Pinpointing Biggie's Crib
A reader steered us to the photographs from a 2003 exhibition at the Robin Rice Gallery in the West Village. The photographer Micheal McLaughlin took a number of atmospheric black-and-white photos of Brooklyn scenes and landmarks, including the childhood home of Biggie Smalls and the Brooklyn Heights apartment of Truman Capote. We know that Capote’s…
A reader steered us to the photographs from a 2003 exhibition at the Robin Rice Gallery in the West Village. The photographer Micheal McLaughlin took a number of atmospheric black-and-white photos of Brooklyn scenes and landmarks, including the childhood home of Biggie Smalls and the Brooklyn Heights apartment of Truman Capote. We know that Capote’s place was on Willow Street and we’ve always been under the impression that Biggie lived on St. James Place in Clinton Hill. Can anyone i.d. the exact address of this apartment building?
BKLYN: Micheal McLaughlin [Robin Rice Gallery]
Bedford-Stuyvesant starts at Marcy? That’d mean that Nostrand, Bedford, Franklin and Classon are now part of what? I anticipate that soon the Flushing Ave. border to the North will be changed to DeKalb or maybe even Lafayette, farther south, due to the seemingly inevitable encroachment of Williamsburgh. Well, with the rapid gentrification of Bed-Stuy, folks from Brownsville, East New York and even Crown Heights, may soon be making claims to residency there. Such is life.
In Biggie’s day that part of the hood was definitely considered Bed-Stuy. I remember him rapping in front of the liqour store on the corner.
St James is Clinton Hill, not Fort Greene. I have seen people try to pass off Waverly as Fort Greene, but no-one would go this far over. However, someone else informed me now that, “according to the City,” Bed Stuy now starts at Marcy — and this was a landlord, not a real estate agent!
Funny how Biggie rapped about living in Bed Stuy. Now that St. James Pl has been annexed by Ft Greene, his lyrics dont quite have the same meaning.
Slangin rocks on the mean streets of Ft. Greene doesnt quite have the same cred as slanging rock in Bed Stuy.
i used to live around the corner and was there for the memorial.
Biggie Lived @ 226 St. James Pl. Near the corner of Fulton. It’s the building on the left hand side just before the corner.
226 st james pl apt 3L.
I understand that Biggie lived on St. James Pl. between Gates and Fulton in one of the limestone apartment buildings with his Mom, not sure which one as there are about four or five in the same style in a row. The developers group renovated one of those buildings about 3 or 4 years ago and made them into condos that sold like hotcakes.
Capote lived in the basement apartment of the building in the photo, at 70 Willow Street, which was owned by Broadway set designer Oliver Smith, a friend of Capote’s (who designed the Bway production of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which Capote wrote). Capote’s short story, A House on the Heights, celebrates the beauty of the house at 70 Willow. What’s less well known is that Capote’s first residence in Brooklyn was actually in Clinton Hill, at 17 Clifton Place (he moved there in 1946). On pg 125 of Gerald Clarke’s “Capote: A Biography,” Capote is quoted as follows: “I have changed addresses, have moved to a little lost mews in darkest Brooklyn…I wanted most to get way from hectic, nerve-wracking influences, to escape and get on with my work.” For ten dollars a week, Capote rented two rooms at 17 Clifton, which was a rooming house owned by a pair of elderly women who ran a phone-answering service in the basement.