Now we know their names

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/nyregion/22slope.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

An Outpost in the Blue Sea of Brooklyn

It is as lonely an outpost as the Alamo, the gritty determination of its Brooklyn brotherhood reflected in the approaching eyeballs of a far larger army, like the 300 Spartans of legend in Thermopylae — but minus 296 Spartans.

Four — count ’em, four — brownstones on a single Park Slope block are waving a flag rare enough in this liberal bastion to stop passers-by in their tracks: “McCain.” The signs, with white letters against a rectangular navy blue background — for those in Park Slope who have most likely never seen a McCain sign — are taped carefully to living-room windows or strapped tightly to the burglar bars on the front door. Compared with the surrounding neighborhood, thick with Obama signs, buttons and banners, this block of 11th Street off Fifth Avenue is as red as a hot patch of East Texas.

“People say, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ ” said Betty Donohue, 73, whose McCain sign has been up for two months. “They say, ‘He’s not going anywhere.’” She laughed and shrugged on Tuesday and said she would wear a McCain T-shirt if she knew where to find one.

The election district that includes 11th Street has 643 registered voters: 51 of them Republicans, 452 Democrats, 23 in other parties and 117 who did not list a party. That breakdown is echoed by the overwhelmingly Democratic makeup of Assembly District 52, as well as that of Brooklyn, which voted 79 percent for Senator John Kerry in 2004.

The little Republican presence on 11th Street became visible in August, when one neighbor got the signs, but it really started decades ago, a lifetime ago, as long as the residents in those four brownstones have known one another. When Mrs. Donohue and her husband bought their home in 1965, most everyone on the block seemed to be Roman Catholic and have six or eight children, supported by a paycheck from the Fire Department, the Police Department or another city agency.

“You had 100 children on the block,” she said (the Donohues had six). Then this family sold its home, and this one and that one, and the neighborhood changed. “Now these professionals, they both work, they have nannies and their meals on wheels,” she said, using her favorite description of restaurant deliveries.

“But lovely people,” she continued. “To pay these prices, you aren’t getting riffraff.”

The Donohues and two other families who have been there forever, the Dixons and the Olsons, got to talking over the summer, and the way they remember it, somebody said something about getting signs, and Bob Olson — a handyman whose professional motto is, “We Repair What Your Husband Fixed” — volunteered.

“I’m a perverse kind of guy,” said Mr. Olson, 43, a registered Democrat who described himself as less pro-Senator John McCain than anti-Senator Barack Obama. “I was going to put up a sign that said: ‘Nobama. Keep the Change.’ ”

Mr. Olson’s wife, Susan, talked him out of it, and he picked up four McCain signs in Woodbridge, N.J. The fourth was for the woman who lives next door, whom he has known all his life and refers to as his aunt. (“You could put Attila the Hun on the Republican ticket and she’d vote for him,” Mr. Olson said.)

In this day of Facebook profiles and blogs updated throughout the day, a simple piece of thin cardboard in the window can be easy to miss. Indeed, most people on 11th Street just walk by, pushing strollers or wearing earphones or talking on cellphones. Every now and then, though, someone stops.

“These people are supposedly liberal, but there’s a few in the neighborhood that, you go against their opinion, they’ll tell you to your face,” said Mrs. Olson, who is 48 and helps out with her husband’s business. He agreed: “There are some people who come up and debate me all the time.”

Like his neighbor Richard Elovich, a sociologist who has lived on 11th Street for 10 years and has never voted Republican.

“I tease Bob,” Mr. Elovich, 53, said. “I’ll try to challenge him in a way. What’s his thinking? What’s McCain going to do for him?” He said he interpreted the McCain signs as an invitation: “To me, that says the person’s possibly open to some dialogue.”

Mr. Elovich is more bothered by the indifferent voters on the block, the younger ones who say the Democrats and the Republicans are all the same. “There’s a certain kind of white male in New York, where life is about not being part of any group,” he said. “Their idea of democracy is limited, in a certain sense, to individualism.”

None of the McCain sign-bearers said they felt threatened by anything approaching vandalism in this polite neighborhood. “A couple of people said to me, ‘You better be careful, putting that up,’ ” said Mrs. Donohue. “Are you kidding me?”

The number of McCain signs may change before Election Day. Down the block, Margie Dixon’s sign hangs among her collection of colorful Irish and Catholic-themed suncatchers, and she was happy enough to hang it. But lately she has been growing concerned about Senator McCain’s age, 72, and feeling less comfortable announcing a political stance in public, on a block where she has lived for 38 years.

“I’m really hedging — I’m almost one of those undecideds,” said Mrs. Dixon, 75 “I’ve never put anything in my window. I’m thinking of taking it down, because I’m flip-flopping.”

Griff Palmer contributed reporting.