Peeking through the glass case at a new exhibit in the Brooklyn Public Library, a woman asked, “Don’t you miss this New York?”
Her nostalgia was sparked by a series of photos from the 1980s originally published in the neighborhood newspaper the Prospect Press. She was seeing a Brooklyn at the very beginning of a transformation we now take for granted. When brownstones were first being reclaimed, along with the streets, and residents began marching against condo towers, as well as crime, crack-cocaine and graffiti.
A collection of photos, ephemera and front pages, the exhibit offered some familiar faces — a newly elected Congressman Chuck Schumer reclining at his desk and a campaigning Mario Cuomo being gushed over by a group of secretaries — and some even more familiar headlines. “Gowanus Canal Finally Cleaning Up?” Good thing they added the question mark.
But after speaking with the paper’s alums, it’s clear what has changed the most in the 22 years since the Prospect Press closed: the newspaper business itself.“No cell phones, hardly anyone had a personal computer, no Google, and blackberries were still a fruit,” said Mike Stein, the staff photographer and an editor of the paper, who organized the exhibit and narrated a slide presentation at its opening last week.
“This was how people got their neighborhood news. We were really filling a need. They snapped the papers up when we put them out,” marveled Stein. “Just two decades ago, the newspaper was still king.”
Add to his list of anachronisms that there was no digital photography and no Quark or PageMaker. “We used Mergenthaler linotype machines,” Stein recalled. “It was this huge, refrigerator-like, hulking monstrosity that spit out gallies of black ink. Then the layout was done manually. The production department would literally cut and paste the stories, headlines, captions, photos [actually developed in dark rooms] and ads onto boards to be sent
to the printer.”
It was a pre-web site world, and in Brooklyn, it was the Wild West.
“I’d be trying to get in my friends’ apartment at the Ansonia and the cops would have their guns out facing off with the gangs,” recalls Monica Musetti-Carlin, the Press’s advertising manager and a native of Park Slope, which was the paper’s area of coverage, along with adjacent neighborhoods such as Windsor Terrace, Sunset Park and Kensington.
“It was a really gritty neighborhood at the time. A lot of seemingly abandoned buildings,” said Doug Tsuruoka, who had been one of the paper’s staff reporters. “There was a lot of energy in the air. Things were starting to change, for good and bad. There was a lot of real estate speculation and forcing out of old tenants.”
On the front lines of a rapidly changing neighborhood, the paper’s offices were on Seventh Avenue between 13th and 14th streets. The publisher, Jim Smith, had a printing business and political aspirations, and so a newspaper was born.
“There were other papers. It was competitive, but there were also a lot of new businesses looking for venues to advertise. There was room for everybody,” said Musetti-Carlin. “Now, with the internet and so many other options, there isn’t room for everybody.”
But the Press foretold the fate of newspapers today, says Stein, when it folded after five years. “It was an unsustainable business model,” he says. Smith had sold the paper a few years earlier and relocated to Hawaii. (Politics didn’t pan out. He was defeated in a City Council race by Steve DiBrienza). And one small print paper with no other streams of income couldn’t make it.
But the five years in Brooklyn life that the Press documented are still with us, largely thanks to the New York State Newspaper Program, which took the Brooklyn Library’s collection of more than 60 defunct Brooklyn community papers and digitized them so they are available on microfilm. “I thought I had lost so much of it, but 90 percent of the Press was saved because of that program,” said Stein.
“They’re such a tremendous trove of information,” said Joy Holland of the library’s Brooklyn Collection, adding that these papers reported from the heart of neighborhoods with details and stories often overlooked by the larger metropolitan dailies.
But the Prospect Press benefited from some big city paper wisdom. “Having Dan O’Malley was the greatest thing any local paper could have had,” said Musetti-Carlin. O’Malley was a “lifer” at the Daily News and contributed to the Press. His son Tim was a staff reporter. “He showed us the ropes. He knew how to talk to people, how to run a newspaper.”
Among the stories and people covered during the paper’s run were the Seventh Avenue Rapist, a string of murders in Prospect Park, the opening of The Atrium at Sterling Place (an early co-op conversion in the neighborhood, in which a group of old stables were turned into 47 apartments selling for $49,686 to $149,877), the retirement of longtime Brooklyn Democratic Chair Meade Esposito, JFK Jr. visiting the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, the battle against a 12-story condo tower on Prospect Park Southwest (it eventually was built), and the graffiti artist who painted the F train.
“[The Prospect Press] really was very community oriented. It was a lightening rod. It kept everybody honest,” recalled Eric Weiss, a freelance photographer who occasionally worked for the Press. “If there was a problem with the commander at the precinct, they were on it. The city was reeling from a lot of corruption, and this paper tried to keep everything on the level.”
“Images From the Prospect Press” will be on display at the Brooklyn Collection of the Central Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, Grand Army Plaza, through August 29, 2009. It is free and open to the public. Check
http://www.brooklynpubliclibrary.org/ for the Brooklyn Collection’s hours.
Both photos are by Mike Stein for the Prospect Press. The top photo shows Sunset Park residents marching against the crack epidemic and the second photo shows "the Wildmen of the South Slope," who were among those responsible for the ubiquitous shoes tossed over electrical lines in the neighborhood.
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