The story behind the Clement Garage, by Clarissa Sauter

Walking or driving past Rapelye and Hamilton, one might never give the corner adjacent to the BQE a second glance. What most don’t know is that it was once home to Salvatore “Buddy” Scotto’s grandfather, his three garages, and his eight family building, many years before the BQE was constructed.

The Clement Garage is across from the Gulf Station on the west side of Hicks Street.
The Clement Garage is across from the Gulf Station on the west side of Hicks Street.

Don Vincence Clementi, known later as Vincent, arrived in America in 1898. Soon after he bought a garage and the floor above it. Named Clement’s garage due to the hostile environment for immigrants, it was one of the few in Brooklyn at the time. Clementi would expand the business in the coming years by purchasing two garages across the street, where a gas station is now located.
Four of Vincent’s thirteen siblings had also come to the States, and he insisted that the entire family meet at two every afternoon for lunch and for dinner on Sundays in the apartment above the garage, described by Buddy as meticulously maintained by his grandmother.

Buddy Scotto, Clementi’s 85-year-old grandson, a Korean war veteran and a community activist for over fifty years, was born in 1928. One of his first memories, he told me, was an argument about Mussolini during a meal. He said the the older family members, first generation immigrants from Sicily, thought he unified the country at a time when most Italians rejected patriotism and instead had strong emotional ties to their home cities or provinces. Their American-born children, however, viewed Mussolini as a corrupt dictator who had committed unforgivable atrocities.
Relations in Carroll Gardens were also tense, especially between different demographics like the Irish and Italians, or the dominant WASPs and new Americans, but nowhere did tensions run higher than in the Italian Mafia. Codes of silence, or Omerta, threatened the lives of many Italian-Americans along the Brooklyn waterfront. Many Mafia bosses and underbosses also held senior positions in the Longshoreman’s Union.

“You said ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’”, said Buddy, referencing the tactic his parents taught him to use to avoid trouble.  Later, he said he felt that “as an Italian American, organized crime was a big embarrassment.”

Papa Clement, as his grandchildren affectionately called Vincent, knew that Buddy and his siblings and cousins were kept busy working during the school year. His daughter and Buddy’s mother, Rose, had married Patrick “Patsy” Scotto, and at different points over the years the family ran an imported wine store, a funeral home, and four movie theaters on Court Street. To keep them safe and off the streets during summer vacation, all of the children stayed with him at his summer home on Long Island. There Buddy Scotto, swam, played, and caught frogs until school  began again.
Back at the garage, Vincent mediated disputes among his family and customers.

“I grew up being taught to help people in the neighborhood,” said Buddy. Vincent also let his grandson learn to drive in his car, since Buddy was strictly prohibited from using his father Patsy’s 1936 Oldsmobile.

Buddy Scotto is still a force on the community, sitting on the board of the Carroll Gardens Association, which he founded, as well as a familiar sight at many local meetings as his wife will let him attend.
Buddy Scotto is still a force on the community, sitting on the board of the Carroll Gardens Association, which he founded, as well as a familiar sight at many local meetings as his wife will let him attend.

Buddy described the experience as “learning how to drive and then thinking I was a grown-up because I knew how to drive a car.”
He said the purchase of the garage had a major impact on his life.

“There’s no way that I could have done all this,” Buddy said, alluding to his instrumental support in garnering funds for the treatment of the Gowanus Canal and construction of Fulton Mall. He was also a founding member of the Carroll Gardens Civic Association, and his activism took him to the 1976 Republican National Convention and Ford’s White House. He remains a controversial figure for  many, but there is no question of whether Carroll Gardens would be the same without him.

After Vincent Clementi died, the property was sold and split up among his children. The building, from which hangs a sign with the logo of Aggressive Energy & Mechanical Group, is now used for office space and apartments. For his family, though, the Clement garage will be remembered as the place where it all began.

Share:

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Comments are closed.

READ OUR FULL PRINT EDITION

Our Sister Publication

a word from our sponsors!

Latest Media Guide!

Where to find the Star-Revue

Instagram

How many have visited our site?

wordpress hit counter

Social Media

Most Popular

On Key

Related Posts

Film: “Union” documents SI union organizers vs. Amazon, by Dante A. Ciampaglia

Our tech-dominated society is generous with its glimpses of dystopia. But there’s something especially chilling about the captive audience meetings in the documentary Union, which screened at the New York Film Festival and is currently playing at IFC Center. Chronicling the fight of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), led by Chris Smalls, to organize the Amazon fulfillment warehouse in Staten

An ode to the bar at the edge of the world, review by Oscar Fock

It smells like harbor, I thought as I walked out to the end of the pier to which the barge now known as the Waterfront Museum was docked. Unmistakable were they, even for someone like me — maybe particularly for someone like me, who’s always lived far enough from the ocean to never get used to its sensory impressions, but

Quinn on Books: In Search of Lost Time

Review of “Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance,” by Kevin Brown Review by Michael Quinn   “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” – Countée Cullen, “Yet Do I Marvel” Come Thanksgiving, thoughts naturally turn to family and the communities that shape us. Kevin Brown’s “Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance” is a

MUSIC: Wiggly Air, by Kurt Gottschalk

Mothers of reinvention. “It’s never too late to be what you might have been,” according to writer George Eliot, who spoke from experience. Born in the UK in 1819, Mary Ann Evans found her audience using the masculine pen name in order to avoid the scrutiny of the patriarchal literati. Reinvention, of style if not self, is in the air