legitimately call their own didn't need
those additions. I felt the project itself was sometimes viewed as an
intrusion. Still, I was surprised when a young woman I'd known for years
who had agreed to be interviewed, avoided meeting with me and finally
decided not to participate in the project.
That happened a lot. I hotly and persistently pursued The Twins,
elderly identical twin sisters who walk arm-in-arm back and forth to
the Donut House; rarely will you see one without the other. (Once I did
spot one of them at the West Fourth Street stop in Manhattan; she was
probably coming from work, but it felt so strange as if she were
playing a kind of elaborate prank and the joke was definitely on me.)
The Twins turned down all my requests and always scurried away from me
as quickly as possible as if I represented a genuine threat. Another
time, while I was staring at the park renovations and the ripped up
garden I'd planted last summer, a middle aged woman I'd never noticed
before began to rant about the renovation: what's wrong with the people
living around this park? They're all liberals who think they can change
everything. We don't need any changes! I told her about the project and
tried to set up an interview; she dropped the hostility meant for the
park power brokers, became friendly and vague and told me she'd call. I
wish I could say her interview is included here, but it's not. Besides
my disappointment, though, I came respect people's unwillingness to
let their words be interpreted, their determination to preserve a bit
of private neighborhood confidence.
A lot of the suspicion may come from the surfeit of new, pricey businesses
in the area. We've long had the hippie capitalism of the Community
Bookstore and the now-closed Roberto Cappuccino, which after many valiant
attempts to attract a larger customer base, finally succumbed to rising
rents. Those are places, that while not in the same vein as the long-time
delis and restaurants, did not feel antagonistic as some of the newer
businesses intent on excluding old timers or anyone without the cash or
willingness to pay overblown prices. Yet some of the new small businesses
do give a nod to their predecessors, some more successfully than others.
The Red Rail, a restaurant on Henry Street in the spot where Cammareri's
Bakery used to be, keeps some of the industrial-sized dough mixers the
bakers once used. Hanging upside down, they look like German Expressionist
birdcages. And in a weird, ahistorical celebration of colonialism, Uncle
Pho's, a bar and restaurant on Smith Street designed to look like the good
old days of French domination of Southeast Asia, has tacked up Brazilian
canvas coffee sacks the owners got from D'Amico's, the old specialty shop
on Court.
This isn't to say that I don't enjoy many of the new shops and
restaurants on these blocks or the changes they've brought. They've
certainly made me feel more comfortable. When walking through my old
neighborhood on the east side of the Gowanus Expressway last month, I
decided to look for an old diner I'd once gone into at least eight
years before and never again. Near the docks, the restaurant, filled
only with male customers, was palpably hostile to the likes of me, a
part-time office worker skipping around the back warehouses, examining
palimpsests as if there were no more real, current life to be found on
those streets. I was greatly relieved to find that that diner, very
close to the entrance of the Battery Tunnel, had become a Middle
Eastern restaurant, welcoming, complete with takeout menu and free
delivery.
Writing about people I've known for years and those I'd met
expressly for this project, I came to feel a lot more certain about
my place here: I hadn't realized how much of the private network
I'd already been privy to. At the same time, I tried to establish a
genuine Kings County lineage, reminding myself of a story I'd
heard about my great, great grandfather. A captain and owner of
a merchant marine ship, he died on board while heading to
New York from Naples. His son, also on board, decided he
wouldn't bury the body at sea as was customary, but would find
a spot on the Brooklyn shore, bury his father, and return his
bones to Italy a few years later. I couldn't have asked for a better
Brooklyn connection. But then a fax came from my father -- it was
a version of the story written by a distant Italian cousin who had
recorded on paper the morbid and fantastic tale with one critical
change: the burial site, he wrote, had been in Buenos Aires
along the Rio de la Plata.
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-- Angela Starita
Email:
starita4@hotmail.com
Special thanks to Ruth Wyatt, whose photographs of Marietta's, and Laura Frazier
appear on this web site,
James Morse, trusted
neighbor and photo scanner, the Brooklyn Arts Council, Coleman Kitchin, web
designer of unusual patience, who built this site, and all who agreed to be
interviewed for this project.
The Profiles
