Those who choose alternative lifestyles often gravitate to the ends of the earth – or as far away as they can go and feel somewhat connected to the people and things that might sustain them. Brooklyn was such a place in the 1980’s and 90’s. There were teeming communities full of affordable housing and stimulating activities. There was good transportation and a sense of shared struggle, joy, and hardship. And if certain ethnicities were insular, it wasn’t as if that didn’t happen across the East River too.

I first lived in the Fort Greene neighborhood, convenient to Park Slope, where the shopping was – and Downtown, where the Brooklyn Dodgers had been headquartered. The tallest building in all of Brooklyn was there - a penile tower whose clock was lit up at night. It provided Brooklynites with the sort of Manhattanish glamour they liked in somewhat smaller doses. I painted a few bad pictures of it, which I have since destroyed.

Fort Greene had the finest Brownstone blocks in the entire city, though no Brooklyn neighborhood can rival Brooklyn Heights for overall opulence. Yet you could walk around and feel that you might run into Walt Whitman any minute. Or see a lesser robber-baron lumber out of a hansom cab.

The poet Marianne Moore lived on my block, from which I painted this picture. She was a sociable recluse who celebrated the Brooklyn Dodgers in the somewhat elliptical verse that was her personal signature. She knew baseball and was probably a lot of fun to go to a game with. In those days you didn’t run into many women – or poets of either sex – who appreciated the strategic necessity of a bunt; the ragged elegance of a double-play; a timely call. She was hip to race via Jackie Robinson and team solidarity. I can imagine her thin, church-lady voice razzing the ump – or lifted in song during a Seventh Inning stretch.

At any rate, she lived – and died - on Cumberland Street and had no doubt looked out of her window to this very building, which still had a certain glamour about it, with its medieval-style lamps and snazzy awning. It reminds me of so many places in New York, though I’m glad I have this special memory of it. Things can become frightfully anonymous in a big city, even when you experience it – should you live on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge - in lower case.

I hear it’s not that way anymore. I wonder.