Where did Carl Sagan grow up and live?

📍Brooklyn, New York, USA

1934 – 1951

“I grew up in the Bensonhurst neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York, the son of Sam Sagan, a garment worker from Ukraine, and Rachel Gruber, who had a fierce and focused intelligence that she was never given the education to fully develop. Brooklyn in the 1940s was Jewish, working-class, intensely neighbourhood-oriented, and the contrast between its human scale and the immensity of the universe I was beginning to contemplate was a tension I lived with happily throughout my career. My grandfather took me to the 1939 World's Fair and I understood from it that the world was changing rapidly and that science was changing it. The Brooklyn Public Library gave me access to books that the apartment could not afford. The night sky above Brooklyn, even dimmed by city lights, asked questions I spent my life trying to answer.”

👍 LovedThe Brooklyn Public Library — the democratic institution that gave a working-class boy access to the accumulated knowledge of civilisation. My mother's fierce intelligence that modelled what a mind could do. The contrast between the human scale of Brooklyn and the cosmic scale I was beginning to understand.

👎 DislikedThe limited horizons that working-class Brooklyn offered to a boy with cosmic ambitions. The anti-Semitism that shaped every Jewish family's sense of security. The sense of needing to prove that curiosity was legitimate even when it reached beyond what the neighbourhood considered practical.

Map showing where Carl Sagan lived — Brooklyn, New York, USA

🗺️ Approximate location today

Street view of Carl Sagan's home at Brooklyn, New York, USA

📍 Street view today

Sources: Davidson, K. Carl Sagan: A Life (1999), John Wiley & Sons; Sagan, C. Cosmos (1980), Random House; Poundstone, W. Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos (1999), Henry Holt