Thomas Adcock - Brooklyn Noir 3 - Nothing but the Truth

If anybody anywhere else in New York City noticed, they might surely have stopped for a moment and shaken their heads. Then, just as surely, they would have gone about their day.

Cobble Hill

So, where else would Peter Braunstein head for cover but Brooklyn? He was a writer, after all.

According to his indictment, freelance journalist Peter Braunstein entered the Chelsea apartment building of a former coworker on Halloween evening, 2005, wearing a New York City Fire Department uniform purchased on eBay.

He thereupon set two small fires in the hallway, then knocked on the young woman’s door. When she answered, Braunstein chloroformed her, bound her, and sexually assaulted her for some twelve hours. For good measure, he videotaped the ordeal.

Soon after, on November 9, the police named Braunstein the prime suspect in the crimes and released photographs of him, taken on November 1 at a Super 8 Motel on West 46th Street in Midtown Manhattan.

The day after his Super 8 stay, Braunstein slid a personal credit card into a subway station vending machine and bought himself a MetroCard. Then he vanished. He could have been anywhere. He seemed to be everywhere.

The media website Gawker chided, “A CITY OF 8 MILLION PEOPLE, ALL WITH THEIR EYES CLOSED.”

As the New York City police department searched frantically for Braunstein, the tabloids delighted in flaying one of their own. The New York Post called Braunstein a “convicted creep” who was serving three years’ probation for menacing another woman. The Daily News went with the “kinky journalist” angle, noting that Braunstein’s victim worked at a high-end fashion magazine. And he had taunted her with designer shoes.

Until 2002, Braunstein was the media reporter for Women’s Wear Daily , the fashion trade publication that shared offices with W , the magazine at which his victim worked.

Braunstein’s desk at WWD had sight lines to the fashion closet, where young, pretty women flitted about with shoes and accessories for shoots and stories. Thirty-year-old Greg Lindsay, now a freelance writer and resident of Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill, inherited Braunstein’s gig at WWD and was assigned his desk.

“You feel creepy in the sense that you’re inadvertently scoping out these women,” Lindsay recalled. “That part in Silence of the Lambs where Hannibal Lecter asks, ‘And how do we begin to covet, Clarice? We begin by coveting what we see every day.’ It was totally that.” Ten months after Lindsay characterized Braunstein with that line, the man himself agreed with the armchair analysis. In a jailhouse interview with the New York Post published on December 16, 2007, Braunstein quoted the same Silence of the Lambs bit “to explain his ‘theory’ of why he chose his victim.”

The journalists who populate this city as freelancers and staffers — the writers and editors who pump out the words and ideas that make this place the media capital of the world — began to question each other. There was concern for the victim and horror at the nature of the crime, of course. And not a little bit of fear.

All that along with the impulse to conclude, What a story!

Sex! Depravity! A police manhunt!

But this was no Dominick Dunne society murder. This crime involved two of their own. The alleged perpetrator had worked at enough editorial shops, and long enough, to know a lot of people in this smaller-than-we’d-all-like-to-think world. And so the writers turned to each other, with questions and motives and what-ifs and what-have-yous.

Writing in the online magazine The Black Table on November 16, Greg Lindsay tried to answer the questions: “No, I never met the guy... [A]nd the more I learn now about how much fear and terror and misery he has inflicted upon my former colleagues, the more relieved I am that I never met him, and therefore never gave him the benefit of any doubts.”

The next day, Braunstein was spotted in Brooklyn.

Walt Whitman made Brooklyn the writer’s borough. His own Brooklyn Heights neighborhood was home to the likes of W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Richard Wright — and is where Norman Mailer hung his hat, and boxing gloves, until his death in late 2007. Nearby Park Slope is home to contemporary novelists Paul Auster, Jonathan Safran Foer, and husband-wife authors Kathryn and Colin Harrison, among many others. (Brooklyn’s 11215 is rumored to be the American zip code with the highest concentration of published writers.)

Though the twentieth century was the age of Manhattan newspapermen — Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, Murray Kempton — many of today’s journalists are Brooklyn-based, and not necessarily bound by employment to a single periodical. The northwest neighborhoods of Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, and Carroll Gardens belong nowadays to the freelance writers and magazine editors who attempt to interpret New York to the outside world.

These three neighborhoods, formerly distinct one from the other, have melded to the point where most residents who have established themselves during the past five or so years don’t actually know the lines of demarcation. Real estate agents, attempting to broker rentals surpassing prices even in Manhattan, sometimes call it one area: BoCoCa. And though the name is unpleasant to those people who label everything but themselves, it successfully blends the area into a mass of comfortable familiarity that attracts BoCoCa’s newest tenants.

Roughly speaking — some might say generously — the three neighborhoods run from Atlantic Avenue in the north to 9th Street in the south. West to east, BoCoCa extends from Hicks Street to Hoyt. From Manhattan, you take the F train to Bergen Street, Carroll Street, or Smith and 9th Streets.

Where mom-and-pop corner stores and butcher shops and bakeries once lined Court and Smith, the neighborhoods’ right and left ventricles now pump bars and boutiques. The restaurants have gained new respect among food critics; you are not necessarily eating Brooklyn food at Manhattan prices anymore.

Apartments are often entire floors of brownstones, large and sunny with the kind of amenities people leave Manhattan for — washers, dryers, dishwashers, backyards! — and include smallish rooms perfect for a desk and filing cabinet. BoCoCa is, accordingly, well-suited to those who write from home all day.

In the fall, when the treelined streets turn red and gold, and in the spring, when the canopy above you is green, it is enough to forget that you are even in Brooklyn — anyhow, the Brooklyn you thought you knew a decade ago. The Italian immigrants who settled there have given way to yuppies who fled the suburbs for the city.

While the old Brooklyn was made up of ethnic enclaves, immigrant warrens, and strivers’ rows of the middle class, BoCoCa has transcended traditional insularity. For some, this is all so different as to suggest that Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, and Carroll Gardens — and most certainly the Valhalla of Park Slope — are not truly a part of Brooklyn anymore. For others, it is all some sort of über-Brooklyn, a Sesame Street for grownups where the neighborhood cinema shows foreign films and friends gather at readings rather than potluck suppers.

In warm months, the Gowanus Yacht Club on Smith and Warren serves beer outside on rickety picnic tables, sating its customers with a side of irony: The establishment is not at waterside. Laptops abound in cafés and bars, leaving a weekday visitor with the impression that no one here actually works. On Fridays, friends meet for drinks at Abilene and potential lovers set dinner dates at Grocery, the restaurant. Sunday mornings are reserved for brunch at places like Bar Tabac, or Bloody Marys at the Brooklyn Inn.