Alice Davidson Outwater

82 Remsen Street

Coming of Age in Brooklyn Heights Circa 1930-1940

By Alice Davidson Outwater

In 82 Remsen Street author Alice Davidson Outwater has written a tender, loving, and often humorous portrait of a 1930-1940's childhood growing up in Brooklyn Heights: part personal memoir, part social history, and an altogether beguiling and vibrant portrait of a remarkable time and place.

The fifth child in a clan of six children, Outwater was a practiced and skilled observer (in her own words, a good "snoop") trying to make sense of daily life, keeping out of older siblings' way, and bossing her younger sister Louise. From her privileged and personal position, Outwater shares her curious and innocent view of the world from the elegant staircase landings inside her family's three-story Tudorstyle brownstone, to the eye-widening views from the street and the world on the other (and under) side of the Brooklyn Bridge. Outwater kept careful watch over it all. Neighborhood outings take readers along to Mr. Chan's Montague Street Chinese laundry and the gypsy encampment under the Brooklyn Bridge. Family stories take readers inside 82 Remsen Street to Grandfather Hooker's magic show with Houdini in attendance, tales of Grandmother Hiles and Auntie Pasco's tramp steamer adventures abroad—including legendary accounts of dressing as Arab men and darkening their skin with beetle nuts to enter Mesopotamia. In addition, Outwater's own recounting of childhood shenanigans such as tummy sliding under the bathroom stalls in Saks, or playing hide and seek in the basement and forgetting friends asleep in the dumb waiter appeal to the curious child in us all.

82 Remsen Street is more than nostalgia. Brooklyn Heights became New York's first suburb in the early 1900s when the Brooklyn Bridge connected the more sheltered Brooklyn community on the East River bluff to Manhattan, and to the tidal changes of the larger outside world. Outwater's generation was sandwiched between two world wars; it navigated a sea of European immigration, and was caught in the wake of the stock market's rise and fall. Outwater wrote these stories so that readers would have some impressions of the unique culture and changes that took place in that era and to give perspective to the decades that followed—the rise of the "baby boom" generation.