Then and Now Thursday: Pete Hamill's Park Slope

A Drinking Life, the memoir written by legendary journalist and author Pete Hamill about coming of age in Park Slope and establishing himself as a newspaperman, is by far the best book I've read all year. In it, he paints a picture of the Park Slope of his childhood, choked with trolleys, blue-collar workers, street fights, pails of beer, and stickball. Hamill was born in 1935 in what's today called the South Slope, and lived here until the late 1950s. For anyone who's curious about what this neighborhood was like during this time, I would strongly recommend picking up a copy. 

Earlier today I set out to track down the houses Hamill grew up in, the schools he went to, and his old stomping grounds. 

Hamill spent the first six years of his life living in the top floor of the above house, at 471 14th Street, between Eighth Avenue and Prospect Park West. "I remember sitting on the stoop, watching Japanese beetles gnaw the ivy that covered the face of the brownstone next door," he writes. 

He attended kindergarten at PS 107, "down on the corner" of Eighth Avenue and 14th Street.

"In the fall of 1941, I entered First Grade at Holy Name of Jesus elementary school.... A white brick school building rose like a fortress before me, three severe stories off the ground." The school is located at 245 Prospect Park West.

In 1941 the Hamill family moved to the ground floor of this building, 435 13th Street, between Seventh and Eighth. 

"The colors of the world instantly changed. The new house was only one block away but it butted up against the dirty redbrick bulk of the old Ansonia Clock Factory... The dark blue shadow of the Factory (as everyone called it) fell upon the stoop and across the backyard... The rooms were larger and wider... and the rent was twenty-six dollars a month, including steam heat."

Hamill would play in the street with his brother and friends, and

"would wander down the street to look at the Alley, a wide noisy cobblestoned warren of ancient trucks and escaping steam and iron-barred windows. The Alley ran from Thirteenth Street to Twelfth Street, splitting The Factory into two unequal sections, and in the years of the war, it always seemed jammed with men at work."

 Today it's a part of the Ansonia Court apartment complex.

Seventh Avenue, north from Tenth Street, 1945.

At age 8 Hamill and family moved into a railroad flat at the top floor of the above building, at 378 7th Avenue between 11th and 12th Streets, 

"a tenement rising four ominous stories above the street. It was in the middle of the block,... with a butcher's shop on one side of the doorway and a fruit and vegetable store called Teddy's to the right... Poles and lines and the steel tracks gave the avenue the look of an artists' exercise in perspective, with diminishing lines flowing away into infinity, or its equal: Flatbush Avenue at one end of the avenue, Greenwood Cemetery at the other." 

At around this time Hamill started his first paper route, which took him down to Fourth and Fifth streets, "tree-lined streets of brownstones and white sandstone apartment houses... There were no fire escapes on these blocks, no stores or bars, and every house had a back yard." 

As street gangs like the Tigers and the South Brooklyn Boys took over the streets in the postwar years, Hamill found refuge here, 

"in the glorious palace of books called the Prospect Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, known to us simply as the Library. I went there every Saturday morning... following the familiar route along Seventh Avenue, my blood quickening as I crossed the trolley tracks on Ninth Street and passed the stately brownstones and the small synagogue and saw up ahead the wild gloomy garden of the Library.... The majestic mock Corinthian columns of the main entrance always made me feel puny but inside, behind walls as thick as any fortress, I always felt safe." 

The library, on Ninth Street and Sixth Avenue, is currently undergoing an extensive renovation.  

Ninth Street, looking west from Seventh Avenue, 1949.

In 1949, Hamill and his friends started hanging out around Bartel-Pritchard Square, at the foot of Prospect Park West.

"Off the square on one side there were two tall Corinthian columns that marked the entrance to Prospect Park; we called them the Totem Poles, or the Totes. They rose from cleanly carved granite bases, and in the evenings... I would walk up from Seventh Avenue and see the others, and we'd gather around the bases, sitting on them, looking at girls, cursing, smoking, making jokes, and drinking beer." 

Bartel-Pritchard Square, 1950.

Looking south towards Bartel-Pritchard Square, past the Sanders Theater, 1950.

Pete Hamill's Park Slope is at once familiar and yet completely changed. The vast majority of the buildings he mentions (including many more not described here) still exist, but the storefronts have been transformed so many times over the years that it's next to impossible to record their entire history. Reading a book like A Drinking Life makes you realize that in a neighborhood as diverse and historic as Park Slope, every building and street corner has lots of stories to tell. 

Historic Photos from Brooklyn's Park Slope, Merlis and Rosenzweig, 1999.

Comments

[Chicken Underwear]

thanks

[ParkSlopePerson]

I have to buy this book now, just for the Park Slope history

[Anonymous]

Thanks for sharing! Great book...also check out his Downtown, My New York. Nice NYC history lesson, going all the way back to the early Dutch settlements. Helped me keep all the recent development in perspective.

[Anonymous]

Thank you so much for doing this! "The Gift" is like a missing chapter from this. A lot of good description of the days when every corner on 7th was a bar of one sort or another...

[5w30]

Two of the places that Hamill's father worked at as mentioned in A DRINKING LIFE are still around. The former grocery store chain Roulston's had a HQ/warehouse at 70-120 9th Street near 3rd Avenue. The ROULSTON's lettering still shows on the entranceway. It's where Hamill's father worked because they say he had good penmanship. During WWII Hamill's father worked in a lighting assembly shop that was part of the Ansonia Clock complex.