Gowanus Crossing by Vincent Coppola

A veteran journalist's gritty, darkly funny memoir about growing up Italian American in 1960s Brooklyn.

 

Midcentury Gowanus: decades before the Whole Foods went up and the lofts were refurbished, a raucous, unruly, proudly Italian-American enclave clings to the banks of the noxious canal. The Mafia and the Catholic Church—two centuries-old, rigidly-hierarchical institutions defined by oppressive codes of silence—dominate the neighborhood.

In Gowanus Crossing, Vincent Coppola brings the world of his childhood ferociously to life. A former senior reporter at Newsweek with bylines in outlets like Esquire and Rolling Stone, Coppola grew up in old Gowanus, a bookish kid for whom Park Slope, to say nothing of Central Park, might as well have been the moon. His journey through and eventually out of the neighborhood is both harrowing and hilarious, and populated with a cast of characters who burst off the page: a four-foot tall wiseguy who walks a lion on a leash, a predatory priest, mobbed-up undertakers, Coppola’s three ill-fated brothers, and a host of assorted schemers, scammers, mobsters, bookies, lawyers, and longshoremen.

Combining Frank McCourt’s gimlet eye for gritty reality with the exuberant menace of a Scorsese movie, Gowanus Crossing captures a lost world in all its gritty glory.