Open Thread Wednesday 12/10/08

By on December 10, 2008 2:00 am in Brooklyn Heights
Flickr photo by cronopio snowstone

Flickr photo by cronopio snowstone

What’s on your mind? Comment away!

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  • http://mermaidsonparade.blogspot.com melanie hope greenberg

    The vibe in the Heights back then was neighborly, community oriented and friendly.
    The hood had all kinds of people of different classes. Now it feels homogenized, and for my tastes, culturally flatlined. The Heights is now about the outer show. That’s why I go into Dumbo. To get back the community feelings I had from the Heights in it’s day, and to hang out with artists. For the artist’s it about the inner life and creativity. They could less what I wear or have in the bank or how much my apt is worth.

  • AEB

    I hear you, Melanie. Thanks.

  • Berkeley Grosvenor

    David on Middagh, what I remember most about John’s Pizza is wrapped in a bit of a fog, as it was typically a “to go” slice coming home from nights where drinks never quite made it to dinner. Normal hours I’d order Fascati. The guys were always friendly at John’s, and I’ve spotted one of them at the Henry St falafel place, incidentally. But what still sticks in my mind is how once the slice was slid into the white paper bag, they’d fold over the top of the bag and flatten the end with two quick bumps of the fist against the counter. It might have been a signature gesture, or perhaps it was just to rouse me from my lubricated, sleepy thoughts. Either way, they are certainly missed.

  • http://selfabsorbedboomer.blogspot.com Claude Scales

    I liked John’s pizza, too, but my regular snack on heading home after closing the Lion’s Head in the Village at 4 A.M. and staggering off the 2 or 3 train at Clark Street at about 4:30 was a grilled cheese and ham sandwich at the Promenade Restaurant, the 24/7 diner that occupied the space that is now Heights Cafe. After a while, I noticed that my checks always said “GAC [grilled American cheese] ham.” The next time I came in, as soon as I caught the counterman’s eye, I said “Gack ham.” He said, “Jack ham?” I said, “Yeah.” After that, whenever I came in, as soon as he spotted me he’d turn to the cook and say, “Jack ham.”

  • bornhere

    When I think about the Heights over the decades (and decades, and decades, and more), I’m not so sure it has changed any more or less than any other essentially residential, essentially middle-/upper-middle-class neighborhood. Forty-plus years ago, the Heights was pretty much what it is now; sure, things were different … but life was different. I know some will disagree, but I felt safer here years ago than I do now, but I probably felt safer everywhere then. There were also more “shops” vs stores, but the economy and residents and everything else were able to support more individual efforts. Churches’ doors were ALWAYS open, you didn’t have to spend hours circling for a parking spot, activities like Halloween trick-or-treating didn’t have to be consigned to “block efforts” to minimize danger, and everything was quieter. There was, I think, a more committed population, and moving trucks at month’s end weren’t a depressingly common sight. I loved the Heights as a kid, and I love it now. I never really felt that the neighborhood was (or is) missing some fabulous nightlife, because I had (and have) “the City” for that: I never felt that where I lived had to be so self-contained that I would never need to venture “all the way to Manhattan.” In fact, I always sort of liked that the Heights was where I could go to school, do some shopping, maybe have a reasonably nice “dinner out” now and then, and, above all, “come home.” If I had wanted a jumping neighborhood to live in, I would have moved; and I have to admit that, when I am in Manhattan for dinner or drinks or whatever, I rarely feel the “neighborhood-ness” of where I am, and I’m invariably grateful I live in Brooklyn Heights. (But I’d still love a fish store and a REAL Italian bakery.)

  • AEB

    But, Bonhere, from what I gather from postings here and from my own dimish recollections of visiting friends in BH in the 70s and 80s, there WAS a greater gay presence in the nabe then than now.

    Piano and gay bars here? Ou sont les etc.? Though the gay bar is, largely thanks to the Net, a dying animal everywhere, here there is very little sense of gay life lived, as opposed, say, to in the Slope.

    Of course gay nabes are also an endangered species…but a trip to the West Village, for example, still presents a sense of an extant gay life. Not here.

  • Nelson

    All….I am looking for a competent and compassionate veternarian for my elderly dog….would love to have some input here…have used Dr. Maddox at Coble Hill but heard he is retiring.
    Thanks so much
    Nelson and “Katie”

  • bornhere

    AEB- That’s an interesting point; but I’m wondering if the identification of a “gay presence” is somehow diminished or muted by the sort of mainstreaming of the gay life. In the past 20 or so years, even the one-time gay stronghold of Key West has dramatically changed: some of that change is due to the horrible number of deaths in the 80s and early 90s because of AIDS, and some of the change is due, I think, to the gradual shift in the sort of enclave existence: almost everybody is now almost everywhere, and there is, I guess, less of a need to find “strength in numbers.” I have gay friends in my building and in the neighborhood and (even) in Carroll Gardens. And except for the smattering (if one or two a smattering makes) of gay bars that were here back in the “olden days,” the Heights was never even a microcosm of the OLD Village or the current west side of the City. The gay poet/actor/writer/banker was, at one time, something of an oddity, and I think that as the “uniqueness” of being gay has diminished, so has the existence of identifiable neighborhoods, services, etc. I also think that some of the gay rep of the Heights from years ago was based, at least in part, on specific residents (eg, Truman Capote) or professions (actors, writers) who lent a kind of “other element” to the area. I have to admit I have never really thought about this particular change in Brooklyn Heights very much; but to me, at least, the change just seems evolutionary.

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