Remembering Latticini-Barese

The Brooklyn Cheese Shop Is 20 Years Gone Today.

A handpainted sign on the side of 138 Union Street in Brooklyn is all that remains of Latticini-Barese, an old Italian cheese shop.

In the summer of 2001, I was living on Carroll Street in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn when my landlord, an old longshoreman, died. His unsentimental family, who had long since decamped to Staten Island and Ne…