On this particular Thursday in April, 1948, City editor Ed Bartnett read a report of an incident in northern Manhattan from that morning that he thought echoed a similar crime related to the waterfront in the West Village the year before. If handled by the right reporter, an investigation might get at the possible links and wider causes of these dock wars. Mike Johnson got his hat.
Local authors, humor writers from The Daily Show, famed music critics and more: Our weekly listing of readings and literary events around Brooklyn.
Freebird Books will be screening films about the waterfront outdoors on successive Thursdays. Tonight it’s Slaughter on Tenth Avenue. Next week it’s Edge of the City.
Our weekly listing of readings and literary events around Brooklyn.
I met and fell in love with the man of my dreams on my first visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Later on, when I’d tell friends, they’d act incredulous. “That only happens in the movies,” they’d said, and I’d say it, too, clinging to that perfect beginning, holding it up as evidence long after everything else told me to let go.
The 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival will take place on Sunday, September 12. Big-name authors like Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Harding, Dennis Lehane and Jonathan Lethem will read and take part in panel discussions. This year, the festival has expanded and will include new, special events. Click through for details.
On the afternoon of Friday, July 14th, 1939, Pete Panto left the Moore-Mack pier where he served as hiring foreman at five o’clock and headed home to his rooming house near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In his room on North Eliott Place he was shaving for a date later that evening with his fiancée, Alice Maffia, when her younger brother Michael came to the room with word that Panto had a telephone call at the corner cigar store. Panto wiped his face and made his way downstairs, but when he returned from his conversation his mood had darkened. He seemed uncharacteristically spooked as he told Michael he would be meeting “two tough mugs” or “men I don’t like” for an hour or so that night, warning “If I don’t get back by ten o’clock tomorrow morning, tell the police.”
