Винченцо Коппола выпустил мемуары о утраченном мире броуновского района Гованас

Long before luxury apartments lined the Gowanus Canal and trendy restaurants filled nearby streets, the neighborhood was a rough-and-tumble enclave where generations of immigrant families built their lives along one of Brooklyn’s most famous waterways. That vanished world is the heart of Vincent Coppola’s new memoir, “Gowanus Crossing: A Brooklyn Boyhood,” a deeply personal portrait of mid-century Gowanus that captures a neighborhood shaped by family, faith, organized crime and resilience. For Coppola, who spent decades as a journalist before turning to literature, the book is not just about his life; rather preserving a Brooklyn that many newcomers never knew existed. He told Brooklyn Paper that the novel is an “elegy to a lost world.” “When I grew up, Brooklyn was very different from today’s Brooklyn in every way. I lived in a kind of snow globe,” he said. “It was an Italian neighborhood just a few subway stops from Lower Manhattan, but it was kind of cut off sociologically, physically and it was an internal world that had its own kind of government and religion, which was the same but also different from the world at large.” While today’s Gowanus is known for redevelopment and new residential towers, Coppola remembers a neighborhood built around the canal itself. “To me, the Gowanus Canal, polluted as it was, was Brooklyn’s Nile River,” he said. “It was pestilent, but it was fertile.” His family arrived there roughly a century ago after emigrating from Southern Italy. “They landed in a place where nobody else wanted to live,” Coppola said. “It was run-down. It was on a polluted canal. It wasn’t brownstones, but it was close to the brownstone areas. It’s where they landed, what they could afford, and they made their lives as best they could.” Those immigrants also carried pieces of the old country with them, including the influence of both the Catholic Churcha and the Mafia — institutions that became defining forces in Coppola’s childhood. “So as a boy, I was kind of in the middle between wise guys and priests who weren’t very particularly holy or dedicated,” he said. Unlike many of the neighborhood’s children, Coppola found refuge in books. “I was the bookish kid,” he recalled. “I didn’t know that other schools were providing students with books and insights into the world.” Because he constantly questioned authority, he said he was often overlooked by teachers. “I was in the back of the room with the idiots,” he said with a laugh. “When you’re young, you feel that. Like, ‘What do I have to do?'” Books eventually became his way out. “One of the answers to the riddle that was my life was reading books, and I read constantly,” Coppola said. “My reading, now that I look back at it, was the key to getting out of there. His literary education came from unlikely places. He devoured paperbacks from a Fourth Avenue newsstand while running errands for his father and later discovered a hidden library belonging to an eccentric relative named “Professor Beans.” Inside a locked room were classics like John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” “I would go back and forth reading his books,” Coppola said. “That’s what got me started with books, and it’s a habit, thank God, that continues to this day.” Though Coppola spent much of his career telling other people’s stories as a reporter, he never intended to write his own. “It was something I avoided,” he said. “I never saw myself as a writer. I was always a reporter.” But everything changed after he was diagnosed with cancer in his 60s, an illness he believes was linked to growing up near the polluted canal. “I was laid up and not sure I was going to live,” Coppola said. “I had radiation, chemotherapy, surgery and I found myself drifting back in time in my imagination.” Living in Georgia during treatment, his memories repeatedly returned to Brooklyn. “I started writing these stories down just for me and my kids, not for publication,” he said. “Writers write.” After posting some of those stories on Facebook, an editor at Henry Holt discovered them and eventually offered him a book deal. While Coppola acknowledges change is inevitable, he worries many new residents overlook the generations who came before them. “I was just up there [in Gowanus] as part of my book tour,” he said. “There were big, tall condominiums on the canal, but it was dead quiet.” Some longtime residents, he said, jokingly refer to themselves as “the originals.” “Here are people who know nothing labeling me an original,” Coppola said. “If I’m an original, what are you? You’re a stranger in a strange land that you won’t even acknowledge.” What troubles him most isn’t the new construction but the feeling that an entire community has been erased from memory. “They acted as though nobody had ever lived there before them,” he said. “I was offended by that because my brothers and my mom’s family — we lived and loved and struggled.” That’s ultimately why he wrote “Gowanus Crossing.” “I didn’t write this book to be famous or rich or any of that,” Coppola said. “I wanted to recreate that world because it was an important world.” The process, however, wasn’t easy. “It took all my talent and a lot of pain,” he said. “We suffered a lot. There was a lot of drugs, violence and despair. It wasn’t easy to write, but as you’ll learn, the best writing is not easy. You have to really reach into yourself.” Even hearing those memories performed by Paul Bellantoni for the audiobook through MacMillan Audio was emotional. “It’s still startling hearing your words through the voice of another person,” Coppola said. “He did a great job, but it is a jolt.” Now, after decades of reporting on history as it unfolded, Coppola hopes readers will use “Gowanus Crossing” to remember a version of Brooklyn that no longer exists — but whose influence still echoes through the borough. “I recreated a world that existed,” he said. “And I think the good response the book is getting is because I recreated a world.” “Gowanus Crossing” is now available for purchase in print and as an audiobook.