Whatever Happened to Brooklyn?

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.

The shipyard that endeared Brooklyn to the U.S. Navy for 160 years is being closed. Already gone is the yard's Sands Street honky-tonk strip--where all real sailors prayed to go to when they died. Says Mrs. Martha Dimmler, Big Martha to Navymen of three wars who packed the Red Mill Bar: "It used to be that no place in the world had wilder, drunker, more wonderful sailors than we did. And now . . ."

No Sale. Brooklyn Heights is one of the few neighborhoods that retains its distinction; its elegant Victorian houses across the bay from Manhattan have attracted many genteel bohemians. On the other hand, the fading Fort Greene Park area nearby recently lost one of its last distinguished citizens when Poetess Marianne Moore, 78, packed her tricorn hat and cape and, after 36 years in Brooklyn, moved to Manhattan. The swamps and old fishing villages in the further reaches have given way to modern subdivisions that most young couples rising in the world regard as mere way stations on the road to suburbia. "Long Island, that's the thing," said Mrs. Myra Gershowitz, 24, as she pushed a baby carriage around Sheepshead Bay. "Everybody's moving to the island. You think you're missing something if you don't move out there."

The ultimate symbol of Brooklyn's disinstitutionalization is the virtual disappearance of The Accent, that ebullient glottal goulash of old Dutch, Yiddish, Irish, Italian and perhaps even Mohawk. "Only 1% of the kids are still dese, dem and dose types," says Speech Professor Bernard Barrow of Brooklyn College. "It is very difficult today to know a Brooklyn boy from a Bronx boy." Even The Bridge has lost its mystique. Not for three years, at least, the police report somewhat sadly, has a con man tried to sell it.

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