Brooklyn Heights: A Historic Waterfront Community Minutes From Manhattan

Deborah Hallen first visited Brooklyn Heights as a member of an amateur chamber music group. A year later, she moved there. A year after that, following a performance on Staten Island, she met Paul O. Zelinsky, an illustrator of children’s books, who, it turned out, also lived in Brooklyn Heights, in his art studio.

“I fell in love at first sight,” said Ms. Hallen, 79, of the man she soon married.

That was back in the 1970s. She and Mr. Zelinsky, 70, are now grandparents, but they still live and work in this historic waterfront community, home to many artists and writers. “Back in the day, rents were affordable,” she said. “Everybody was everybody’s friend.”

Ms. Hallen took a job teaching science at P.S. 8, the local public school on Hicks Street, from which she is now retired. She is vice president of Friends of the Brooklyn Heights Branch Library, which raises money for programs at the handsome new library on Cadman Plaza West. In addition to many book events, the library hosts groups for knitting, chess and other pursuits. Ms. Hallen also sits on the Youth, Education and Cultural Affairs Committee of Community Board 2, an appointed position. Mr. Zelinsky, who won the Caldecott Medal in 1998 and has sold millions of copies of his most popular book, “Wheels on the Bus,” is part of a circle of illustrators who meet regularly in the neighborhood.

In 1998, the couple and their two daughters left their one-bedroom rental and moved into a two-bedroom, two-bath co-op apartment with views of the harbor and the Brooklyn Bridge, a wood-burning fireplace and a roof deck. They paid $320,000. “It’s worth over a million dollars now,” Ms. Hallen said. “We have no desire to leave. It’s beautiful and quiet here.”

She likes to walk on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, which overlooks the harbor, and to walk over the Brooklyn or Manhattan Bridge, or take a subway into Manhattan. “It’s half an hour to a Broadway show,” she said.