![]() ![]() The Mezzogiorno Italians who had made Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens their distinctive enclave were beginning to age and move on, their children selling to people crossing the East River for the first time and falling under the spell of the place, its row upon row of handsome, landmarked townhouses. Architect Brendan Coburn calls Cobble Hill “the most intact nineteenth-century row house neighborhood in the United States.” (Photo: Kaitlyn Flannagan for Observer)īy this time, 15-plus years ago, our 400 block of Henry Street, between Kane and Degraw Streets, was already coming to be populated by lawyers and French chefs and financial consultants, young Wall Street types and those who serviced them. The shoots conducted themselves with such brute, pushy insistence that I wondered whether on some level they didn’t unsettle that frail, reticent woman. While I slept one night, or so it seemed, the vine tendrils had jumped the fence and snaked two stories up into the branches of my cherry tree and plum tree. Her backyard’s most remarkable feature for a city boy like me were the relentless grapevines, vegetable trespassers as thick as the widow’s wrists. The owner was an Italian-born widow of extensive but indeterminate years-she looked like Nosferatu with smile lines-who had let things drift, her garden morphing into a thicket of soaring sunflowers, spiky weeds and feral zucchini. But the other side was an exuberant scene of mixed agricultural endeavor. Over the stockade fence on our north side lived “new people” like us, a novelist and a photo editor who had landscaped their tidy backyard for dinner parties. It had been a big selling point: lining the sidewalks were twin rows of patchy-barked plane trees-relatives of the sycamores-facing each other across the street as orderly as dance partners. Fariña and her husband-called “Spanish Tony” by the Italians on the block-to hand over the keys.Īs the first winter in our new brownstone gave way to spring, our stretch of Henry Street began to turn leafy. ![]() 29, the school on the corner.Īs I would learn, there were plenty of other surprises on this tucked-away block, once genteel, long notorious and just then, at the turn of the millennium, edging back toward gentrification. Her name was Carmen Fariña-the future chancellor of the New York City school system-and she had taught Mr. I was floored when the wife of the couple opened a copy of Gun, with Occasional Music: his first novel, dedicated to her. It wasn’t the oasis-like surroundings or the bones of the building that first caught my eye, but the owners’ shelf of Jonathan Lethem books. I had looked at probably 20 brownstones by the time I stumbled onto the perfect gem, on a picture-book block of Henry Street at the border of Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens. Henry Street, between Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, has a colorful past and dynamic present.
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