You are currently browsing the stories about the Carroll Gardens neighborhood

A Hard Lesson Upside the Head

by Todd Cobb 12/25/2009
Neighborhood: Carroll Gardens

She was never really my girlfriend. She was my occasional hook-up, I guess, my sometimes companion. Nothing more than that. A girl, true enough, but I don’t think she was ever really any kind of friend. This story isn’t about her, anyway. I was a month-old New York newborn, a 39 year-old infant who could only find [...]

They’ve Finally Cut Eggy in Half

by Albert Stern 07/02/2009
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Carroll Gardens

At the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Bond Street about a quarter of a block ahead of me, three young men waited at the crosswalk for the light to change. Two were dressed in thug-casual regalia: sneakers, baggy pants, baseball caps askew, and hoodies up to obscure clear lines of sight to their faces. The [...]

The Check Thieves

by Tina Portelli 08/31/2007
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Carroll Gardens

In my downtown Brooklyn neighborhood were raised a breed of men who are check thieves. A rare breed of men who are slowly becoming extinct. Their turf is Court Street to Smith, Degraw Street to President. These are the sons of the older generation men, who would never let a woman pay for a check. And, [...]

THE COFFEE INCIDENT

by Katherine Sharpe 10/01/2006
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Carroll Gardens

The story starts with two things about me. First thing: I love coffee. I drink coffee every morning. When I gave up caffeine for several months last year, I brewed myself a mug of decaf every morning and called it my “coffee.” Second thing: I habitually run late. Not catastrophically late, just late enough to [...]

A Tale of Three Landlords

by Gabriel Cohen 06/20/2005
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Carroll Gardens

I should have made a film about my landlords. A documentary. A document. It would have started in darkness. You’d hear an odd skrik…skrik…skrik. Fade in on the inside of a window; zoom close to peer down into a backyard. A man pushes a hand mower across a tiny lawn. Words appear: Brooklyn. 1990s. The man hitches [...]

Girlfriendless at the Grocery Market

by Evangelos Vasilakis 05/17/2005
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Carroll Gardens

My girlfriend, with whom I live in Brooklyn, was going to be out of town for a few days. And so it happened that I found myself in a grocery store, alone, deliberating between the advantages of a Swanson Hungry Man fried chicken dinner and a Banquet Salisbury steak. Each came with corn and mashed [...]

The Community Bookstore

by Christopher Hacker 09/16/2004
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Carroll Gardens

Another gourmet bakery opened on Court Street in Cobble Hill; the old sheet music shop was replaced by a cell phone store; the bodega next door went out of business last week, and today the new owners are gutting it and lining the walls with shelving made of a thick, smoked glass. It seems that [...]

The Sink

by Elizabeth Manus 01/02/2002
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Carroll Gardens

In the beginning, there was a brownstone with a crackled façade and a ground floor apartment for rent. I took the tour. Hardwood floors, a tiled fireplace, and a country kitchen. But the rooms didn’t get much light. I wanted sunlight, the kind that slid from four windows into the diamond-bright bathroom, the kind that [...]

Ashes

by Phillip Lopate 10/30/2001
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Carroll Gardens

My first inkling of an attack on the Twin Towers came from the Fed Ex man delivering a packet. He rang the doorbell around 9:15, and when I started to sign for it, he said, shaken: “Did you hear what happened? A plane crashed into the World Trade Center. You can see the black smoke [...]