South Brooklyn Profiles: Rachel Butler

Rachel Butler
The great triptych of shipping in South Brooklyn, as I see it: the International Longshoremen's Association offices and clinic on Court and Union; the social clubs named for particular Italian towns where longshoremen would eat and warm themselves between gigs; and the massive cranes that made longshoremen and stevedores' jobs more or less obsolete. The cranes are still there--awkward, slow moving animals that seem to operate of thier own volition. Even the clubs now have a life independent of dockworkers. I use to live next door to the Torre del Greco club where two or three old men would still meet to play cards and joke about their town just outside of Naples with a fatalistic pleasure: Torre del Greco is right under Vesuvius, set to blow for years now. (The man who ran the club was missing half a finger. He said he had been the victim of a shipping company doctor who did minimal traige before sinding longshoremen back to work. The doctor's name was Tagliagambe, which means "cut the legs." The men in the club thought the name was suiting, but not particularly ironic.)
The desolate and mysterious piers near Van Brunt St. can afford these sorts of leftover stories, but not Court Street, where commerce and style change at a quicker rate. The ILA clinic was bought by the Long Island College Hospital this year and the union's offices are now a Mormon Church. The church's arrival mostly went unnoted, according to church member Rachel Butler, a willowy 15-year-old who's lived in Brooklyn almost all of her life: her parents moved here from Utah for her father's job.
I had interviewed her older sisters a few years before about being Mormon in a neighborhood that is primarily Catholic. At the time, the oldest of the Butler sisters was 17; she said she felt like she only lived in Carroll Gardens, but had no longer had any sense of belonging. She was a student at Stuyvesant as Rachel is now. Both made friends with kids from all over New York, but Rachel, who eased into our conversation after a few minutes of hesitation, clearly thinks of Brooklyn as home. My fascination with her church's place in a primarily Catholic neighborhood doesn't make sense to her: as far as she's concerned the church is now an accepted part of Carroll Gardens. She's never felt excluded from other people or experiences because of it.
Her junior high school friends have all moved to Park Slope, so she feels more tied to the feel of the neighborhood than to particular people she knows here. There are the stores, for one thing: she likes George & Son, a fruit store I have never thought to call by its actual name, and Monteleone's, which she adamantly defends as the local champion of lemon ice. Like most people south of Carroll Street, she names Caputo's the best Italian deli. The new arrivals to Carroll Gardens she says, "seem open to the culture of the neighborhood," but she regrets some of the changes. The Carroll Park playground renovation, for example, seemed pointless. A big slide was replaced with "boring and stupid" equipment.
Sometimes she gets tired of the "college-obsessed" atmosphere of Stuyvesant -- when one of her teachers feels his class isn't working hard enough, he asks, "What is this, Bronx Science?" -- but there's no question that she's headed to college herself. She probably won't stay in New York for college, but, as a girl with a fair amount of asphalt in the veins, she also wants to avoid Provo, Utah where her sisters go to Brigham Young University --"so boring."

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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.