The Day When Back in the Day Ended
Williamsburg
Village Style
Freddy Jakubowski has tended bar at the Greenpoint Tavern on Bedford Avenue since 1985. It was 1992 when a place arrived unlike any other there, a little restaurant called the L Cafe. “Some girl opened it,” Mr. Jakubowski said. “She was a good girl. I’m not much of an architect or a decorator, but she did it something like Greenwich Village.” He saw youngsters going there, mostly newcomers. They sat for leisurely stretches, visible through the storefront window. Mr. Jakubowski went in a few times, for coffee or soup. “The artists mostly talked among themselves,” he said, shrugging. “I talked to a couple of them if I could understand them.”
Dumbo
Sprouting Street Signs
Sheila Goloborotko moved her printmaking and sculpture studio from Cobble Hill to Dumbo in 1987, when it was still called the waterfront and was home mostly to sweatshops and truckers. A few other artists were scattered throughout, and the area changed gradually, but eight years ago Ms. Goloborotko noticed a big shift. The neighborhood had had few street names or parking regulations, but suddenly the city installed signs. “Why on earth did they put parking signs if nobody comes here?” Ms. Goloborotko thought at the time. “Then we saw the people coming in.”
Red Hook
‘Guys Holding Hands’
For Sam Costanza, a gruff photographer who spent his youth swimming in the East River and boxing at Gleason’s Gym, Red Hook was always “a very heterosexual place.” Then, around 1997, he recalled, “we started seeing a lot of girls down here holding hands, a lot of guys holding hands.” The neighborhood accepts all sorts, he was quick to add; it was just different seeing young couples of the same sex. “The girls dress like boys,” he said. “But they’re very, very nice.”
Fort Greene
Vanishing Characters
DK Holland moved to Fort Greene in 1986, and by the early 90’s change was on the way: a cafe opened, and a house on her street sold for $500,000. But she vividly recalls another, sadder milestone reached one night in 1993: the final time that Ms. Holland saw Jerry Lawson, of the a cappella group the Persuasions. After eating with friends at the now-defunct Chesapeake restaurant, he stood up and sang a brooding old slave song. ‘The whole place was just captivated,” she said. “After that, there weren’t as many characters in the neighborhood anymore. It was like seeing the birds go. People just suddenly disappeared.”
Carroll Gardens
‘Organic Stuff’
Frankie Rizzo mourned the closing, sometime in the late 90’s, of Tony’s meat market, where he bought his veal cuts and sausage for 40 years. What that closing said about changes in Carroll Gardens was made clear soon after, when a store called Park Natural Foods opened nearby. Mr. Rizzo, who is retired, eyes it with suspicion. “The way these people eat is different,” he said. “They all seem to go for that organic stuff. Italians would never go for that.”
Ditmas Park
Latte, Please
“Lots of people have been moaning and groaning for a decade about needing a coffee shop here, a place to go to read a book or talk to their friends,” said Monica MacAdams, a lawyer who has lived in Ditmas Park since she and her husband bought a seven-bedroom Queen Anne house there in 1979. Then, last year, a funky, bright cafe called Vox Pop opened on Cortelyou Road. Ms. MacAdams said her neighbors were thankful that Vox Pop was not a franchise and that it had led Ditmas Park over the socalled latte line. “I see people in the coffeehouse — interesting, arty-looking young people,” she said. “I don’t think it’s a huge population, but it’s growing.”
Bay Ridge
‘We Speak English’
Long before the mosques and halal meat shops arrived in Bay Ridge, a few variety stores put curious signs in their windows: “We Speak English.” For Regina and Gerard Carlson, lifelong residents, speaking English was never anything worth advertising. Soon that would change. One day in 1987, Mrs. Carlson recalled, “we were walking with the baby on Fourth Avenue, and we noticed that we were the only ones speaking English.”
Sunset Park
Mexican Cornona Stick
When Bernabe Gonzales, a building superintendent, was growing up in Sunset Park, a largely Puerto Rican neighborhood. Some parts of it functioned as open-air drug markets; one block of Fifth Avenue might accommodate eight or nine sellers, each hawking a different type of heroin. Then one day in 1992 Mr. Gonzales first noticed a different kind of street activity — Mexicans setting up little street stands to sell lotes, grilled corn on a stick served with mayonnaise and cheese. “I was like, what’s that?” he said. “Now they got everything: mangoes, tacos, enchiladas.”
Canarsie
The Fire This Time
A firebombing in 1990 was the first sign that Canarsie was changing, said a slight 78-year-old man who identified himself only as Dave. “It was 100 percent white here — you had Italians, you had Jewish,” he said. “They burned the house of blacks who moved in, right here in East Canarsie. People were afraid their property would depreciate. It wasn’t all the people, just a couple. They caught the guys.” Dave has worked since 1940 at a garden shop in the Brooklyn Terminal Market, where he greets his regular customers, many of them now West Indian and African-American, with instant recollection of their preferences for hyacinths or gardenias.
Windsor Terrace
Chicken Breasts
Dan Mills remembers a stray remark by Tony Pinto, a local butcher, in the late 80’s that augured a big change. “He said that people were starting to come in and instead of ordering a big roast beef, they’d order a couple of chicken breasts,” Mr. Mills recalled. “It used to be that Mama made a roast beef on Sunday and everybody showed up.” The switch meant that a group of people far different from traditional Irish Catholic families was trickling into Windsor Terrace: single people. Couples in which both partners worked. Women who didn’t cook. Not long after that conversation, Tony Pinto sold his butcher shop.
Bedford-Stuyvesant
Pressure Points
In 2002, a funny thing happened to Antoniette Millsapp, a longtime resident of Bedford-Stuyvesant. “I was sitting on the stoop in the summer,” she recalled. “This man was walking by and he said, ‘Do you own your house? Do you want to sell it?’ He said he could give me cash off the bat. I said, ‘Sir, then where would I live?’ ” Since then, such interactions have become commonplace. Ms. Millsapp is regularly flooded with letters, notes stuck in her gate and people ringing her doorbell, asking if she wants to sell her house. Content in her retirement from her job as a radiology supervisor at the Columbia-Presbyterian hospital , she answers them with a polite “No.”
Prospect Heights
‘ Mr. January’
Gus Vlahavas, the owner of Tom’s Restaurant on Washington Avenue in Prospect Heights, watched the white flight from the neighborhood in the 60’s, and its descent into crime and drugs in the 70’s. By the late 80’s, Mr. Vlahavas saw that some people — Park Slope types, he thought — were trickling to Prospect Heights, but he became convinced that change was afoot only in 1992, when a photographer named Randy Duchaine appeared and said he was shooting a calendar about Brooklyn icons. “I was in it,” Mr. Vlahavas said, proudly. “Mr. January.”
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