There's a delightful article in the Times about 7 Middagh Street, the legendary bohemian house in Brooklyn Heights where Benjamin Britten, W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, and Gypsy Rose Lee all cohabited circa 1940. I used to live a block away from where the house once stood — the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway obliterated it — and read everything I could find about George Davis' peculiar menagerie. Britten, incidentally, couldn't stand the chaos of the place and fled with Peter Pears to Amityville, Long Island, which fortunately had not yet begun to experience the terrifying events depicted in The Amityville Horror.
