Dance performance under the Brooklyn Bridge Thursday night.
CITYBILLY HISTORY LESSON #4
I’ve been spending a little more time in Brooklyn Heights lately, where the Promenade offers the most spectacular views in and of the city, the neighborhood is comprised of beautiful brownstone mansions, and notable residents, past and present, have created landmarks on seemingly every block, from The Standish, the fictional residence of Clark Kent in the Superman comics, to Plymouth Church, the Grand Central Depot of the Underground Railroad, presided over by Henry Ward Beecher. The neighborhood has a rich history stretching back to it’s strategic role in the American Revolution and it’s unofficial designation as America’s first suburb once Robert Fulton’s steam ferry service allowed for Brooklyn residents to commute to lower Manhattan in the early 1800s. However, on my recent walking tour of the neighborhood, my focus was on finding the homes of 20th century literary figures, and specifically, the apartment where Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman while, in a separate apartment in the same building, Norman Mailer wrote The Naked and the Dead.
My first stop was 70 Willow St, known in the neighborhood as “the big yellow house”. Truman Capote lived in the basement apartment of this 1830s Greek Revival mansion. While there he wrote In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. A block away, closer to the water, at 142 Columbia Heights I found one of Norman Mailer’s Brooklyn Heights addresses, but not the one he shared with Arthur Miller. Just steps from the Promenade, this was Mailer’s home until his death in 2007. He would have lived here with his last wife, Norris Mailer Church, who recently released a book chronicling their time together (as well as her brief time with Bill Clinton) and, sadly, passed away this week.
Continuing on to Grace Court, possibly the most beautiful block I’ve come across in New York, we find Arthur Miller’s former home at #31. Again, this is not the shared Miller/Mailer residence, but it is certainly notable because Miller finished writing his masterpiece Death of a Salesman while living here. He would later sell the property to civil right activist W.E.B. DuBois.
Somehow, I missed 155 Willow St, another Miller home where he would have lived with Marilyn Monroe, however, I finally made it to 102 Pierrepont St., home in the mid-1940s to both Miller and Mailer. I’ve always been amazed that two of the great pieces of 20th century literature were created in the same building by two different men who were only vaguely aware of each other at the time. Miller also wrote another great play, All My Sons, at this address. This early brush is also fascinating when considering they would both became infamously linked with Marilyn Monroe later in life (Miller, of course, married her in the 50s, and Mailer wrote a “biography” based mostly on his opinions of her).
And even though I didn’t make it to an apartment where Marilyn stayed on this journey, just last week a friend and I had a drink at Armandos on Montague St, which was Monroe’s hangout when she lived in the neighborhood.
