By Jonathan Leaf

Dere’s no guy livin’ dat knows Brooklyn t’roo and t’roo, because it’d take a guy a lifetime just to find his way aroun’ duh f—— town.

     —Thomas Wolfe, from 

        “Only The Dead Know Brooklyn.”

Longtime Heights resident (and once respected novelist) Norman Mailer provided proof of the above quotation, but it wasn’t by getting lost in the borough in which he was raised, but by showing how hard it is to really see what’s happening in a place so vital but also so chaotic. As Mailer admitted, when he lived in a Heights rooming house in the ’40s, he used to bump into another aspiring writer picking up his mail each morning. Mailer laughed at the fellow lodger’s hopes of making it in the literary game. The neighbor was Arthur Miller.

To be fair, few people even now know that Miller wrote the plays for which he’s most famous while living in the Heights. And fewer still know how much other history is attached to an area that they may only associate with handsome townhouses and well-kept streets lit by wrought iron street-lamps. 

Yet Brooklyn Heights was the city’s first federally recognized historic district, and it may be the city’s most historical district. At the time of the Revolution, it was the place from which Washington’s armies escaped, fleeing on barges to Manhattan following their loss at the Battle of Long Island, which actually took place in what’s now Prospect Park. Later, it was the home to important bankers like Hezekiah Pierrepont, after whom the local street is named, and Leonard Jerome, whose daughter Jenny, born and raised in the Heights, was Winston Churchill’s mother. 

As the neighborhood was the locale for such folk, the gentry of what was once America’s third-largest city. It has grand homes, especially on Columbia Heights and the other streets bordering the Promenade that stretch nearest the bay. Come spring, they are overrun with baby strollers. While these old homes, some dating all the way back to the federal period (as on Willow St.), define part of the area’s look, much of that look comes from the Heights’ more formal and public architecture. There’s the splendid library, a beautiful brownstone on Montague, that served as the Brooklyn Public’s first branch. Also, the white marble bank over on Court St., with its Greek temple designs, the limestone courthouses and the Gothic churches.

Among the most impressive of those churches is Brooklyn’s own Grace Church on Hicks, which, unlike its famed Manhattan counterpart, has three Tiffany windows. Keeping in character with what may still be the city’s Waspiest section, Grace is Episcopal—as are St. Ann’s and the ornate Church of the Holy Trinity over on Clinton. These houses of worship, like their congregants and the district itself, are dignified and capable of showing age at times, if rarely showy.

The neighborhood has been a bohemian enclave without ever looking bohemian, and even now its Sunday style is defined by oxford button-downs. In spite of this, the Heights has the most literary history of any stretch in the Western Hemisphere, so much so that you have to look to districts in Old World cities like London, Paris and St. Petersburg to find anything to match it. 

Consider a brief list of Heights residents who did much of their very best writing while living here: Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Thomas Wolfe, W. H. Auden, W.E.B. Du Bois, Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, Richard Wright, Truman Capote—and both Miller and Mailer. Author Sherrill Tippins, in her recent book February House, makes the point that Auden, composer Benjamin Britten, Lee and Carson McCullers lived at one now demolished address, 7 Middagh St., simultaneously.

If the district has no such writers now, what with even Mailer now spending the bulk of his time in Provincetown, it is getting something it never had before: decent food. Inevitably, though, the better eating is only creeping in to the edges of the neighborhood, through the Arab shops on Atlantic Ave. on its south face, and at restaurants like Noodle Pudding all the way on the north, into the boundary with trendy Dumbo.

Nonetheless, the progress is slow; on a summer evening, those Heights residents who are devoted foodies are still more apt to saunter over to Boerum Hill for French bistro food or to Carroll Gardens for Italian.

But perhaps that’s for the best, because it helps maintain the area’s most distinctive quality. Lacking visitors in search of dining or young people going to clubs, it’s often wonderfully quiet—an area in which to write a work of true-crime like In Cold Blood, while other urban stretches are living it out.