A GOOD NEIGHBORHOOD. Smith Street in Brooklyn is known today as a trendy Restaurant Row, but I recall what it was like just before a wave of gentrification made it so. The memories rushed back at me last night, when I saw a play called There Goes the Neighborhood.

Back in the Eighties, I lived off Smith Street on Baltic Street. Music was everywhere. Within listening range of the run-down, low-priced apartment I shared with a painter, a trombonist practiced salsa licks. The music also blared out of a bar as well as an abogado/accountant/driving lesson operation near the Warren Street exit of the Bergen Street subway stop.

Along the stretch south of Baltic were many dusty and deserted-looking storefronts with enigmatic window displays. They seemed to be home to social clubs — one had a paper-machier cow in its window; another boasted giant-sized versions of chewing gum wrappers.

Nearby on Court Street was a tongue-in-cheek display devoted to something called the Brooklyn Surfers, evidence of which lingers on the Internet in the posting "Hey, I lived in Cobble Hill (which is on the other side of the Gowanus canal from Park Slope) from '81 to '89. Court St. right across from the cinema (and next door to the Brooklyn Surfers- long gone)."

If you like this kind of reminiscence and share a fascination with the perennial transformations of New York's neighborhoods, you'll be interested in There Goes the Neighborhood, in which Deanna Pacelli plays ten characters involved in the gentrification of the area of Brooklyn around Carroll Gardens. Synapse Productions is running this 55-minute play by Mari Brown on Monday nights through November 7. Emphasizing the impact on the Italian-American community, the low-budget production (based on interviews conducted by Brown and Pacelli) is a little rough-around-the-edges but still worthwhile, especially if you've got an attachment to the area, which has also been depicted (more or less) in the movie Moonstruck and the books Motherless Brooklyn and My Old Man.

In November, Synapse will briefly revive its puppet musical Animal Farm for three nights at The Connelly Theater. Ed Park of The Village Voice reviewed it here.