Going... Going... Gone?

The first time Critic Edmund Wilson visited Brooklyn, he found "a whole new world, which seemed to me inexplicably attractive ... There was space and ocean air and light, and what seemed to me--it was what most astonished me--an atmosphere of freedom and leisure quite unknown on the other side." That description was published 35 years ago. Today, life for many of Brooklyn's 2.4 million inhabitants has taken an all too familiar urban turn. Tales of metropolitan life that came from three Brooklyn neighborhoods last week:

> The tree-lined 1800 block of West Ninth Street in Bensonhurst is a close-knit neighborhood of working-class Italian families. At least 50 people were outside their neatly kept houses when four shots rang out. Plumber Angelo Treglia, 42, fell dead. After police officers arrived, none of the residents would admit to having seen a thing. "What are they waiting for, another murder?" asked Treglia's tearful widow Tilda, as she begged for someone to identify the killer. Finally, after four days of pleading, Detective Edward Zigo convinced five witnesses that allowing the murder to go unsolved might be seen by outsiders as a sign of the area's deterioration. Police charged a neighborhood handyman, Joseph D'Amico, 48, with the slaying. The alleged cause of the killing: a quarrel over botched repair work he had done on Treglia's sidewalk. > Park Slope was a well-to-do neighborhood of elegant three-story brownstone mansions until their owners began moving to the suburbs. The area's slow decline was partly arrested in the 1960s when middle-class professionals began renovating many of the houses, including one that was bought by Lawyer Hugh Carey. Even after he moved to the Governor's mansion in Albany in 1975, Carey kept the house in Park Slope in the family. Last week thieves broke in and made off with $4,000 worth of jewelry, silverware, cameras and electronic calculators. Said the Governor's daughter, Susan Dempsey: "We asked our neighbors if anyone saw or heard anything, but no one was around."

> Once the south side of Williamsburg was populated by upwardly mobile immigrant Jews from Europe. When they moved elsewhere, progressively poorer blacks and Hispanics took their places. A month ago, members of the Love Brothers, a Hispanic gang, began terrorizing the 100 or so residents of a six-story building on South Fourth Street, tearing out the building's pipes, smashing windows and furnishings and peddling whatever could be moved. They got $35 a stove, $25 a refrigerator, $10 a sink, $3 a steam radiator. By week's end the building was a cannibalized hulk, and all the tenants were gone.

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