ON CARROLL STREET

In those days I thought every barber was Italian. And because our barber was a part-time musician I thought for sure all barbers played an instrument in the back of their shops. At that time we lived on Carroll Street, deep in the bosom of the Italian neighborhood we called South Brooklyn.
Originally, most of the Italians who came to Brooklyn usually came from Manhattan’s overcrowded Little Italy, the area around Mulberry Street. Many of them settled on Union, President, Carroll and the surrounding streets of South Brooklyn. And although these street names are non-Italian, they invariably conjure up a neighborhood filled with Italian sounds, smells and sights.




When I close my eyes I see old ladies dressed in black, with their hair in a bun in the back of their heads, walking those Italian streets, their shopping bags almost scraping the pavement. When the weather turns steamy and hot I imagine rowdy kids, with names like Angelo or Carmine, playing stickball or maybe they’re opening up a Johnny pump and flooding the streets. Those were our glorious Bernini fountains, one in every neighborhood.
I almost see visions of wrinkled old men piercing the air with their canes while carefully stepping along the sidewalk. The stores then were small mom and pop shops bunched together, creating for each neighborhood a small village. If I try hard enough I can almost smell the bread at Guarino’s Bakery. Down the block I see yards of sausage hanging like rope at the butcher’s on Fifth Avenue, where also goatheads dangle from meathooks and eerily stare out at the neighborhood.
At the Latticini Freschi there are large trays of white mozzarell’ bathing in water, and dozens of large yellow balls of provolone and caciocavallo hanging like small planets from the ceiling.
Along the avenue there are pushcarts lining the street and at least one of them sells franks smothered with mustard and sauerkraut. There’s a far lady at the ice cream fountain in the candy store, licking her fingers while at the end of the fountain there are teenagers swigging down egg creams.
In that old neighborhood I hear melodic Italian sounds, dialects casually spoken as if we were all still back in those ancient villages. In the summer if I concentrate I can almost hear Red Barber’s soft Southern drawl announcing a Dodger game from Ebbets Field. Because there was no television, imagination was used to create what visuals were needed. And we did that on that special summer night when the entire neighborhood sat on those hard brownstone steps, listening to a raspy voice broadcast every punch and jab of the Tony Zale – Rocky Graziano fight.
We also got our news from the local newspapers. An activity we frequently took part in was waiting at the candy store for the bundles of papers, the Daily News and the Mirror. The bundles were tossed from a news truck around nine pm and we raced to get the first paper and turn to the back pages for the sports section. In those days we could easily recite the batting averages and home run records of our favorite players.
On Sunday mornings we watched the girls in their pretty pink dresses covered up to their necks, walk daintly to church, not even a hello from them. Yet the night before, these same bobbysoxers, their skirts hiked above their knees, danced wildly in front of the candy store to the music of Benny Goodmen. I’ll remember always elderly Italian gentlemen, unashamed in their undershirts, hunched over and sitting on dining room chairs out on the sidewalk, talking with their fingers and their eyes, while in the background, Carlo Buti sang Non to Scordar di Me.
This was the old neighborhood in its heyday – now gone – on Carroll Street, in the ancient village of South Brooklyn.
Nowadays, the area is called Carroll Gardens and many of the Italians have moved away. The Dodgers left Brooklyn in ’57 and finally, Ebbets Field was demolished in 1960.