I live in Brooklyn, a few blocks from the apartment Marianne Moore shared with her mother on Cumberland Street. The red sign you see above is mounted on the building’s front wall. I like that someone has marked her presence with a line from her essay “Brooklyn from Clinton Hill”: “Brooklyn has given me pleasure, has helped educate me; has afforded me, in fact, the kind of tame excitement on which I thrive.”
A sign next to Moore’s quotation warns against trespassers. Begging for trespass. Also making me wonder: did Marianne Moore readers overtake the building, once? Pester the residents? Occasion the sign?
A friend and I trespassed last fall, sneaking in 260 Cumberland behind an indifferent delivery man. We climbed the steps (no elevator, no clear image of young Elizabeth Bishop in it, nervous, on her way up). Just grey walls, solid steps, the faint and stronger cooking smells of the living. I looked for MOORE on the line of mailboxes in the lobby then for any unusual name, a name she may have liked. Nothing flared.
Marianne Moore’s essay on Brooklyn, “Brooklyn from Clinton Hill,” is worth finding, a sound piece to get to amidst all the chirpy pieces about “Brooklyn writers,” lately. Her fascination with the place and the anonymity it gave her for over thirty years (thirty years in the same apartment!) opens up the neighborhood again for me.
The essay is a dizzying tour of what she watched, heard, and was moved by: a scarlet tanager in a nearby tree; the origin of Brooklyn street names; a book of pangolins at the Pratt Institute Free Library (Pratt: please reopen this!); Louis Zukofsky’s A Test for Poetry and his presence as a professor at Brooklyn Polytechnic; and so many other passions in her net. Her exhilarations culminate in the Williamsburg Bank building, where she finds “a Mosler safe, with the look of Cartier platinum and the burnish of a watch interior, its luster maintained year after year without a flaw.”
One can still go in and look at the lobby of the bank. The building is all condominiums, now (developed by Magic Johnson), but the lobby is a vista of checkered floor and tellers’ stalls, the safe in the dark behind pendant lamps. It will inevitably become a retail space. Many of our good nights with friends have ended here, standing next to the night guard in the lobby. I like that this place holds apart from buying & selling, for now, holding in Moore’s prose, too.