Much Ado About Brooklyn

WHERE TYKES AND LITERARY TYPES GATHER TO PLAY

By EdySutio

“I live in Brooklyn. By choice. Those ignorant of its allures are Entitled to wonder why.” TRUMAN CAPOTE

BROOKLYN IS KNOWN for all the writers who live here: You can find them frowning at their laptops in their neighborhood cafes, donning their noise canceling headphones to block out the clamor of the only other comparably populous group-children under five. As luck would have it, my Brooklyn lies at the intersection of these two sets of scribblers.

Before I moved here three years ago, I was worried I wouldn’t be cool enough for Brooklyn, As it turns out, I’m not-and that’s fine. Brooklyn-with its milliners, its mustaches, its small-batch cupcakes for dogs-might even be tiring of its own hipness. An artisanal spirit without the pretentiousness can be found at places such as Café Martin, in Park Slope, where the Irish owner is often behind the counter. “Why does that man have such a sulky look?” one pint-size customer recently inquired, over her hot chocolate. Admittedly a bit taciturn, owner Martin O’Connell makes the best and among the most reasonably priced espresso drinks in the borough. A little farther north, Blueprint has a peaceful garden walled in by repurposed Brazillian walnut, where a Dark & Stormy with house-made ginger beer and lime perfectly accompanies the Niman Ranch pork butt sliders.

One of the many things I love about the borough is its choice of bookshops. The Manhattan independents tend to be dark and crowded, both with shoppers and wares; not so Greenlight in Fort Greene, a clean and well-lighted place, which also sells books at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Eat, Drink and Be Literary series. (This spring, BAM will host evenings with Chang-rae Lee, Alison Bechdel, Daniel Alarcon, and Meg Wolitzer). The Community Bookstore in Park Slope is more traditional, narrow and a little musty, but with a whimsical children’s section and a pond full of turtles out back. The tiger cat, Tiny, is often napping sprawled across the table of new hardcover fiction. (Do not attempt t omove her, even if her hindquarters are obscuring the cover of the novel that took you five years to write).

When it’s nice out and the cherry and dogwood trees are blooming, there’s Brooklyn Boulders in Gownus; its colorful climbing walls accommodate everyone from the serious mountaineer to…well, me and my kid. Prospect Park’s historic carousel closes in the rain, but that’s arguably the best time to visit Jane’s Carousel on the waterfront in DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), which becomes a kind of submarine, with water streaming down Jeans Nouvel’s gorgeous glass box housing, bluring the barges glidding by on the East River.

Just a few steps away on Front Street is Berl’s: the only all-poetry bookstore in New York City. Its owners, married poets Jared White and Farrah Field, sold chapbooks at the Brooklyn Fleas for years before opening Berl’s last September.

“It’s hard to take a baby to work at a fleas market,” White explained-a good reminder that even writers have to grow up sometime, and Brooklyn is a pretty nice place to do it.

Brooklyn accents: Park Slope’s historic brownstones and Fort Greene’s Greenlight Bookstore are neighborhood standouts.

In 1835 Walt Whitman served as librarian of the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library, founded in 1823 as the borough’s first free and circulating collection and now part of the Brooklyn Museum.