Journalist Vincent Coppola’s new book, “Gowanus Crossing,” is a vivid portrait of a Brooklyn neighborhood lost to time.
BY COLE SINANIAN
cole@queensledger.com
“I lived in a snow globe at the bottom of the hill between Carroll Gardens and Park Slope,” says Vincent Coppola.
This snow globe was Gowanus, and it smelled like ten-cent pizza, fish heads, homemade wine and lemon ice. The green waters of its central artery churned with raw sewage, medical waste and worse. As teenagers, Coppola and his friends would amuse themselves fishing the Canal for used condoms.
Coppola, who grew up in Gowanus’ working-class Italian community in the 50s and 60s, depicts in vivid detail his early years on the banks of this infamous waterway in his autobiographical book, “Gowanus Crossing: A Brooklyn Boyhood:” released by Henry Holt and Company in June of this year.
Only years later, after losing multiple family members to cancer and surviving his own battle with the disease, would Coppola come to understand the full extent to which the Canal’s putrid waters had marked him and all who have called its banks home. In Coppola’s Gowanus, the canal is inescapable, omnipresent, charged with a rotten magnetism pulling its subjects by the hearts and bloodstreams in an eternal spiral towards its black depths.
“Brooklyn is a mythic place,” he writes in the book’s introduction. “Gowanus is its Nile, pestilent and fertile, forever reborn and reimagined.”
The Gowanus of Coppola’s youth was an enclave of poor Italians from the dusty villages of Italy’s Campania region, doing what working immigrants have done on the margins of America’s largest cities for centuries. They brought their religion, their culture and all its superstitions where the ship dropped them and rebuilt what they’d left back home in the shadow of a burgeoning empire. Coppola writes of a man named Angioletti who rode down Carroll Street in a horse-drawn wagon, singing the names of his fruits and vegetables in Italian, while a blacksmith on Third Avenue sent sparks and swirling coal dust into the air as he bent molten steel over his forge. He recalls the stoop guys of the era, men with names like Muzzi, Funzi and Blubberhead, and the old pastry shop where Frank Sinatra would pick up his sfogliatella. All the while, the skyscrapers of Manhattan stood indifferent across the water, a faraway land that — despite being just three subway stops away — Coppola did not visit until he was 17.
Persistently toxic canal notwithstanding, today’s Gowanus is a world away from the landscape described by Coppola.
As a boy with literary dreams, Coppola found his spirit at odds with what he describes as “the afterbirth of a cynical, inward-looking peasant culture” in which a man was expected to work with his hands, not his mind. Coppola’s father and uncles were all dock workers, so naturally they put Coppola to work each summer unloading cans of Del Monte peach juice from trucks and trailers. His role models at the time were the mafia, one of the “two pillars” that bound the social hierarchy of Old Brooklyn, the other being the Catholic Church.
“They had money, they had women, they had flashy cars,” Coppola said of the mob. “They would give you their cars without you having a driver’s license. They would let you drink, watch dirty movies. I really admired them.”
But this pillar crumbled once Coppola reached his early twenties. While a student at Brooklyn College, he took a summer job with the mob — which at the time controlled the local trucking business — thinking at worst he’d have to move around some stolen goods.
In fact, Coppola has been hired as a strikebreaker. With the apparent blessing of the police, factory owners in the Bronx had hired the Brooklyn mafia to run their goods while the workers, who were largely poor Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, went on strike. For a working-class Brooklynite from a family of laborers, none of whom had finished high school, strikebreaking for Coppola amounted to nothing less than class treason.
“I’ve always identified with poor people,” Coppola said. “These Puerto Ricans, who meant nothing to the mafia guys— I saw them as working people trying to get a leg up, being screwed over one more time, and it really broke my heart. It probably put me on a different trajectory in life.”
Vincent Coppola, author of “Gowanus Crossing: A Brooklyn Boyhood.”
After a stint teaching at a vocational high school on Bedford Avenue, Coppola journeyed into Upper Manhattan, where he earned a Masters Degree at the Columbia University School of Journalism. Later he went to London for a fellowship, where he reported on the city’s West Indian migrants as they struggled against a society that pushed them to the margins, the similarities to his own country’s racist hierarchies not lost on him. From there Coppola launched his journalism career, working for a decade at Newsweek, a job that sent him to Georgia, where he’s lived for the past 45 years.
On a recent trip back to Brooklyn, Coppola, now 78, found the snow globe that once formed his universe utterly transformed. His family home, a once ramshackle rowhouse his grandfather purchased for $3,000, is now worth $4 million. Most of the Italians are gone, moved on with changing times to Staten Island or New Jersey. The neighborhood is dead quiet, clean, groomed and refined by the whims of the real estate industry bent on filling the Canal’s still-rotten banks with luxury high-rises, largely for young newcomers oblivious to what came before.
“There’s nothing left but buildings,” Coppola said. “They’re like tombstones to me.”
Though the Gowanus of Coppola’s youth may be lost, the putrid black artery at its core chugs along, unphased, ever-dragging those it’s touched back to its toxic core. It was while bedridden during his battle with throat cancer — which Coppola suspects can be traced back to his exposure to the Canal, now a Federal Superfund Site — that he found himself reminiscing of his years spent on its banks. These musings became memories that he wrote on Facebook, which eventually coalesced into “Gowanus Crossing.”
While it was messy and at times violent and racist, Coppola does not resent the snow globe-Gowanus of his youth. It was a community united in its shared struggles, triumphs and tragedies, where everyone knew everyone and loyalty to one’s neighbors was unshakeable,
“There were struggles and triumphs and victories and celebrations and traditions, which I don’t see anymore,” he said. “We lived there, we loved there, we raised families. We died there.”
