Wild Dogs of Brooklyn

Just after New Years in 1979 I moved from the East Village to Brooklyn.  Carol was pregnant, but her cramped digs on Carroll Street would not accommodate us.  We found a loft building, very rare in Park Slope, on the lower margins of the neighborhood near 4th Avenue, a six lane artery running from downtown Brooklyn to Bay Ridge.  Across the avenue a ruined commercial zone of dilapidated red brick structures of unknown provenance, mostly abandoned, spread over both sides of the Gowanus Canal, described...