There was an article in this weekend's NY Times about the sale of the Moonstruck brownstone (the setting for the 1987 movie starring Cher and Nicolas Cage) in NYC's Brooklyn Heights neighborhood. For those not familiar with the area, Brooklyn Heights is a mid 19th century neighborhood of brownstones adjacent to the Brooklyn Bridge and just across the East River from downtown Manhattan. Back in 1965, it was also the first neighborhood in NYC to be declared a historic district. While the article focused mostly on how the long time owner fought to save the neighborhood from development when he bought his home almost 40 years ago (back then urban renewal meant ripping everything down and starting anew as opposed to the rehabbing popular today, there was one or two lines near the end that struck a chord: the part where the old owner, while enjoying his retirement, started missing the old neighborhood after a few weeks. I feel his pain.
The first apartment my wife and I had was in the area, basically on the border of Brooklyn Heights and downtown Brooklyn, adjacent to the Brooklyn Bridge. We lived there for over 5 years, leaving only when it became clear that a one bedroom and a baby wasn't going to work for us. We loved the area, we still have many great memories: walking around the scenic brownstones and promenade in the evening with our dog, going out to the dinner or drinks at a moments notice, not caring if we got too drunk to drive because we walked everywhere, all the interesting shops in the neighborhood and, of course, walking across the Brooklyn Bridge most mornings in lieu of taking the subway into Manhattan for work.
Though we've driven through the area over the years, we never really revisited. Part of it was my wife's reluctance to go by our old apartment building and look out over Manhattan and see what wasn't there anymore (we had a great view of the Twin Towers from our kitchen window). Part of it was we and our friends were also suburbanites now, busy raising our young families outside the city, our partying days drifting to our past, and had no great need (or time) to go back.
However, this past spring I went back for the first time. Our eldest is into trains, my wife jokes it was from all those months when he rode the subway in the womb, and NYC has a subway museum several blocks from our old apartment. Like the former owner of the Moonstruck house, I missed the old neighborhood, despite not having lived there in over 7 years. So, since I knew I could get free parking on our old block, I parked in front of our old building and walked my son through his old baby haunts. Long story short, you really can't go home again.
The neighborhood looked the same, but wasn't. Part of it was the increased police presence on on our old block. As it is essentially the service road for the Brooklyn Bridge, the police pay a little extra attention these days to that particular area (hopefully that also means that cars are not broken into on a regular basis by the subway station at the end of the block anymore). At the time I wondered if this meant that cars were being broken into with less frequency. However, I also just read an article in the NY Post about a blogger catching a car thief in DUMBO. When we lived in the area, every now and then, as we headed to the subway stop, we'd see a series of cars on our block broken into. This would go on for a few days, stop for a period of time, then restart. It got to the point where we joked that whoever was doing it must be in/out of jail again. I now wonder if it was the thief mentioned in the article. Anyway, Idigress.
Another part of it was the doorman to our old building had retired and none of the maintenance staff remembered us (but the mailman did). The diner on the corner was still open, but the very small grocery store in one of our complex's buildings had recently closed. But that wasn't all. There was also more pedestrian traffic. When we left, the adjacent residential area now known as DUMBO was just beginning to be redeveloped from abandoned warehouses into loft apartments, making the area sort of SoHo east. This meant there were many more pedestrians on our block, wandering from Brooklyn Heights to DUMBO. But there was more that was different.
When we lived there, the neighborhood was well to do, for Brooklyn. This time it felt like the way Manhattan's Upper West Side used to feel. Many more upscale shops, squeezing out the mom and pop places that had hung on since the 1950s and 1960s, were in place. Though some of the old places we liked were still around, there were a lot fewer of them. But I also nannies dragging children around on a Saturday, something I never noticed when we were there in the 1990s. The neighborhood had always been family orientated but it felt like it had lost a little of that.
When my son and I left that evening, I realized that for the first time since we left, I no longer missed the neighborhood. Life had gone forward and it no longer felt like home. Hopefully the former owner of the Moonstruck house will soon have the same feelings as he settles into his retirement.
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