The Great (Hidden) Brooklyn Novel by Nathan Ward
By Nathan Ward
Of all the Brooklyn books I like, my favorite is one that does not exist on its own: it’s buried in a much larger novel about World War II and the death camps.
Of all the Brooklyn books I like, my favorite is one that does not exist on its own: it’s buried in a much larger novel about World War II and the death camps.
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.
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.
Take a stay-cation in Red Hook. Once the city’s busiest shipping port, Red Hook is now a quiet neighborhood that feels like a small town in the city’s biggest borough. With good food, free art, and waterfront access, Red Hook offers the perfect place to get away in the city.
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.”
Nathan Ward is BrooklynTheBorough.com’s Reader in Residence for June 2010. Look for his posts all month about the Brooklyn waterfront, which is the subject of new book, Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront, out this month from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Ward was an editor with American Heritage and has written for The New York Times and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, not far from the Red Hook piers. Check out his blog at http://darkharborbook.blogspot.com.
Each Thursday throughout the month of June, Ward will be on hand to introduce screenings of films about the New York waterfront at Freebird Books, located on Columbia Street. All four movies depict the more sordid side of New York stevedoring in the wake of newspaper exposes and crime commissions in the 1940s and ‘50s. A fifth bonus film will follow the launch party for Dark Harbor on Sunday, June 6. The first movie, screening Thursday, June 3, at 8 pm (outdoors if the weather permits, otherwise indoors) will be Port of New York starring Yul Brenner. For more info on the film series and the launch party, visit http://freebirdbooks.blogspot.com/
