In this week’s stunning 40th anniversary issue of New York Magazine, Pete Hamill has penned, Brooklyn Revisited: The author returns to Brooklyn to find that everything and nothing has changed. Here’s an excerpt:

All Brooklyn people have their own versions of the borough, of course, shaped by time and place. Each connected hamlet has its own heroes, villains, legends, myths. My Brooklyn story has two main chapters. Almost 40 years ago, I published an article in this magazine that evoked the virtues of Brooklyn as an alternative to living in Manhattan. At the time, I was living alone in a rented garden apartment on Berkeley Place in Park Slope, getting over a sad divorce, drinking too much, trying everything in my power to calm the confusions of my two young daughters. I knew that my most implacable enemy was solitude, and that I needed a sense of community. I found it again in Brooklyn.

My new friends were united by common interests. Most were men and women of the liberal left. They had read Jane Jacobs and Dorothy Day and Saul Alinsky. They were against the war in Vietnam. They demanded full civil rights for all minorities, including women, gays, and lesbians. They believed that politics truly mattered, and had formed the Park Slope Independent Democrats to make their own existence felt in the hidebound Democratic Party Establishment. Most supported John Lindsay as mayor (and a few worked for him). Most supported Gene McCarthy for president in 1968, but they also mourned Robert F. Kennedy. It was a time of angry disputes, apocalyptic racial rhetoric, moral quandaries, bitter divorces (as all relationships were tested by the gathering power of feminist theory)