"Brooklyn Before is a delight. I see visual threads from many of Larry Racioppo’s projects intersecting these photographs: the car fins, the plaid pants, the boom box. The effect is to convey an urban grittiness that was authentic working-class reality in this patch of Brooklyn. Fantastic!"

- Jan Ramirez, Chief Curator, National September 11 Memorial & Museum 

"Brooklyn Before offers a glimpse of a forgotten Brooklyn and captures the grit, diversity, and community of South Slope in the 1970s, before the influx of boutique coffee shops and multi-million-dollar rehabbed brownstones. Larry Racioppo’s images focus on working class families and communities during a challenging historical moment for New York City."

- Natiba Guy-Clement, Manager of Special Collections–Brooklyn Collection, Brooklyn Public Library 

"If you’re born and raised in Brooklyn like me, the rhythms and attitudes within Larry Racioppo’s photographs are like voices of old friends: They return you to your truest self. If you’re not, these images invite you into inscrutably odd and cool neighborhoods. Walking the same turf Racioppo mapped out, as I do each day, reveals scant evidence of what his camera captured. Before these streets became hip to hipsters and real to realtors—before Brooklyn became a brand—they contained worlds now nearly vanished. When I open this book, these worlds spring defiantly back to life. "

- Larry Blumenfeld, Jazz critic and culture reporter 

"In this eye-popping jewel of a book Larry Racioppo immortalizes the Park Slope Brooklyn where I was raised before it lost its unique character when it lost its unique characters. Brooklyn Before is as close as we can get to saving what was once a glorious working class Brooklyn."

- Denis Hamill, former Daily News columnist and author of Fork in the Road 

"The streets shown here take me back to when I first lived in Brooklyn in the 1970s and 1980s, and it is wonderful to revisit that vibrant ethnic urban life in Larry Racioppo’s amazing photographs.  As I pored over the pages, I was once again impressed how this wonderful borough has always been a place for immigrants, the home of aspiring working-class and middle-class families. Before Brooklyn shows us the past and holds lessons for the future."

- Tupper W. Thomas, founding President of the Prospect Park Alliance