Brooklyn Al Primo Posto: Vincent Coppola’s Magical Memoir of the Church, the Mafia and the Gowanus Canal

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. Our guest today is from Brooklyn. Another writer from Brooklyn. But this time, a very different kind of writer. Of course, Brooklyn these days is full of whole foods and lofts and all sorts of other kinds of economic, cultural innovation. But there's another Brooklyn, a Brooklyn of the Gowanus Canal, a Brooklyn of Vincent Coppola's new book, Gowanus Crossing. And Vincent is joining us. Vincent lives now in Savannah, Georgia, but grew up in Brooklyn. A very different kind of Brooklyn, Vince, from the Brooklyn that many writers now live in. Is that fair?

**Vincent Coppola** (1:19)
The Brooklyn I grew up in was literally, Andrew, an Italian village plucked from the south of Italy at the turn of the century and kind of dropped in this godforsaken part of Brooklyn.
And the community, Gowanus or South Brooklyn, called locally, it was there for almost a hundred years. And then inevitably, as all things in New York City, it was, it changed. Newcomers came in, property values rose, and the original families could not afford to live where we grew up.

**Andrew Keen** (2:03)
Yeah, it's an astonishing story, this book. I mean, you, you left Brooklyn. You had a very distinguished career as a journalist. You wrote many books. You went to Columbia to study journalism.
But in a way, would it be fair to say, Vince, that you never really left, that it was always in your heart?

**Vincent Coppola** (2:25)
No, I never left it. And as I got older, I realized, you know, I'd been around and out in the world. I'd been in places and I felt this pull carrying me back.
It was triggered particularly in my early 60s, when I developed stage four cancer, and I was, which is associated in my mind with that canal. But I got sick and going through treatments, I found myself going back to what was familiar and in a way embracing to me, a place where I really felt I belonged.

**Andrew Keen** (3:09)
Tell me about the canal. I've walked around Brooklyn extensively. My son lives on and off there and is an expert. We've done many walks around Brooklyn.
I'm sure we've crossed the canal, but of course it's not a particularly popular tourist spot these days, is it?

**Vincent Coppola** (3:26)
No, it's not a tourist spot, but it's a residential area on the move.
The Gowanus Canal had its origins in the 17th century, where it was a salt marsh, where Dutch and later English settlers extracted oysters, which were exported to England and Holland. It played a part in the Revolutionary War. There was a battle there. Then in the 19th century, that salt marsh was developed into an industrial commercial waterway, which basically opened up Brooklyn to the world. By the 20th century, it had become, unbeknownst to us who lived there, one of the most polluted places in America.

**Andrew Keen** (4:27)
Tell me about your childhood. This book is about that childhood, a Brooklyn boyhood. What was it like, Vince?

**Vincent Coppola** (4:36)
Well, you know what you know.
Where I grew up, there was no emphasis. We were formerly Italian peasants.
So education, unfortunately, but I was a bookish kid, and my relatives would say, everything you know is in books. Almost as if it was a negative. I think, therefore, I don't exist. But it was rough and tumble. I came from a very large family. My great-grandfathers had settled on that canal as the Irish and German before them had moved out. So we were the last of many immigrant groups to settle there. It was basically the bottom of the barrel. It was, in my mind, very much cut off from New York City, even though it was just three subway stops away. I didn't go to Manhattan until I was a teenager. I didn't go to Central Park until I was in my 20s.

**Andrew Keen** (5:53)
Are you saying that you never set foot in Manhattan until you were a teenager?

**Vincent Coppola** (5:57)
Correct. Never. It was, to me, looking back, I lived in a snow globe, a toxic snow globe, which nonetheless was intact. It had its own rules, its own government, its own religion, which were kind of at odds looking back with the rest of the world.
I never knew, and I was a bright kid. I didn't know who the mayor of New York was, but I could tell you the names of all the mafia guys on the corner.
I went to Catholic schools where we were not pushed. If you were brainy, let's say, you were considered a troublemaker. And I wound myself, wound up inadvertently, one of the kids in the back of the classroom, wondering why and what the world was like outside Gowanus.