Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

Any oral history of Brooklyn, as Marc Eliot’s new Song of Brooklyn claims to be, must grapple with precursors like the entertaining, thorough, and not completely maudlin It Happened in Brooklyn: An Oral History of Growing Up in the Borough in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s (below), first published in 1993 by Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer . So can this “Oral History of America’s Favorite Borough” pull its weight? Sadly, no--even if Julia Vitullo-Martin, generally a savvy observer, gave it a mostly positive review in the New York Post. The subtitle suggests that Eliot and his publisher are aiming at some of the same nostalgia market that the earlier book captured. But an oral history not limited to specific decades has a lot of ground to cover, and that's way too much for almost anyone. Eliot is described by the publisher as "the New York Times bestselling author of more than a dozen books on popular culture," divides his time among New York City; Woodstock, NY; an...

The crime fiction collection Brooklyn Noir was the first in Akashic Books' highly-successful "Noir" series , which now extends to dozens of anthologies. Now Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth has been published, the first true-crime collection in the series. The Table of Contents lists not just the chapters but the neighborhoods they're set in, so I was intrigued to see that the collection includes a memoir titled "The Ghetto Never Sleeps, Mister Policeman," by Robert Leuci and set in a neighborhood designated as Atlantic Yards. Is Atlantic Yards a place? Nope; it's a project . (If you want an AY crime story, check the statistics .) The essay by Leuci, a former New York Police Department detective who retired in 1981 to become the subject of the book/movie Prince of the City , and an acclaimed novelist/ memoirist , is set decades before the term "Atlantic Yards" emerged in 2003. The Ghetto Never Sleeps Leuci's essay is an interestin...