Remembrance of Things Pasta
There Have Been Some Changes in the Old Neighborhood.
I moved to Brooklyn in 1994, to the block of Carroll Street between Smith and Hoyt Streets. I’ve been in the same basic area ever since. The real estate folks call it, variously, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill and Columbia Heights Waterfront District. Once upon a time, it was all just South Brooklyn, land of brownstones and churches and old-school merchants, most of them Italian.
Recently, two of those longstanding businesses—Sal’s Pizzeria and G. Esposito & Sons Jersey Pork Store, both on Court Street—closed for good. Between the two of them, they had put in more than 150 years of work in the neighborhood. This got me to thinking about the area as it was when I arrived, and all that’s changed since then.
On my first visit to Carroll Gardens, I was not aware of the neighborhood’s intensely Italian character. One of the first things I did was to stupidly walk into a shop on Court Street, simply because there was a sign in the window that said “espresso.” All the old men immediately stood up from their card tables and asked how they could help me. I could tell they weren’t really interested in helping me. But they did get me an espresso. I nervously drank it and left. (That social club is a pet store now.)
After I moved into my top-floor apartment in a brownstone on Carroll Street, I’d see some of those same old guys playing bocce ball in Carroll Park. There were two courts. Both are gone now, because those gents are dead and nobody in the neighborhood plays bocce ball anymore.
At the Monteleone Bakery, a few steps from the park on Court Street, I first learned about the wondrous pignoli cookie, moist and chock full of pine nuts and always more expensive than any other treat in the case. (And worth it.) Monteleone is still there, but a shell of itself. In the aughts, it underwent a renovation that took away much of the space’s character; and, for a short weird period it joined forces with the Cammareri Brothers Bakery, which was on Henry Street and had closed after decades in business. The cookies have never been the same.