This past Saturday, my wife, Deb, and I visited my daughter in Brooklyn. There was a night and a morning on either end of the visit, but really it was one day, and the idea was to see how much we could cram into it. But the sojourn was about more than seeing the daughter. It was also about research, as how can one write off a trip if they don’t tie in the writing?
We booked a hotel at the top of Fort Greene, bordering Vinegar Hill, a significant neighborhood setting for the book I’m finishing up. Kings County Gone Amok is the third book in the Brooklyn 8 Ballo series, in which 8 investigates the kidnapping of a young girl that brings him again and again to Vinegar Hill, which was then known as Irish Town.
Bright and early on Saturday, Deb and I struck out for a walk around to get a feel for the place. As we entered Vinegar Hill, we walked down Sands Street, the location of where I’m currently in the big showdown that involves various factions who were historically accurate entities of the time. The Italian Black Hand gang led by Frankie Yale. The Irish White Hand gang led by Pegleg Lonergan. And the Gangster Squad, led by Detective Johnny “Broadway” Broderick. The kidnappers and 8 Ballo are the fictional part of this climactic scene.
Sands Street led right up to the gates of the Brooklyn Naval Yard, still does, and was a place of sin-filled fun in 1925 Brooklyn. At the time, it was nicknamed Hell’s Half Acre. It housed illegal speakeasies, tattoo parlors, brothels, gambling joints, and just about any sort of carnal adventure you might want to engage in, as long as you weren’t afraid of risking your life. The primary creatures crawling through this excess of indulgence were the sailors from the Naval Yard, but many more were drawn to its bestial, animalistic eroticism.
Sands Street at seven on a Saturday morning certainly seemed a bit tamer than that, and now hosts high-rise buildings and small parks. All the same, as I walked down the street, putting myself back to 1925, I could feel the hoots, hollers, and screams of pain, pleasure, excitement, and terror.
We walked up and down Bridge Street, the center of Irishtown back in 1925, trying to place my fictional headquarters for the White Hand Gang and Pegleg Lonergan. I found the building I wanted on Water Street, and was forced to move it to the top of the hill of Bridge Street, melding the location and edifice into the creation of my book, The Five Fingers Club, which is a speakeasy in the basement, a hardware store on the first floor, and the offices up above where Pegleg decided who was going to work that day on the waterfront.
At the bottom of Jay Street, on the edge of the East River, a walking path wove its way between the water and green parks, leading under the Brooklyn Bridge, into DUMBO, and beyond. At this time of day, the sparse traffic consisted of joggers and dog walkers. This beautiful spot, overlooking the Manhattan skyline, was a major reason I imagined why so much of 1920s Irishtown had been torn down and rebuilt into high-rise apartments in 2026 Vinegar Hill, but a significant amount of historical character still remained if you looked close enough.
Several of the streets were still cobblestone. There was the old brick building, worn and forlorn-looking, that my mind was able to relocate to Bridge Street to become the Five Fingers Club. The fringes of the neighborhood still possessed either old-world charm or run-down poverty, depending on your mood of the day. The Hudson Avenue Generating Station, built in stages from 1922-1932, is being repurposed from fossil fuels into the Brooklyn Clean Energy Hub.
Next, we headed to Downtown Brooklyn, on the edge of Brooklyn Heights, for brunch with my daughter and her partner. We had a fabulous meal at French Louie’s, which I highly recommend if you ever find yourself in Brooklyn. Then it was off to the Buffalo Parade.
Tatanka Owe Akupi. Return of the Buffalo. Amir Nizar Zuabi created this artistic version of wild buffalo roaming the streets of Brooklyn in partnership with Elders from the Lenape and Lakota Tribes. It started with short talks and songs by these elders that spoke to unity, love, harmony, and peace. Then the buffalo came.
The buffalo were life-size puppets, each with two people inside and several handlers outside, and they came in a herd of fifty. They streamed into Abolitionist Park in Downtown Brooklyn as if they were pounding across the Great Plains, the most amazing puppets I’ve seen since Sesame Street and the Muppets, but even more powerful and realistic.
The herd circled the park, then went off down the street, following a marching band with a crowd of thousands following, as they paraded toward Brooklyn Bridge Park, a mile and a half away. We followed for a bit, caught up in the spectacle of it all, but eventually had to peel ourselves away as we had plans to go to the Rockaways for an Oyster Festival and a sailboat ride on Jamaica Bay.
The Rockaways, a peninsula of Queens that feels more like a barrier island, was the perfect bookend to a day that started on Sands Street of Vinegar Hill. The name “Rockaway” may have meant “place of sands” in the Munsee language of the Native American Lenape who occupied the area at the time of the arrival of the Europeans, the same Native American tribe whose Elders were speaking at the Tatanka Owe Akupie.
The Oyster Festival was a bit of a letdown as it didn’t compare to those offered in Maine, but a few of those succulent mollusks found their way into our bellies as we listened to an Irish band play. Yes, another tie-in to Kings County Gone Amok (if you happen to be an IRS auditor reading this).
A cloudy (not sunset) sailboat jaunt out into Jamaica Bay followed, taking us through marshlands, across the bay, to the edges of JFK Airport, and back to the Rockaways. I’m not sure if 8 Ballo will find his way to doing any of the Rockaway events, but I’ve been tinkering with incorporating this fascinating getaway spot less than an hour from Manhattan and part of Brooklyn into the Modern-Day Chronicles of Max Creed.
We ended the night with dinner at The Wharf, a bayside restaurant and bar with a band inside that could be heard on the extensive waterside deck. This made me think the Rockaways might be a good venue for 8 Ballo’s next investigation. It turns out it was a booming spot in the 1920s, a summer playground for New York City, and was filled with bootleggers because of the irregular coast. There were many high-speed chases on land and water, making the wheels turn in my head, but I have a few other books to write first.
When being a writer, it is impossible to separate work from play. It is all one and the same.
About the Author
Matt Cost was a history major at Trinity College. He owned a mystery bookstore, a video store, and a gym before serving a ten-year sentence as a junior high school teacher. In 2014, he was released and began writing. And that’s what he does. He writes histories and mysteries.
Cost has published twenty books, mostly in the crime genre, from traditional PI to thriller to historical mystery. His most recent book is the debut of a new series, 1955: A Jazz Jones & January Queen Raleigh Mystery.
Cost now lives in Brunswick, Maine, with his wife, Harper. There are four grown children: Brittany, Pearson, Miranda, and Ryan. Cost now spends his days at the computer, writing.
Always filling in the classics I never got around to. This week I’m diving into John LeCarré’s 
Next up in my TBR is Emily St. John Mandel’s 
Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Vaughn Hardacker (Monday), Rob Kelley (Tuesday), Matt Cost (Thursday), and Allison Keeton (Friday).
I’ll be signing books at the South Portland Barnes and Noble on Saturday, September 12 at 1 PM and at The Maine Book & Print Fest at Thompson’s Point the next day at the same time. After that, Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick hosts a reading/discussion of The Last Altruist and Hard as a Headstone at 4 PM on Saturday, September 19. Hope to see you at any or all of them.
If tasty books that had something to say were automatic best sellers, then the entire group of Maine Crime Writers would be lounging on the world’s most comfortable patio chairs around a glimmering pool in a tropical, but not too hot or humid, paradise, toasting each other with D’Amalfi Limoncello Supreme [the world’s most expensive alcohol*], and lighting the tiki torches with rolled-up $100 bills. Wait, why would WE be lighting the tiki torches? Our entourages would be lighting the tiki torches for us as we waved our empty limoncello flutes at them, demanding refills.
Once. And the one with a cat holding a bone that reads: I found this humerus.
Now Available from Kathy Lynn Emerson: For the first time in fourteen years, a print edition of the first in the Diana Spaulding 1888 Mysteries, Deadlier than the Pen, is available in paperback. Diana, a columnist for a slightly disreputable daily newspaper, is after a story about the reclusive horror writer calling himself Damon Bathory. She ends up following him from New York City back to his home town of (where else?) Bangor, Maine, during the infamous Blizzard of ’88. And did I mention that someone appears to be trying to kill her? Also available as an e-book. The other three books in the series will be available later this year.
