Gowanus Crossing

A Brooklyn Boyhood

De: Vincent Coppola

Brooklyn is a mythic place and the Gowanus Canal, pestilent and fertile, is its Nile. “Yous stay outta that #!##! water,” Uncle Honey used to warn us.

We never listened.

Long before Whole Foods took over an abandoned site beside the Gowanus, and shiny condos sprouted
on the shores of the still-toxic canal, a proud and unruly Italian American enclave staked out this small
corner of Brooklyn and declared it home. It was a brutal but fiercely loving world, dominated by the Church and the Mafia, codes of silence, and most of all, one-of-a-kind characters.

In Gowanus Crossing, Vincent Coppola brings the world of his childhood ferociously to life. There’s a
four-foot-tall wise guy who walks a lion on a leash; a predatory priest who has a secret path to the local school; Coppola’s three wayward brothers and their embittered longshoreman father; and a host of other schemers, scammers, mobsters, bookies, gamblers, and certifiable crazies.

Coppola’s journey through and eventually out of Gowanus is harrowing, often hilarious, and ultimately heartbreaking. He tells his story with the gimlet eye Frank McCourt brought to Angela’s Ashes and with the exuberant menace of a Martin Scorsese film. In Gowanus Crossing, Vincent Coppola captures a lost world in all its complicated glory.

Reseñas de la Crítica

“Elegiac and eloquent, hilarious and harrowing, Gowanus Crossing is a tribute to a lost, rough but sometimes magical time and place. Vincent Coppola has written a must-read for all fans of Brooklyn, then and now.”
—Jeannette Walls, New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Castle and Half Broke Horses

“Brooklyn newcomers should be handed this book with their lease. Vincent Coppola's memoir of scrappy old-world Gowanus captures the passion, humor, and violence of his hardscrabble Italian childhood in the 'toxic snow globe.’ A reminder that through all its incarnations the city has remained terrible and beautiful—extremely so.”
— Ada Calhoun, New York Times bestselling author of St. Marks Is Dead

“Vincent Coppola’s lucky to be alive, judging from his memoir. Now his readers are the lucky ones. Gowanus Crossing is a brilliant work of storytelling.”
—Nick Taylor, author of Sins of the Father: The True Story of a Family Running from the Mob