Brooklyn Heights childhood revisited: Alice Outwater’s 2nd volume of reminiscences
Alice Davidson Outwater has followed up her 2011 “82 Remsen Street” with a new collection on what it was like to grow up in Brooklyn Heights in the 1930s and early ‘40s. As with the first book, the stories in “Revisiting Remsen Street” (Wind Ridge Publishing, Shelburne, Vermont, 96 pages, $15.95) were originally published in the Brooklyn Heights Press in roughly monthly installments at the turn of the millennium.
Young Alice Davidson’s was not your average upbringing, since her family owned one of the wider houses on Remsen Street and had live-in Irish maids and a cook, as well as the laundress and seamstress who came in weekly. It was in many ways an enviable “upstairs, downstairs” existence in which the Davidson children were to a degree, but not entirely, insulated from what went on in the greater world outside. The new volume includes episodes in which that world begins to intrude on Alice’s awareness.
Not only is there the incident when 7-year-old Alice and her 5-year-old sister Louise come across blood on the sidewalk of Montague Street, “a big messy splotch that turned into a dried trickle as it approached the curb” – a sight that frightens them but that their parents refuse to discuss – but there are also later moments when Alice encounters words like “tryst” whose meanings she doesn’t fathom. Later still she begins to understand about prejudice and discrimination, after having been “blissfully blind to the behind-the-scenes exclusion” practiced at the dancing school and debutante parties she was privileged to attend.