That's So Brooklyn

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Almost 18 years ago, my wife, Jean, and I alit from the 4 or 5 train at Nevins Street and walked south into Brooklyn. We were in our early 30s; five months earlier we’d held our wedding in Cape Cod; we wanted children; we were looking for an apartment to buy. This was a cliché, but this was the way. As we passed through Boerum Hill, I spotted buildings with star bolts—the decorative ends of tie rods, which help hold old structures together—and I told Jean I hoped our home, wherever it wound up being, would have stars. I liked stars—the simplicity, the primacy of five points.

Several blocks down, just before the neighborhood turned into industrial Gowanus, with its oil depots and warehouses and converted factories and hookers at night, we found the open house, and ascended three flights of stairs to a two-bedroom apartment that, to our relief, did not have an ass-backward layout, nor the kinds of owner customizations it takes decades to undo. In fact, this was a spacious, bright apartment that looked to be the right size for the family we were hoping to start. And while there were no star bolts—this post–Civil War building had nothing in the way of architectural flair—there were three large red decorative stars in the stairwell just outside the apartment’s door. I don’t believe in signs, but this was a sign. (I still don’t believe in signs.) In May of 2007, we moved in, and have remained there ever since.

For the first 33 years of my life, I moved a lot: five or six different houses before I left for college, five homes in Baltimore, back and forth to Vietnam, three apartments in Manhattan. This is not a complaint—it was a fact of life. I can’t even say “I got used to it,” because I was never used to anything else. It was just normal. We moved, we moved back, we moved on. As an adult, I figured my whole life would be like that: a change of scenery every three or four years.

For a good chunk of that, I was a professional travel writer, so the changes of scenery happened every three or four weeks, not years. My life so far had prepared me for this: I neither needed nor expected traditional forms of stability, so the prospect of going to Geneva, Prague, Copenhagen, London, Fez, Paris, and Budapest in the span of a week—and then off to Austria and India—excited no anxiety, no pangs of homesickness. I was good at this. It helped that I was economy-sized; I felt little discomfort on budget airlines. Other travel-writer friends, including the close friend who brought me into the business, had a harder time with this over the years—they wanted stability, a home base, a good night’s sleep every night.

Me, I didn’t care. On some level, I was inspired by the Colson Whitehead novel John Henry Days, in which a freelance journalist is attempting to set an unofficial record for the most, the longest consecutive junkets: He’s on the road, on someone else’s dime, for months and months, with neither prospect of nor need for going “home,” wherever that might be. His fate ain’t exactly great, but I liked the idea that one could do this, that the grandest of grand tours might be achievable, if one had the contacts, the fortitude, the credit cards, and the utter indifference to traditional notions of domesticity.

Home? What was home to me? Every people, in every corner of the world, had craved a home to call their own—a safe place for members of their own tribe, and their own tribe only—and the world, as I saw it, was worse off for it. The fighting, the bitterness, the territoriality and exclusion. Why couldn’t they, we, all just learn to wander as I did? Why couldn’t we all be a bit more like Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood?

Okay, maybe not exactly like Bela. But accepting that we belong nowhere, and that we need not belong anywhere, could be a good first step to a better world.

And then I moved to Brooklyn.

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Brooklyn did not immediately domesticate me. For the first few years I lived in the borderlands between Boerum Hill and Gowanus, I did not think about fitting in or settling down. I was too busy traveling for work, bouncing around the globe almost without a pause until my first daughter, Sasha, was born, in late 2008. Even then, I kept it up, taking Sasha and Jean on a multi-week trip to Italy before Sasha was two months old. Home was less a place than a placeholder, the rooms and people I would return to when necessary, but hardly fixed, and with little emotional register.

Obviously, that has changed, or I wouldn’t bother to tell you any of this. It’s difficult to say how, though, or precisely when. Small moments began to exert their gravity: preschool, pre-K, kindergarten; a second child, Sandy; renovations of our kitchen, then our bathroom. Each pulled me closer, constrained my orbit. Our block—a single block sandwiched between two housing projects—grew familiar: Bodegas opened and closed, cats congregated in the church parking lot, the street wore down and was replaced and wore down again. I learned my neighbors’ names, our kids became friends (or at least friendly), and the annual block party, every September, drew us all out to eat and drink and interact. A celebrity couple moved in. A brownstone collapsed during a gut reno, changed hands several times, was finally finished and painted a garish green. Its parlor floors are renting for $12,000 a month. The oil depots and warehouses and streetwalkers are all gone, replaced by climbing gyms and big apartment buildings that will be completed by the time I click send on this. A few years ago, I took over management of the block email list, because I’m that kind of nerd, and now people know me for that—I’m the email guy.

And that’s the thing that has made the difference: being known. In any neighborhood you live in for any length of time, you can observe changes and spot characters. When I lived in the Lower East Side, I used to see this one guy all the time—gaunt, stubble-faced, and always dressed all in white, like a painter, but never with a speck of color on his clothing. He walked speedily, with purpose, and his passage up and down Allen Street every day defined that neighborhood for me. (Once, in a brainstorming session at New York Magazine, I pitched a regular back-page feature that would interview neighborhood characters like him for as-told-to first-person stories. It would be called, I said triumphantly, “The Streets Have I’s.” Joanna Coles, then the executive editor, seemed skeptical.) To me, recognizing The Painter felt like really living in a place—it meant I knew things.

But knowing things—people, businesses, changes—is only the beginning of having a home. When I go out now in my neighborhood, I’m almost guaranteed to see people I know: Molly, who’s lived on the block her entire life; Joe, who bought his first building here in 1977 for $26,000; Marc and Mira and Radha and Craig and Josh and Maureen and Kris and Tom and Reena and all of their many, many kids. A couple of streets over, and the network of familiar faces doubles, triples.

That’s nice and all, but what feels better—and what I never knew would feel better—is being recognized myself. Molly and Marc ask after the kids; the butchers at Paisanos call me Mr. Gross; the bodega guy, James, says what’s up even when I’m hurrying to the subway. When a couple of months ago I finally, properly met our celebrity neighbor, we had a nice quick chat—about this—and when we said goodbye, he said my name. Younger me might have sneered at this, but I’m a part of a community now. I exist here, on this block, because I exist in the minds of my neighbors, and because of that I exist a little more solidly in my own mind as well. I wouldn’t claim to mean a lot to the community, but I mean enough. I may not be the star of the block, but I’m part of a constellation. My presence is noted, my absence would be missed. Without knowing it, without intending to, I figured out how to cross the fabled line from tourist to local: It’s not how you think of the place but how—whether, really—the place thinks of you.

There remains a conflict, of course. I don’t know if this is a Jewish thing or just my own delightful paranoia, but I have always tried to mentally prepare myself to flee. I don’t have a go-bag or $10,000 bundled with the family’s passports, but still, if the time comes, I’m ready to abandon my corner of Brooklyn, both physically and psychologically. There is something at the core of me that can’t relax, can’t accept that the home I’ve had longer than any other might be the home I have forever. One day, eventually, it’s got to fail, right? A flood like 2012, fires like we see in Los Angeles, a political calamity, an economic collapse, a good old-fashioned pogrom—any of those could happen tomorrow, and I could, I feel, fly away from everything, channel the mentality of my travel-writing 30s, and pick right up wherever we land. I am, after all, a highly experienced tourist.

Or is this just another defense mechanism? Is my well-constructed paranoia keeping me from ascending to some heretofore undiscovered level of community belonging? Am I afraid, perhaps, of what it would mean to accept my place among these no-longer-strangers, and of the responsibilities that would incur? Or am I once again overthinking everything? I don’t know, but I do know this: Ask me these questions again in another 18 years—I’ll be right here at the edge of Gowanus to answer them, or at least to try. 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I Like It: Calamityware

Frankly, most plates—and bowls and mugs and such—are boring. They can be pretty, they can be tasteful, but they’re rarely, you know, fun. Not Calamityware, whose intricate Asian-style blue-and-white porcelain tableware is adorned with designs that subtly incorporate flying monkeys, pterodactyls, Sasquatches, robots, UFOs, and other cleverly monstrous elements. They’re also quite elegant, if you like that sort of thing. Anyway, get some. But try not to laugh while you’re eating—that can cause problems.

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