Dumbo to Gowanus: Olde Breuckelen part Deux

Ahh, Gowanus… your waters reglitterized by an influx of earnest young arts professionals and gallerists, how fondly I recall strolling along your bucolic banks in early Spring amid the dimpled rising of sewer salmon and toilet trout.

Some thirty years ago, driven out of Dumbo by rising rents, the relentless pounding of the machine shop below and the squealing of the B train a scant ten feet from my bed, I packed up my Gladstone bag, my box of paint, my box of kitchen, turned my back toward Manhattan and headed up the hill in search of affordable space.  Past the immaculate headquarters of the Jehovas with its polished sidewalk, spotless windows and gaggles of clean young men sporting short-sleeved dress shirts with pocket protectors. Through the Heights – past Love Lane, an address I always wanted but could never afford – past Atlantic Avenue and Little Lebanon, over the manhole leading to the Underground Railroad, through Cobble Hill and into Carroll Gardens. Taking a random left off Court Street I came eventually upon a storefront with a handful of apartment rentals taped to the plate glass window.  A vast man under a tiny Hamburg sat at a wooden desk inside; he waved me in.

 
Big Pussy had just the spot for me, he said, after a brief introductory conversation and, grabbing a ring of keys we were off in his white caddy into the nether depths of Gowanus. “She’s got a couple three boys,” he tells me, referring to my future landlady,” but she ain’t got no phone. So we’ll stop by, see if she likes you, if you like the place. Maybe say hello to the neighbors. You get the third floor.”  We turned left on to Union Street. I noticed there seemed to be a beat cop on each corner, something I’d never seen, even in Soho, and quite a few young men out washing and waxing cars or sitting on stoops, smoking … middle of the morning on a weekday.

 
The house itself was indistinguishable from others on the block: three stories, Archie Bunker-like with striped aluminum window awnings and a brick and granite stoop up to the second floor entrance. Big Pussy and I get out of his Cadillac and all activity on the street ceases as all eyes are turned upon us. I notice the twitching of second floor curtains up and down the block. A flurry of rapid Italian passes between Pussy and another man in a wifebeater T, who nods in the direction of the basement door under the stoop and yells out, “Marcella! Get over here….”

  
Marcella - she’s got a black eye -  leads us in to the basement living area, a chaos of lurid Catholicism and clutter, redolent of dried basil and old laundry, every surface covered and the boys a tangled heap of shrieking nuggies in the gloom. She yells at the boys that she’s going out and leads me and Big Pussy back outside, up the stoop and into a high-gloss, beige corridor and the stairway to the third floor. Marcella asks me about what I do, do I have a job. Big Pussy pipes up that I’m an artist. Like Michaelangelo, he tells her. I tell Marcella I work construction. She is skeptical. The lock on the apartment door is broken – not to worry, Marcella says, everything around here is safe…. I am skeptical.  The place is standard shotgun style, eat-in kitchen at the back overlooking the poured concrete back yard, middle “living” room and bedroom in front with a big closet with a window. Three inch matted, deep brown shag throughout. Pink, faux marble vanity with “gold” fixtures; $500 a month, two months up front. Back on the stoop, Big Pussy and Marcella fall into a seemingly heated conversation in Italian with plenty of sweeping gesture encompassing both me and, it seems, the immediate neighborhood.  Grabbing my wrist, Marcella says, “You don’t mind, I take you to see the Capo”…. Big Pussy grins at me, rolls his eyes, follows us across the street to another stoop.  Everyone has put down their rags, hoses and buckets. The second floor curtains part again and I can see the grandmas peering back out at me. The neighbors are beginning to drift down toward us, sizing me up.

  
An older man with cane and suspenders sits at the top of the stoop. “Prego, Don Antonio…” she begins. He interrupts, staring at me, “You an artist? Waddaya, paint pitchers?”  I am struck momentarily dumb by his prescience. I open my mouth, reaching blindly for the right response. Don Antonio cuts back in, “Kids today is garbage,” he says, looking right through me, “You don’t look like garbage.”  I stammer my thanks. “We got a good coupla blocks here,” he tells me, the small crowd nodding,

“ Family. No garbage. You know the Cosa Nostra?” This entirely out of left field; what could possibly be the right response to this question? “ You know Sammy Persico? Sammy the Snake? I know all the guys. I was Capo ….” He chatters at Pussy and Marcella for a second, the congregation eyes me up and down, tattoos flashing on sweaty biceps, smoldering cigarettes adangle from every lip. “ You’re ok, kid. Look after Marcell, she ain’t got nobody.” Don Antonio wraps up the audience. I’m scared shitless about what I may have just gotten myself into.

   
 Of course, I took the place. It soon became apparent that the wave of emigrating yuppies, as we called them then, had spread well throughout Cobble Hill and, to a lesser extent, Carroll Gardens, but had not yet reached the downhill end of Union. Just a half a block west of the fabled Canal, with it’s funky Union Street bridge superstructure, in the shadow of the Casket Company, I was to be the first outsider to move on to the block. Whereas these third floor apartments had been hitherto reserved for the Nannas, the early Eighties were hard times and this was the first to be let out to the likes of me.

I never learned what may have become of the grandma who should have resided there; perhaps she went with the boys’ father. I turned the bedroom into my studio and threw a single mattress down on the closet floor. Marcella never bothered me and I’m pretty sure I never “looked after” her. Rarely she might come upstairs to ask my help with something. She might look at the painting I was working on and ask why I didn’t put people or something in it, “Like Spider Man, maybe. One my boys, he likes to draw Spider Man. Maybe you could show him. Show him to draw more better, you’re the artist…” After a year or so Marcella came up and asked, “ It’s not for me, you know, “ she says, “but the neighbors and people, they wanna know, you know, you got a girlfriend?” I stammer. I blush. “You know,” she says, “Nobody never sees you coming home with a girl, ya know?”  I thought of all the twitching, third floor curtains up and down my route to the F train, the cop on the corner, the lounging, indolent street soldiers.  “It’s not so easy getting a girl to come down to Gowanus,” I told her, “but I sure hope to soon.”

All in all, Gowanus has come a long way and who knows where it will go in the future…..