Jonathan Lethem Shows The Guardian His Brooklyn Nabe

“This whole neighbourhood has become centred on the kind of middle-class families that were just one very small minority element then [in the ’70s]. So many of these houses were – it wasn’t just that there were families of different races in them; there were different uses for them. There were boarding houses and boarded-up houses – abandoned ones. And there were also communes. Not just my parents’.”