“Ninety-Second Street: Brooklyn Stories” by Gerry Coleman

Ninety-Second Street: Brooklyn Stories

Gerry Coleman
Brooklyn Writers Press (2025)
ISBN: 978-1952991547
Reviewed by Joan Kirschner for Reader Views (08/2026)

Ninety-Second Street: Brooklyn Stories by Gerry Coleman is a series of anecdotal tales from a time, mainly the early 1960s through the mid-1970s, that now exists only in memory. These atmospheric stories take place primarily in and around the far reaches of Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge neighborhood. It is an insular community anchored both by the Verrazano Bridge over New York Bay to Staten Island and the remote end of the Fourth Avenue subway line, roughly a full hour’s ride from the bustle of Manhattan. In contrast to what many New Yorkers of the Outer Boroughs (Queens, Staten Island, and The Bronx, as well as Brooklyn) still call “The City,” meaning Manhattan, the Bay Ridge that author Gerry Coleman so vividly, and at times poignantly, describes – and grew up in – is something of a lost world.

His characters are mainly young men who frequent the local bars for their social life, along with a few young women, who might be potential girlfriends or sexual partners. They are primarily Irish Americans, with others of Italian American background, and a few of Scandinavian descent (Bay Ridge has long had a sizeable Norwegian community). They grew up together in working-class families, the Irish Americans and Italian Americans attending the same parish church and parochial schools and all being chastised by the strict priests and nuns who were their teachers.

The Vietnam War hangs heavily over these young men. Their draft numbers may determine whether they will become soldiers, and they are already in a general state of dread for themselves and mourning for former classmates and friends who went to those distant battlefields and never came home.

The stories burrow into the frequently dark childhood and adolescence they shared, the psychology and social mores of their community, and often explore the grimmer sides of their family lives, with parents who were marked by their experiences of the Great Depression and World War II, and who typified traditional roles and values. Because it is just before the passage of legislation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the general shift towards more sensitive language, they are both supportive of and blunt in describing one among their band of brothers who suffers from cerebral palsy.

Coleman has a knack for describing the physical surroundings as well as some of the more eccentric denizens of his community with both a fondness and a vivid personal lyricism that brings the settings and his characters to life, even in what others might consider the most dismal of circumstances. His readers might imagine themselves as that person at the end of the bar or at a table in the back who brings along a book for company, but peeks furtively over its open pages to observe what everyone else is up to.

Baby Boomers, with ties to mid-twentieth-century New York City, Brooklyn in particular, may nod, laugh, or, depending on their own experiences, wince a bit with recognition at these stories. Coleman is an astute observer and does not present a world whose warts are cleaned up or glossed over. Readers should be prepared for graphic descriptions rather than rosy nostalgia. Although the tales in Ninety-Second Street: Brooklyn Stories are fiction, they feel as though they come from a place close to his heart, even when they aren’t pretty.

As a former New Yorker of a certain age, when I was young and making a life for myself in the city, I sometimes came across and became close to individuals who could have hailed from Coleman’s Ninety-Second Street, or a neighborhood very similar. My background and choices were very different, and I didn’t always understand theirs. These stories remind me of them and explain something more to me about who they were and why, and I feel grateful for finding a route to these insights, however belatedly.

I’d like to read more from Gerry Coleman about the work he pursued and choices he made later in life, and what he might have learned from them.