Brooklyn, Writer

On the 142nd anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge

**The Brooklyn Bridge officially opened on May 24, 1883. Reposting, in honor of its 142nd anniversary. **

Montague Terrace is a narrow street lined with brownstones. It is in Brooklyn Heights, one block removed from the promenade, a pedestrian walkway built over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Step on to the promenade and there is the Manhattan skyline. There is the Brooklyn Bridge.

In 2005, after eleven years away from Brooklyn, I took an apartment at 7 Montague Terrace. A five-floor walk-up, the apartment had a single window, a kitchen sink, a refrigerator but no oven. Thomas Wolfe had once lived 1 Montague Terrace. W.H. Auden had lived at number 5. Since I’d come back to Brooklyn to write, not cook, it was perfect.

I grew up in Midwood, not far from Brooklyn College, which I only ever glimpsed through its black gate: a swath of green lawn, precise concrete paths, a brick building whose frontispiece was a white bell tower capped with a gold dome.

My high school guidance counselor suggested I apply. I am not, I thought, going to college in the fucking Junction. (where Flatbush and Nostrand Avenues meet). I went instead to Marist College in the Hudson Valley, a two-hour ride on the Metro North.

My parents moved to Long Island when I was nineteen, and for years, l lived there, commuting to stultifying secretarial jobs in the city while trying to write at night and on weekends. My first novel, finished six months after I graduated college, had not sold. I had the idea that I had to finish the second before I could move out of my parents’ house as though the manuscript were some kind of passport.

I was not sure where I wanted to live. In my head, I carried an image of a cabin in the country, a vision of verdancy not based on any reality I’d ever known.

Then I read a magazine article about writers ‘flocking’ to Park Slope. Possibly in the New Yorker. Where Grandma and Pop-Pop once lived? What an odd joke, I thought. Why would anybody move to Brooklyn? On purpose?

My grandparents were long gone by then, yet I still imagined writing in their three-bedroom apartment on Seeley Street, two blocks from Prospect Park, for which they’d paid $700 a month. I’d be in the front room, typing on Pop-Pop’s old Remington, while he sat in his chair in the living room, yelling at the Mets. When the cuckoo clock struck 5pm, I’d have a beer with Grandma, who drank a Schaefer’s a day because of her high blood pressure.

I soon understood it was not satire. It was a thing: the Brooklyn Writer. Every time I heard this, I felt proprietary, as though I’d found a stranger living in my childhood bedroom.

I guess I’ll go back, I thought with genuine annoyance. By then, if I’d been told writers were moving to Narnia, I would have started knocking on the backs of wardrobes.

I loved Montague Terrace. On weekends, I would stop writing at ten o’clock at night and then go around the corner to Heights Books, open until 11 pm. At the end of each aisle stood a stack of books yet to be shelved, some as high as my waist. The slightest touch could have toppled them. Those of us browsing moved carefully around them, book lovers turned nimble as dancers, breathing in the blended scents of dust and paper and even ink, as though authors of the very oldest books lingered nearby, still at work.

Every night, I ran. I jogged the length of the promenade and emerged at the Fruit Street Sitting Area on Columbia Heights. Then Cadman Park. One time, a rat slammed into my sneaker. We stopped short, two horrified New Yorkers who have accidentally touched. I shuddered, it probably did too, and we both darted away. Under the overpass, up the narrow stairwell, and I was on the Brooklyn Bridge. Nights, I often had it to myself. Each evening, I ran towards the city. Without the towers, Manhattan looked like a person whose eyes have simply vanished.

The bridge is said to be haunted. Men died while building it. A woman, the wife of one of them, purportedly used it to leap to her death. In 1883, the weekend after it opened, twelve people were crushed in a stampede caused by a rumor that the bridge was about to collapse. I thought, too, of the living who’d fled Manhattan on a beautiful Tuesday morning turned to ash.

Every night, I touched the toes of my sneakers to the line where Brooklyn becomes Manhattan and turned back. I’ve never seen a ghost up there. Is the bridge haunted?

I don’t know. I do know this:

If Brooklyn is the Borough of Churches, then the bridge is its cathedral. The bridge is most beautiful at dusk. The bridge cannot save everyone. The bridge will always be the way home.