“I don’t know anything else and I still don’t. The only time I’ve spent outside of Brooklyn was six weeks in Europe in 1976. And when I was there I was terrified at what I might miss and that everything might change while I was gone. My fears were realized when I came back and beer and soda cans changed. They used to have a pull-tab where the ring and oval tab actually separated from the can. When I returned they had switched to the top we have now where the cutout is forced down and stays attached. Probably done to reduce litter, since the old pull-tabs were always all over the streets.

I even knew this guy I used to live near that was 72 years old and had never even been to Manhattan. I asked him why one day and he said “What for?”

Brooklyn was the first true suburb of Manhattan and I think in a way that caused people here to grow up with a sense of longing. I think there were angst ridden kids here back in 1780.”

“I was born in D.C. and I came over to Brooklyn in 1990. I was always drawn to the neighborhoods here and the feeling they give you. Especially here in Fort Greene.

This neighborhood has the cultural heart that I was interested in when I started a publishing company. It’s a diverse neighborhood that is a fountain of cultural activity and a place with a literary legacy. Spike Lee is around here, Richard Wright wrote Native Son in Fort Greene Park, the Marsalis brothers were from around here. Rosie Perez. Fort Greene, and Brooklyn in general, is simply a quirky, idiosyncratic, eclectic place – something that I think we capture in the ‘Brooklyn Noir’ series. It is an incubator for creators. And plus, another thing that is great is that there are so many fucking weird people here. And they only get weirder. It is a land of characters.”

“I was born in Northfield, Minnesota and I came to New York in 1978 to study at Columbia and I never left. My first memories of New York, when I came to look at Columbia the first few days, were of the Korean grocery shops with the flowers and fruits outside and the vivid colors of those things. And the subway, I loved the subway. I was still discovering urban life and I loved graffiti, the garbage. Everything was exciting to me. I had a big romance with New York City.

I moved to Brooklyn after I met Paul in 1981. I spent a lot of time visiting him in Carroll Gardens before moving in with him some months later. I didn’t know Brooklyn at all and there was a part of me that thought ‘I’ve spent my whole life trying to get out of Minnesota and to Manhattan and now I’ve fell in love with this man in Brooklyn.’ But very quickly I became a Brooklyn booster. We lived together in Cobble Hill on a romantic, mid 19th century street.

Before we bought this house, when we were living together and finally able to afford some place bigger to live, Paul said to me ‘Okay, we can do anything you want. We can move back to Manhattan, we can go to the suburbs, anywhere.’ The thing was that I had no intention of going anywhere else. I wanted to stay in Brooklyn very much. I was terribly happy here. We bought this house about 13 years ago and we’ve been living in it for 12 and a half years.

Another interesting thing is that my mother, who is Norwegian, and grew up in the most Southern town in Norway, had heard about Brooklyn her whole childhood. This was because there was a huge immigration of Norwegians in the late part of the 19th century to the United States. Some of them moved to the Midwest like my father’s grandparents, but many moved to Brooklyn. My mother, for years, thought that only Norwegians lived in Brooklyn. She thought it was an entire region of Norwegians, which is a wonderful thing.

And I think, just philosophically, that one of the best parts of living in Brooklyn is the presence of immigrants who are here now. Even Park Slope, that has become very bourgeoisie since we have been here, has a much stronger feeling of immigrant presence than most parts of Manhattan. Just down the street, the apartment building on the corner has every type of nationality in it. It’s amazing.

As a writer, I feel that most of my novels have a delayed effect in terms of place. My first novel was set on the Upper West Side. My second was set in a mythical version of my hometown in Minnesota. My third was set in SoHo where I lived very briefly and the novel I’m working on now is set in Brooklyn on Garfield Place. In that way, the neighborhood, after some time living there, does sink into my work.”

“I grew up in Bay Ridge. My best memories from here are connected to the fact that I went to school with kids here from kindergarten all the way through junior high. I remember hanging out with my friends at night on Shore Road and at these paddleball courts and having parties down at Shore Road that the police would come and break up. I also remember hanging out at this place called PJ’s pub that was really an old man bar, and my friends and I thought we were so cool. But it was ultimately quite depressing.

I went to high school in Manhattan and commuted back to Bay Ridge and then I went to N.Y.U. and commuted back to Bay Ridge. Now I commute back here every Sunday for ‘family day’ – an early Sunday dinner at 3 in the afternoon.

Now that I live in Manhattan I miss the ethnicity, the shops – shops that people own that aren’t chain stores – like A & S Pork Store. My father used to come back to this neighborhood after he moved out and he would say ‘Bay Ridge! I forgot how beautiful this place is.’ And now I have become my father in that every time I come back I say the same thing. ‘Bay Ridge, How beautiful! Look at all the trees!’

As a writer I think my sense of humor was absolutely developed in this park. Absolutely. I feel like I remember the day where I thought either I’m gonna have to be really funny or they are gonna eat me alive. People really like to tease here and give you a hard time. And I felt really different because I was going to an art school, and I dressed differently and I was very liberal minded. I’d wear these crazy colored leg warmers and ripped jeans and a crazy hat and I remember thinking ‘Just please get me to the subway without anyone bothering me.’ Because once you are in the subway it would be okay.”

“I had been living in the city and I needed to move and I had two friends living in Cobble Hill. I came out here for lunch and had really not been to Brooklyn. It was love at first sight. It was an epiphany. It was a place I could not believe existed. I decided to move here right away and haven’t looked back

I first lived on Second Place in Carroll Gardens, which is a historic block with all the huge front yards. I had been living in Manhattan for 10 years and had never once become friends with a neighbor. When I moved to Carroll Gardens I became very close with the neighbors in my house. We were constantly in each other’s apartments, making food for each other, watching T.V. It was something I always wished my New York life would be. Brooklyn had a feeling of a big city with a culture but also a small town feel. And it felt like a secret.

Now I live here in Boreum Hill in this big, warm, quiet apartment that is sort of shaped like the state of New Jersey. I have Fort Greene on one side, Brooklyn Heights on another side, Park Slope right here. I love it.

With Brooklyn I really feel artistically and personally I have found my home. This is where I belong. I think it’s a romantic place. With my movie The Baxter, I used that phrase – the Baxter – to describe the wrong guy. The guy who doesn’t get the girl. In every romantic comedy there is this dashing leading man and there is this nerdy guy who doesn’t get the girl – the Baxter. In a way Brooklyn is the nerdy guy and Manhattan is the dashing leading man. Brooklyn is the less obvious choice and the road less traveled but it’s sort of like if you take the time to really look at it you realize that it has more depth even though it doesn’t beg for attention. I also think creatively I have found a muse. It’s in my mind. Everything for me is always set in Brooklyn. I’m working on another romantic comedy right now, set in Brooklyn, set in the winter, and I want to show all those ridiculous Christmas light displays. Which, to me, is so uniquely Brooklyn. It’s these cement concrete houses with these crazy displays on Halloween and Easter that are hilarious and very beautiful and charming at the same time.

I also love the communal aspect of Brooklyn – when I came here I could immediately pick up on the fact that there were not a lot of transients – by that I don’t mean homeless people – but the fact that you were looking at the people who lived here. When you would walk down the street you would see the people who actually lived here unlike the East Village or the Upper West Side in Manhattan where you don’t know who you are looking at – whether it’s a neighbor or a tourist or someone from another state.”

“I grew up in Brooklyn a few blocks from the cemetery. When we were kids we used to play in here. Back in those days we would slide through the fence and sit inside.

I’ve been working here 38 years. I started as a high school kid cutting grass. Basically I oversee the entire operation, set policies, negotiate contracts, and make sure everything runs smoothly here. I actually live on the cemetery grounds in a house that was built in 1876. It’s not weird to me but it’s weird to friends and acquaintances. And you have a hell of a time getting a pizza delivered to my house. If I call for pizza or Chinese and tell them the address, they say ‘Okay, yeah sure.’ We still actually maintain two other residences on the property.

The cemetery was first created in 1838. The first burial was in 1840. Since then it has become the place to be buried. Even more than that, during the 1800’s this was the second most popular tourist attraction in New York State – Niagara Falls being the first. When it was designed and built in 1838, Greenwood was the first major planned landscape. This was before there were any city parks. Thousands of people would come out here just to tour on a Saturday afternoon. It became so popular that they decided they needed something like this in Manhattan. So Greenwood was the forerunner to Central Park. People came here and still come here from all over the world. Some of the luminaries of the 1800’s are here: Peter Cooper, Samuel Moss, Elias Howe, many inventors. And of course Charlie Ebbets, Peter Tilyou, Leonard Bernstein, Boss Tweed, the list goes on and on.

Every religion under the sun is represented here. Christians, Jews, Buddhists, everyone. And we are still an active cemetery. We still have land, we are still selling plots, and we’ve got one of the most modern crematoriums in the country. On an average year we do about 1,500 burials and 2,000 cremations.

My favorite place in the cemetery is probably Battle Hill. Not only does it have a lot of history, but it is has a beautiful view of the harbor, the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline. We have a statue of Minerva dedicated to freedom that stares out at the Statue of Liberty. The two of them gazing at each other and the Statue of Liberty facing these hills of Brooklyn where all that blood was spilled during the Revolutionary War. During a battle in the Revolutionary War, the British were coming up Gowanus Road and we retreated to the high ground of Battle Hill and set up snipers.

Do I believe in ghosts? Absolutely. But there are no ghosts here. I grew up in a haunted house here in Brooklyn on 37th street. It wasn’t a bad spirit, but we knew it was there. Everybody felt it and knew it was there. But here I have never seen or felt anything.”