Dere's no guy livin' dat knows Brooklyn troo and troo.
— Thomas Wolfe
Everyone—especially if he had never been there—used to think he knew Brooklyn troo and troo. It was Green-pernt and Bensonhoist, Coney and Canarsie, the land of kosher pizza and the foot-long frankfurter, of pickles with everything and every third Schaefer's on the house. It was Leo The Lip Durocher bawling out the umpires at Ebbets Field, the impassioned rooters alternately toasting Dem Bums with Cokes and bombarding them with the empty bottles.
Comedians and novelists alike attested tirelessly to the aromatic glories of the Brighton Beach Express and the Gowanus Canal, the beery, cheery heartland of dock-wallopers and sailors' broads and Yiddishe mammas, the wasteland of peeling tenements where a Tree Grew. Brooklyn was where every uprooted native from Al Capone to Barbra Streisand was congratulated on being from.
It was a family joke on a national scale, a source of passionate chauvinism if you were born there, of instant derision if you were not. "Where are we?" asks the disoriented passenger. "Nowhere," says the hackie. "We're in Brooklyn." From the height of vaudeville to the early days of TV, a comic had only to intone "Flatbush" to fracture the folks out front. The gibes even led to a society for the Prevention of Disparaging Remarks about Brooklyn. But who today bothers to disparage Brooklyn?
There was another Brooklyn of celebrated restaurants and name-heavy nightclubs, of legitimate theaters where Broadway shows tried out, the home of a distinguished art museum and half a dozen daily newspapers, notably the Daily Eagle, which Walt Whitman once edited. But who today hymns that Brooklyn?
Boredom at Home Plate. From Fort Hamilton to Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn today is an amorphous urban sprawl, the most populous (2,600,000 in 80.9 sq.mi.) and proletarian of all five boroughs that comprise New York City. The turning point probably came between the time Durocher left the Dodgers (1948) and the time the Dodgers left Flatbush (1958). Now a housing project occupies Ebbets Field, and one of its occupants, Rodney Kenner, 9, buried the Bums for all time last week as he rode a bicycle where home plate used to be. "You know," said Rodney, "baseball is a bore."
Luna Park, once a rhinestone star in the Coney Island constellation, was never rebuilt after a fire in 1944; a housing project went up instead. The other big Coney amusement center, Steeplechase, also closed last year. Coney Island, where the summer visitors used to be packed like subway straphangers, is so worried about falling attendance that it has shelled out $150,000 to restore the old allure. Where Murder Inc. once made lethal lead pay big dividends, the two-bit Gallo and Profaci mobs cannot even afford to fix the cops. Tough Tony Anastasio, the stevedore Caesar who ruled the waterfront for a generation before he died in 1963, has been succeeded by a Ciceronic son-in-law, Brooklyn College Graduate Anthony—never Tony—Scotto.