Habitats: Private Lives in the Big City

25 Over the Family Store, Staff Quarters: MARY GANNETT AND HER SONS IN COBBLE HILL, BROOKLYN (July 26, 2009)

1 4 2 25 Over the Family Store, Staff Quarters Mary Gannett and Her Sons in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn JULy 26, 2009 Mary Gannett in her apartment above the family bookstore in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. (Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times) 1 4 3 The story of the family that lives above BookCourt, a much-loved independent bookstore in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, begins in 1979 in the venerable WordsWorth Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The staff included a pair of part-timers in their early 20s named Henry Zook and Mary Gannett, and in a “maybe someday” kind of way, they thought about opening a bookstore of their own. A photograph posted decades later on Facebook captures them as they looked in those years—he with a mop of fuzzy hair, she an angelic blonde, and both seeming incredibly young. By 1980, the two were married, working for New York publishing houses, and living on Cheever Place in Cobble Hill, an appropriately named address for such a bookish pair. The following year, the couple rented the ground floor of a pre–Civil War frame house at 163 Court Street. Where Dom’s Barbershop had sat for a quarter of a century, they opened their own little bookstore, a place with much of the intimacy and ambience of the one where they had met. Nor did they stop there. In 1984, shortly after the birth of their first son, Zachary, the couple bought the entire building for $160,000, and within two years the family was installed in the duplex above the store. The son—Zack to everyone except his mother—claims he can remember the day they moved in. He definitely remembers the years that followed. “It was a great house to grow up in,” Zack says as he lounges on a bench outside the store, dressed this day in rolled-up chinos and a Flaming Lips T-shirt. He and a friend used to jump over the fences that separated his family’s back garden from the gardens on either side. When he was very young, he would look out the front window facing Court Street and hold his breath until someone passed. Cobble Hill was a far quieter neighborhood in those days, and sometimes the street was so empty, he couldn’t quite make it. By 1990, with the birth of a second child, Benjamin, there were four of them in the duplex, along with assorted pets. (An early store cat named Zoe was exiled from the premises after lunging at a fish in a customer’s shopping bag; this was back when Cobble Hill was home to many Italian families, and the ill-fated fish had been intended for someone ’s Christmas Eve dinner.) The year Benjamin was born, the couple expanded into the building’s dirt basement; Ms. Gannett still winces at the memory of a major renovation conducted with an infant in residence. O V E R T H E fA M I Ly S T O R E , S TA f f Q U A R T E R S 1 4 4 Six years later, the couple spent $700,000 to acquire the brick building next door at 161 Court Street, the storefront of which had been the home of Albert’s Floral Shop and is locally celebrated for its star turn in the movie Moonstruck. All this additional space allowed Ms. Gannett and Mr. Zook to significantly expand the store, which is now more than five times its original size. What Zack remembered as a “creepy greenhouse,” complete with a giant turtle, has made way for a sky-lighted expanse where readings are held. Other changes over the years included the arrival of a Barnes & Noble a few blocks away in 1999 and the couple’s separation in 2002. Yet today, most of the family still lives above the store. Ms. Gannett, who handles the shop’s finances and is the children’s-book buyer, lives upstairs in No. 163 with Ben. Zack, the general manager, is ensconced on the top floor of No. 161. Mr. Zook, the senior buyer, lives nearby on Douglass Street. “We converge every day at the store,” Zack says. “It’s psychotic, but it works.” Longtime costumers who know and are fond of both Ms. Gannett and Mr. Zook sometimes think to themselves that such an arrangement must have its painful moments. But they forget how...