Brooklyn Heights
The Brooklyn neighborhood, overlooking the East River and Lower Manhattan, where Mailer's parents lived from 1943 and he himself lived after the war, and his principal home from 1962 until his death in 2007 - centered on the four-story brownstone he owned at 142 Columbia Heights.
Brooklyn Heights, the genteel neighborhood on the bluff above the East River with its celebrated Promenade and views of Lower Manhattan, was Mailer’s principal home from 1962 until his death in 2007. Its anchor was the four-story brownstone at 142 Columbia Heights, bought in 1960 by the published Days’ account (Lennon and Lennon 2018, p. 353) or in May 1962 by J. Michael Lennon‘s compiled list of Mailer’s residences (Lennon, “Residences”), and moved into in late spring 1962; there he kept the top-floor “crow’s nest” study for the rest of his life. Many of his interviews were conducted there, among them his most extensive conversation on sex and pornography (the 1980 Puritan interview, 81.23). For the years from 1983 he divided his time between the Heights and Provincetown.
Earlier and other addresses in the Heights
Mailer knew the Heights well before 1962. His parents moved to 102 Pierrepont Street in the spring of 1943 (Lennon and Lennon 2018, p. 346), and he stayed there after Harvard in 1943 and again after his return from Paris in 1948. Lennon’s residence list has him at 49 Remsen Street, with a studio at 20 Remsen, from September 1946 to September 1947, the year in which he completed The Naked and the Dead (1947); a 2013 post on Lennon’s website instead places him at his parents’ Pierrepont Street apartment for a time in 1946 (see 102 Pierrepont Street, Brooklyn). Late in life, from about 1986 to 1996, Mailer also kept a fourth-floor studio down the street from 142 Columbia Heights (Lennon, “Residences”).
The Heights after Mailer
On 21 July 2013 Lennon led a Norman Mailer Brooklyn Walking Book Tour of the neighborhood for the Norman Mailer Center, beginning in the lobby of the St. George Residence, 55 Clark Street, and ending at 142 Columbia Heights (“Brooklyn Walking Book Tour,” Norman Mailer Society, 23 May 2013). The tour took up Mailer’s and other writers’ experiences in Brooklyn Heights and his novel Barbary Shore, set in a Brooklyn Heights boarding house.
Related pages
- 142 Columbia Heights | 102 Pierrepont Street | Brooklyn, New York | Provincetown, Massachusetts
- 1943 | 1962 | 1981 | Barbary Shore | Norman Mailer Center
- Norman Mailer: The Interview (81.23)