'He Finally Comes Home': Park Slope Street Named For Pete Hamill

PARK SLOPE, BROOKLYN — With a decades-long writing career that spanned the globe, Pete Hamill was a man with "hundreds of addresses" throughout his life, his brother Denis says.

But as the legendary newspaper columnist reached the end of his life, there was only one home on his mind.

"'I want to die in Brooklyn,' Pete told me one day. [He said], 'I wanted to come back home, which I always thought was a beautiful noun on which to end a story,'" Denis said to a crowd Thursday, steps from the Seventh Avenue home where he, his brother and their siblings grew up.

Hamill, who moved back to the borough with his wife in 2016, got his wish when he passed away at Brooklyn Methodist Hospital last August, just a few blocks from his childhood home. He was buried in Brooklyn's historic Green-Wood Cemetery.

But the journalist got a second homecoming even closer to his roots this week.

On what would have been his 86th birthday, the city designated the Seventh Avenue block between 11th and 12th Street where he grew up as "Pete Hamill Way."

"When Pete started talking to me about Brooklyn, he was talking about 378 Seventh Avenue, and he wanted to come home," his widow, Fukiko Aoki, said. "Now, he finally comes home with this 'Pete Hamill Way.'"

The honor, organized by Council Member Brad Lander and the Borough President's Office, was a full-circle moment for, as Denis said, the place "that made Pete Hamill, well, Pete Hamill."

Hamill, who would go on to become an editor both at the New York Post and Daily News, not only learned to both read and write at the Seventh Avenue home, but found his first inspirations on the streets that surrounded it, his brother said.

"This street was always the ground zero for all of Pete's work," Denis told the crowd. "It was here that Pete Hamill learned the idiom and voices and yearnings of the big thumping hearts of working-class men and women, like my mother and father, who defined the great city that was and, by the way, still is the greatest capital of the universe."

Thursday's event included readings about Brooklyn from Hamill's memoir "A Drinking Life" and from an unpublished work he had been writing when he died about the borough.

Before getting into journalism, Hamill worked as a sheet metal worker at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and served in the U.S. Navy.

In his youth, he began delivering papers for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle at 11 years old and frequented the Brooklyn Public Library, which Hamill said his mother taught them was "the road out of poverty."

Eventually he would become known as a voice of New York City, which he lovingly called "the city of people who do not look like you," Denis said.

"Pete would be most honored if someday, some smart, but aimless Brooklyn kid who did not look like him gazed up at the 'Pete Hamill Way' sign, wondered who that guy was, looked him up and realized that the road to a life as well lived as Pete Hamill's could start from this street corner and through the Brooklyn Public Library," Denis said. "...That would be the Pete Hamill Way."