Harrowing ‘Gowanus Crossing’ captures vanishing sense of community

Coppola, a former staff writer for Newsweek and Atlanta Magazine who moved to Georgia in 1979, paints a harrowing picture of life in Gowanus, where mobsters were heroes, nuns tormented students and priests preyed on young boys. People had names like Jimmy the Morgue, Professor Beans, Sammy the Indian and Fat Rosie. When he wasn’t in school, Coppola and his friends spent their days fishing used condoms from the canal, busting out windows in abandoned buildings and running errands for the mob. At the cramped row house he shared with his family of six, his first rule of order was avoiding confrontations with his violent father.

And yet, Gowanus was his home, and Coppola’s deep affection for it permeates his episodic account of growing up in the kind of place that has vanished from the American landscape where “35 first cousins live within three blocks of my house.”

Coppola’s vivid descriptions bring to life a thriving community where children play on the sidewalks, women gather on stoops to chat and knit, fruit peddlers sell wares from horse-drawn carts, vendors grill sausages and peppers outside corner markets, music is always playing and mobsters cruise the streets in shiny Cadillacs.

Credit: Chip Simone

Credit: Chip Simone

“Saturdays, my brother Thomas and I climb the creaky wooden steps to the top floor of our row house.” Coppola writes. “Up the ladder, through the hatch, onto the sticky tar roof. We spread towels, eat salami sandwiches, sun ourselves, read books. To the north, Manhattan’s towers beckon like the Hindu Kush. Unspoken, we’re both planning to summit these heights.”

Unfortunately, Thomas would succumb to AIDS. Coppola’s other brothers also had their burdens. One was a heroin addict for 40 years, another was a gambling addict who lost the family home. But Coppola managed to break the mold, attending Brooklyn College and then Columbia University before launching his journalism career. He attributes his success to a love of books.

“I don’t know why that was, but I was a constant reader,” Coppola said, speaking from his home in Savannah. “My library was the newsstand on the corner where I’d run to get my dad’s racing forms and tabloid newspapers. But I was always reading the backs of cereal boxes and always imagining.”

He identifies two books in particular that influenced him: John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” found among a hidden trove of books belonging to a cousin he didn’t know well, and Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22.”

“When I went to commuter college and took the subway out of Gowanus and came back every night, I would see people reading ‘Catch-22’ and they would be laughing their asses off,” Coppola recalled. “I was thinking, ‘Wow, here I am assigned to read about Iroquois torturing Jesuits. That was literature. And here’s a book that has people laughing on the subway.”

The author of three nonfiction books, including “Uneasy Warriors: The Perilous Journey of the Green Berets,” Coppola was prompted to write “Gowanus Crossing” when he was diagnosed with stage 4 throat cancer in 2013. (He says he never smoked a day in his life, and it’s the same cancer that took his mother and her sisters. He attributes it to the pollution in Gowanus Canal, now a Superfund site.)

“I was finding myself, as I got older, missing that sense of community, bizarre as it was — a place where everybody knew one another and everyone looked after one another and the streets were filled with people,” he said.

After his diagnosis, “I had time on my hands and I started writing these stories — not to project forward as a book, but to escape from my recovery from chemo and surgery and radiation and all that,” he said. “I had a bunch of them and I started putting them on Facebook just for fun. And sure enough, people started reading them and reacting to them.”

Coppola and his partner Suzanne Pruitt recently visited New York City for an author event and they stopped by the old neighborhood. It was a heartbreaking experience, he said.

“I remember it teeming with people and life and noise and fun and food,” he said. “I go there today and there’s all these million-dollar condominiums and no life. It’s dead quiet. With gentrification comes silence. Is that an improvement? I don’t know. Not to me. I guess the book mourns that world because it’s gone.”

E. Shaver Booksellers in Savannah presents Coppola in conversation with Tom Junod, author of “In the Days of My Youth I was Told What it Means to be a Man,” on June 13. For details, go to eshaverbooks.com.

Suzanne Van Atten is a columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She may be reached at Suzanne.VanAtten@ajc.com.