Whom Should We Name Brooklyn’s Nameless Parks After?
- Arthur de Gaeta for The Home Reporter
- Receiving Green-Wood’s De Witt Clinton Award for Excellence in 2011
Pete Hamill
Give this guy a park; heck, give this guy everything (even if his brother Denis continues to sully the family name with his idiotic columns for the Daily News). Hamill wrote one of the best Brooklyn books, A Drinking Life, much of which chronicles his childhood and young adulthood living not far from the present location of the expressway—up and down Sixth and Seventh avenues, 13th and 15th streets, a war-era mix of trolley tracks and taverns. This is basically Hamill’s neighborhood, and his years of journalism (a sort of public service) and book-writing surely make him someone the community should remember, even if he now lives in Manhattan. I mean, the guy’s almost 80; he’s from one of those generation for whom Brooklyn was a place you escaped, not stayed and prospered.
