e against unpleasant people is unavailable in Manhattan.
Ask a man to look you up at No. 952 West One Hundred and Twelfth Street,
and though your heart loathes him, you shall not escape. But in
Brooklyn you are safe until the moment your doorbell actually rings. For
even if your visitor should find Bowdoin Place, many streets in Brooklyn
have two, three, or four systems of numbering. Some will maintain that
it is not rigidly honest to give a stranger your Brooklyn address
without giving him detailed directions for finding his way from the
station, illustrating your argument with a sketch map. But there will
always be Puritan consciences.

As a matter of fact, some of the kindest and most enlightened people I
know live in Brooklyn. And I cannot see why that in itself should make
them a subject for general satire. I have been told that a professor at
Harvard has recently made the calculation that the drama and the art of
conversation in America would be poorer by 33-1/3 per cent. if the joke
about living in Brooklyn were to disappear. When a visitor from
Brooklyn drops in unexpectedly at a Harlem flat, the proper thing for
the host to say is, "Well, well, what a task it must have been to find
your way out," and when the visitor starts for home his host remarks,
"Sorry you can't stay; but we all know how it is--in the midst of life
you are in Brooklyn. Goodnight."

Of course I don't mean to deny that the people who live in Brooklyn are
themselves largely responsible for the perpetuation of the silly jest.
They subscribe to it in a spirit of meekness that is characteristically
local. Ask a man from Cherry Springs or Binghamton where is his home and
he will quietly say, Cherry Springs or Binghamton, as the case may be.
But the resident of Brooklyn is apologetic from the start. He
anticipates criticism by saying, "Well, you know, _I_ live in Brooklyn,"
and he looks at you in tremulous expectation of the usual condolences.
If by any chance one should omit the traditional reply, the man from
Brooklyn begins to fear the worst. On both sides of the East River the
principle seems to be accepted that inasmuch as there are places like
Cherry Springs or Binghamton there must be people who live in them, but
that it is by definition impossible to bring forward a valid reason why
one should live in Brooklyn.

The question is really a complicated one. Harlem's disapproval of
Brooklyn is not of a piece with Harlem's disapproval of local