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Vincent “Chin” Gigante-------- Sometime during 1976, a few weeks after his uncle disappeared, my acquaintance Xavier Eboli paid Vincent “Chin” Gigante a visit. He had known The Chin all his life. More than friends, they were famiglia. An Eboli had married a Gigante, a Gigante had christened an Eboli baby, and the two families took turns sponsoring confirmations. Which is [...]
We moved to Greenwich Village in the mid-1980s, and at every landing of our fifth-floor tenement walk up there was a nose-full of tantalizing smells. This was in the very Italian section of the West Village, full of tenements that we called “V.I.V’s” or “Vertical Italian Villages.” The older folks, who sat out in front, chatting and fanning themselves in the [...]
In 1979, when my boyfriend Bob bought the house, Park Slope had not yet exploded in a frenzy of gentrification. But change was on its way. Young professionals from Manhattan, starting families and priced out of Brooklyn Heights, were establishing themselves, transforming 7th Avenue with upscale specialty stores and busily renovating neglected brownstones with woodwork to die for. But the [...]
Nestled in the shadow of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, Dyker Park is renowned throughout New York City for its lush golf courses. Proud Brooklynites, always ready to boast about their home borough, might inform you that these Dyker courses spawned a legend: Tiger Woods’ father, Colonel Earl Woods, caught the golf bug there in 1972 while stationed at the nearby Fort [...]
