Customer Reviews

Another Time Another Place

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For anyone who lived in or near Brooklyn's Brownsville section at any time prior to the early 1960s, this book is sheer nostalgia. By having interviewed a substantial number of people (many of whom now live in Florida), the authors do an outstanding job of conveying the flavor of "the old neighborhood" in days gone by. At the end of the book there's a series of interviews with Brownsville celebrities, that is people who went on to become nationally famous, including Steve Lawrence and "Grandpa Munster" Al Lewis.

The authors clearly convey a picture of Brownsville in its heyday as a nuturing neighborhood and the experience of having grown up there as not at all unlike my vision of small-town America--a place where people knew and cared about one another.

Perhaps small-town America is still like that. However, one would be hard presssed to find an urban neighborhood that could be called nurturing anywhere in America today.

I only wish the authors had told us more about the history of Brownsville all the way up to the present time and why the neighborhood changed so drastically, but perhaps that was beyond their purpose. Still one can't help but wonder what became of the elderly people who had lived there all or most of their lives and were "left behind" through no fault of their own when the area turned into a crime-ridden slum.