142 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn
Mailer's four-story Brooklyn Heights brownstone overlooking New York Harbor, bought in 1960 or 1962 (sources differ) and his Brooklyn home from late spring 1962 until his death in 2007, though from the 1990s he lived more and more in Provincetown.
142 Columbia Heights is a four-story brownstone in Brooklyn Heights into which Mailer moved in late spring 1962 with his third wife Lady Jeanne Campbell after their 4 May 1962 marriage. The published Days characterizes the move precisely: “in late spring they move into 142 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, a four-story brownstone he had purchased in 1960. Mailer lives there continuously until his death, except for sojourns in Provincetown, where he will live the majority of his time during the last decade of his life” (Lennon and Lennon 2018, p. 353). J. Michael Lennon‘s compiled list of Mailer’s residences (January 2006) gives a different purchase date, May 1962, the month Jeanne Campbell moved in, and has Mailer living in Manhattan until then: at 73 Perry Street, from October 1960 at 250 East 94th Street, and from March 1961 at the Hotel Wales on Madison Avenue (Lennon, “Residences”). The two sources disagree on the year the house was bought.
The Columbia Heights house — a top-floor writing study, the harbor and the Manhattan skyline visible across the East River — is the workspace for much of Mailer’s writing from The Presidential Papers (1963) forward. He gave the long Paris Review interview there on 6 July 1963 (64.1), and married Beverly Bentley there on 29 December 1963.
The house in the residence list
Lennon’s list traces how Mailer used the house over four decades (Lennon, “Residences”):
- 1962–1969. Columbia Heights was his year-round base, with summers in Provincetown: at 535 Commercial Street in 1962, then in a rented apartment, and from 1966 at his own house at 565 Commercial Street. He separated from Jeanne Campbell in the late fall of 1962.
- Fall 1969 to 1975. The list records no residence at Columbia Heights. After his separation from Beverly in the late summer of 1969 Mailer wintered in Provincetown (1 Miller Hill Road, then the rented house at 627 Commercial Street), and from 1972 to 1975 lived with Carol Stevens in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Here the list departs from the published Days, which has him living at Columbia Heights “continuously” from 1962.
- 1976–1991. From January 1976, after leaving Stockbridge and Carol Stevens for Norris Church, Mailer was again at Columbia Heights for most of each year, from about September to June, with summer weeks on Cape Cod and, from 1977 through 1982, Augusts on Mount Desert Island in Maine. After he bought 627 Commercial Street in October 1983 the Provincetown share grew: the list places him in Provincetown for all of 1987 and the first months of 1988, and from 1989 to 1991 from June to September.
- Studios. From about 1986 to 1996 he kept a fourth-floor studio down the street from the house, and from about 1996 to 2000 a rarely used studio in the DUMBO area.
- 1992–2006. The list puts Mailer in Provincetown half the time or more from 1992 to 1996, and year-round at 627 Commercial Street from 1996. The published Days likewise describes him “now living full-time in Provincetown” in 2004 (Lennon and Lennon 2018, p. 376). He kept the Brooklyn house until his death in 2007.
After Mailer
On 21 July 2013 J. Michael Lennon led a Norman Mailer Brooklyn Walking Book Tour for the Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony, from the lobby of the St. George Residence at 55 Clark Street to “the Norman Mailer Home” at 142 Columbia Heights. The tour treated Mailer’s and other writers’ experiences in Brooklyn Heights and his Brooklyn novel Barbary Shore (“Brooklyn Walking Book Tour,” Norman Mailer Society, 23 May 2013). See Brooklyn, New York for Mailer’s Brooklyn homes in order.
Related pages
- 1960 | 1962 | 1963 | 1976 | 1983
- Brooklyn Heights | Brooklyn, New York | 102 Pierrepont Street, Brooklyn | Provincetown, Massachusetts | 627 Commercial Street, Provincetown | 565 Commercial Street, Provincetown
- Lady Jeanne Campbell | Beverly Bentley | Norris Church Mailer | J. Michael Lennon
- Norman Mailer: The Art of Fiction XXXII (64.1)