‘There are no 50-year-old millennials
seeking adult-only ball pits or fantasising
about riding unicycles round the park’
— Tanya Gold, p62
High life
Taki
New York
I now know it by heart. Brooklyn Heights,
that is. It takes 35 minutes by cab from
where I live on the Upper East Side, and
approximately $30. I even walked to the
Heights once. One hour down the FDR,
turn left on to Brooklyn Bridge, dodge the
aggressive bikers and avoid the vendors;
it’s a 20-minute crossing, give or take ten
minutes depending on the crowds. Once
you’re over, turn right and you’re there. The
Heights are sedate, leafy streets with fine old
homes turned into apartments, lush gardens
and lofty harbour views. It feels like a staid
patrician neighbourhood where time has
stood still since the turn of the 20th century.
Brooklyn Heights was farmland when
enterprising Heights property owners began
to sell off plots for country retreats to the
Manhattan elite. Mansions of brick and
stone went up and in 1883 came the Brook-
lyn Bridge. With it came rooming houses,
machine-shops and factories. Waves of immi-
grants poured in. The Brooklyn Navy Yard
went up. There were bohemians and hustlers
and hookers and muggers too. The patricians
fled, as they always do. Bars and rowdy tav-
erns greeted the sailors and ruffians down by
the water. This was the place that Norman
Mailer’s mother chose to buy into, and where
the novelist lived until his death in 2007.
His son Michael still lives there, hence my
acquaintance with it. The Heights were the
fictional home of Clark Kent, Superman, and
also the fictional setting for Willy Loman’s
adulterous affair in Arthur Miller’s Death of
a Salesman. Miller lived nearby before head-
ing north where he met Marilyn Monroe.
The social terrorist Truman Capote lived
in a basement flat at 70 Willow Street at a
time when he could write good fiction. He
moved to Manhattan, where he met all sorts
of swells. He took pills and drugs and drank
like an Irishman, and his talent went miss-
ing. He died bloated and unable to string a
sentence together verbally or on paper. That
should be a lesson to all of us. In 1950 the
Low life
Jeremy Clarke
I apologised, was gladly granted an indul-
gence, and on Sunday I packed a small bag
and reached into a drawer for the passport.
I was going back to the cave house in the
Provençal village. Back to France and
the French and to speaking my trousers-
on-fire French. Salut! Tu vas bien? Viens
m’embrasser, mon petit chou. Back to a
country where, as Barbara Cartland put it,
you can make love in the afternoon without
people hammering on the door.
Back to village bells clanging off the
hours of the day, back to early rising and try-
ing to be witty, or at least sentient, in French
with the insanely jolly woman in the village
bakery at a quarter to seven in the morning.
Back to the flaking morning croissant and
strong coffee and eating outside — always
eating eating eating. When people profess a
love of France, I assume they mean a love
of eating. Back to the gigantic science-fic-
tion aloes and the mulberry tree, to the pol-
larded plane trees in the village square and
the ornate dribbling fountain and cobbled
streets and quaintly old-fashioned street
lanterns.greatest destructionist since Genghis Khan,
Robert Moses, proposed to obliterate the
Heights with an expressway straight through
them, but Mailer and his ilk managed to limit
the damage. Still, the city planner wreaked
havoc. Houses that were once home to W.H.
Auden, Gypsy Rose Lee, Benjamin Britten
and Paul and Jane Bowles went down the
tubes. Walt Whitman and Hart Crane lived in
the Heights and, as I wrote recently, if Gen-
eral Howe had been looking down at the
East River back in 1777 instead of carous-
ing with his beloved brother, the admiral, he
would have seen the ragtag army of George
Washington fleeing the Heights in silence for
the safety of Manhattan.
Brooklyn Heights is back in fashion now
because there is no more east village, as in
Greenwich Village. The one-time haunt of
every bohemian artist and writer, it has now
been ‘gentrified’ by social climbers, film stars
and billionaires who wish to be looked on
as cool. Prices have gone through the you-
know-what. Hotels in the village are packed
with tourists. The streets are jammed with
shoppers, the restaurants and clubs filled
to the brim with freaks and wannabes. The
French Connection was filmed in Brook-
lyn Heights, including the crucial drug-
smuggling scene on the waterfront below
the Heights. As was that wonderful movie
Moonstruck, starring Cher and Nicolas Cage.
The ideal city living is the village life. As
in London of yesteryear, where communi-
ties knew each other from birth to death, and
sections of the city felt like urban villages,
New York’s varied boroughs — Chinatown,
Greenwich Village, Germantown, Hell’s
Kitchen, Little Italy, even Park Avenue —
felt like a village. No longer. I will never for-
get when one of my father’s employees took
me to Brooklyn as a teenager, to a crum-
bling edifice called Ebbets Field, home of
the Brooklyn Dodgers. Locals back then
spoke Brooklynese: a bird was a boid and
Thirty-third street was toirty-toird. People
drank beer in the bleachers and a ticket cost
65 cents. The scoreboard was hand-operated
and when a particular disaster took place on
the field, the operator sometimes didn’t put
it on the board until ordered to do so by the
umpire. Abe Stark’s haberdasher sign adver-
tised that if you hit the scoreboard with a
home run, you would win an Abe Stark suit
of clothes. Not many did. Fans would scream
at the opposition benches after a rare Dodg-
ers victory: ‘Eatcha heart out, ya bum.’
The place was heaven, though I was a
Yankees fan. I had met Joe DiMaggio andbecome friendly with Mickey Mantle, two
of the greatest ever, but still I felt bad for
the beloved bums of Brooklyn — until they
committed the greatest betrayal ever by
going Hollywood on us and moving to Los
Angeles. The Los Angeles Dodgers are now
big-time and have just been to the World
Series, as it’s called. They draw millions
each year but have as much soul as Anna
Wintour. Their announcer speaks perfect
English and I hate him for it. I’ll take Tex
Rickards any day, the grammatically chal-
lenged Brooklyn announcer who regularly
reminded fans: ‘Don’t throw nuthin from
the stands.’ And when he spotted overheat-
ed fans hanging their coats on the outfield
fences, he warned them: ‘Will the fans along
the left field please remove their clothes?’
Ah, Brooklyn! I miss you.