{"id":288299,"date":"2026-07-06T18:07:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T18:07:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/288299\/"},"modified":"2026-07-06T18:07:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T18:07:10","slug":"vincent-coppolas-gowanus-crossing-brings-a-forgotten-brooklyn-back-to-life-brooklyn-paper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/288299\/","title":{"rendered":"Vincent Coppola\u2019s \u2018Gowanus Crossing\u2019 brings a forgotten Brooklyn back to life \u2022 Brooklyn Paper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Long before luxury apartments lined the Gowanus Canal<\/a> and trendy restaurants filled nearby streets, the neighborhood was a rough-and-tumble enclave where generations of immigrant families built their lives along one of Brooklyn\u2019s most famous waterways.<\/p>\n

That vanished world is the heart of Vincent Coppola\u2019s new memoir, \u201cGowanus Crossing: A Brooklyn Boyhood,\u201d<\/a> a deeply personal portrait of mid-century Gowanus that captures a neighborhood shaped by family, faith, organized crime and resilience.<\/p>\n

For Coppola, who spent decades as a journalist before turning to literature, the book is not just about his life; rather preserving a Brooklyn that many newcomers never knew existed.\n<\/p>\n

He told Brooklyn Paper that the novel is an \u201celegy to a lost world.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I grew up, Brooklyn was very different from today\u2019s Brooklyn in every way. I lived in a kind of snow globe,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was an Italian neighborhood just a few subway stops from Lower Manhattan, but it was kind of cut off sociologically, physically and it was an internal world that had its own kind of government and religion, which was the same but also different from the world at large.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"GowanusIn \u201cGowanus Crossing,\u201d the Gowanus Canal is a character in itself.Photo by Anna Bradley-Smith<\/p>\n

While today\u2019s Gowanus is known for redevelopment and new residential towers, Coppola remembers a neighborhood built around the canal itself. <\/p>\n

\u201cTo me, the Gowanus Canal, polluted as it was, was Brooklyn\u2019s Nile River,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was pestilent, but it was fertile.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

His family arrived there roughly a century ago after emigrating from Southern Italy.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThey landed in a place where nobody else wanted to live,\u201d Coppola said. \u201cIt was run-down. It was on a polluted canal. It wasn\u2019t brownstones, but it was close to the brownstone areas. It\u2019s where they landed, what they could afford, and they made their lives as best they could.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those immigrants also carried pieces of the old country with them, including the influence of both the Catholic Churcha and the Mafia \u2014 institutions that became defining forces in Coppola\u2019s childhood. <\/p>\n

\u201cSo as a boy, I was kind of in the middle between wise guys and priests who weren\u2019t very particularly holy or dedicated,\u201d he said.\n<\/p>\n

Unlike many of the neighborhood\u2019s children, Coppola found refuge in books.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI was the bookish kid,\u201d he recalled. \u201cI didn\u2019t know that other schools were providing students with books and insights into the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because he constantly questioned authority, he said he was often overlooked by teachers.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI was in the back of the room with the idiots,\u201d he said with a laugh. \u201cWhen you\u2019re young, you feel that. Like, \u2018What do I have to do?’\u201d<\/p>\n

\"GowanusCoppola (bottom left) and his family.Photo courtesy of Vincent Coppola<\/p>\n

Books eventually became his way out.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the answers to the riddle that was my life was reading books, and I read constantly,\u201d Coppola said. \u201cMy reading, now that I look back at it, was the key to getting out of there.<\/p>\n

His literary education came from unlikely places. He devoured paperbacks from a Fourth Avenue newsstand while running errands for his father and later discovered a hidden library belonging to an eccentric relative named \u201cProfessor Beans.\u201d<\/p>\n

Inside a locked room were classics like John Steinbeck\u2019s \u201cThe Grapes of Wrath.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI would go back and forth reading his books,\u201d Coppola said. \u201cThat\u2019s what got me started with books, and it\u2019s a habit, thank God, that continues to this day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though Coppola spent much of his career telling other people\u2019s stories as a reporter, he never intended to write his own.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was something I avoided,\u201d he said. \u201cI never saw myself as a writer. I was always a reporter.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

But everything changed after he was diagnosed with cancer in his 60s, an illness he believes was linked to growing up near the polluted canal.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI was laid up and not sure I was going to live,\u201d Coppola said. \u201cI had radiation, chemotherapy, surgery and I found myself drifting back in time in my imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n

Living in Georgia during treatment, his memories repeatedly returned to Brooklyn.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI started writing these stories down just for me and my kids, not for publication,\u201d he said. \u201cWriters write.\u201d
\n\"\"The Coppola cousins who grew up in a different Gowanus.Photo courtesy of Vincent Coppola\n<\/p>\n

After posting some of those stories on Facebook, an editor at Henry Holt discovered them and eventually offered him a book deal.<\/p>\n

While Coppola acknowledges change is inevitable, he worries many new residents overlook the generations who came before them.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI was just up there [in Gowanus] as part of my book tour,\u201d he said. \u201cThere were big, tall condominiums on the canal, but it was dead quiet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some longtime residents, he said, jokingly refer to themselves as \u201cthe originals.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

\u201cHere are people who know nothing labeling me an original,\u201d Coppola said. \u201cIf I\u2019m an original, what are you? You\u2019re a stranger in a strange land that you won\u2019t even acknowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n

What troubles him most isn\u2019t the new construction but the feeling that an entire community has been erased from memory.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThey acted as though nobody had ever lived there before them,\u201d he said. \u201cI was offended by that because my brothers and my mom\u2019s family \u2014 we lived and loved and struggled.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s ultimately why he wrote \u201cGowanus Crossing.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t write this book to be famous or rich or any of that,\u201d Coppola said. \u201cI wanted to recreate that world because it was an important world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"The Gowanus Canal.Photo courtesy of Vincent Coppola<\/p>\n

The process, however, wasn\u2019t easy.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt took all my talent and a lot of pain,\u201d he said. \u201cWe suffered a lot. There was a lot of drugs, violence and despair. It wasn\u2019t easy to write, but as you\u2019ll learn, the best writing is not easy. You have to really reach into yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even hearing those memories performed by Paul Bellantoni for the audiobook through MacMillan Publishers was emotional.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s still startling hearing your words through the voice of another person,\u201d Coppola said. \u201cHe did a great job, but it is a jolt.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, after decades of reporting on history as it unfolded, Coppola hopes readers will use \u201cGowanus Crossing\u201d to remember a version of Brooklyn that no longer exists \u2014 but whose influence still echoes through the borough.<\/p>\n

\u201cI recreated a world that existed,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I think the good response the book is getting is because I recreated a world.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

\u201cGowanus Crossing\u201d is now available for purchase in print and as an audiobook.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Long before luxury apartments lined the Gowanus Canal and trendy restaurants filled nearby streets, the neighborhood was a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":288300,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[45474,98,110176,6456,3462,100,6766,35831,99,4840,464,20043,110177,110178,110179,873,110180,9049,9,110181,24,63,10692,8005,110182],"class_list":["post-288299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-book-review","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-books","tag-brooklyn-community","tag-brooklyn-culture","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-history","tag-brooklyn-neighborhoods","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-catholic-church","tag-gowanus","tag-gowanus-canal","tag-gowanus-crossing","tag-henry-holt","tag-historical-memoir","tag-italian-american","tag-local-author","tag-memoir","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-books","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-organized-crime","tag-park-slope","tag-vincent-coppola"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288299\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/288300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}