A Brooklyn boy moves to the Upper West Side: Now long ago

In 1966, shortly after I started college, my family moved from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, to a then-new building. It was built under the states’s Mitchell-Lama urban renewal law that encouraged clearing of tenements and replacement with new buildings. These were not classically “rent-controlled” (like the controls instituted in older buildings post-WWII) but has restrictions on the rent, limiting the profit of the landlords and requiring justification of any rent increase.

I have very good nostalgic memories of my growing up in Brooklyn, in an era far very different from its current status as the hip center of the universe, mostly post-Dodgers and very much pre-Nets (at least in their Brooklyn incarnation). But I never regretted my family’s move to “The City”. As a college student and young adult when I came home for vacations or visits Manhattan, and especially the Upper West Side, was diverse and cultured and exciting in ways that were so different from where I had lived in Brooklyn. I loved coming there, loved walking the streets, day or night (a lot of night as a young man), reveling in the variety of small stores on Broadway, and the fact that the subway was only two short blocks away. And that coming from the subway you could stop for food for dinner from the butcher, baker, fish store, fruit and vegetable store; there were also family-run stores of everything from shoes to jewelry to laundries to delicatessens. And, within a few years of living there, my mother, a kindergarten teacher in the local school, knew most of the families whose children had passed through her class. That was not different from back in Brooklyn, where the same was true for my mother and her “kids” and their families, though there was probably more economic and ethnic diversity in Manhattan. There were (mostly) the same sorts of stores on the shopping streets of Brooklyn, but Broadway had a different feel; it was so intense!

One of the first, and most amazing things, we noted was how many movie theaters were within a few blocks of our house. There were also no multiplexes then, but the Riviera and the Riverside were on the same block of Broadway between 96^th and 97^th streets. The Symphony (now the Symphony Space, but then a movie theater) was on Broadway at 95^th, and in its basement, with an entrance on 95^th, was the Thalia. The Midtown was on Broadway between 99^th and 100^th and the Olympia up at 106^th. The New Yorker was at Broadway and 88^th, and the Loew’s 84^th St was at – 84^th St! There were even more theaters further south on Broadway. So I went to the movies a lot. This was a big change from the Avenue U, 25 cents + 5 cents candy Saturday double features in Brooklyn!

One night in the first summer we were there and I was home from college, 1967, my father and I were walking on Broadway, alive and vibrant at night as Avenue U or even Kings Highway never was. There was a lot of action and people as we approached a Stark’s Coffee Shop, on the corner of 92^nd (or maybe it was 91^st) St. We realized that they were filming a scene from a movie in the coffee shop, and we stopped for a while. I later saw that scene, many times, in the film The Odd Couple, with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Indeed, most often at the Thalia, which had an enormous collection of films and played a different double feature every day! You needed to have the printed schedule (no computers!) to keep track of what was coming so you could catch what you wanted to see. Most often, the Odd Couple (1968) was paired with another great film set on the Upper West Side, A Thousand Clowns (1965) with Jason Robards and Martin Balsam. I am sure I saw that double feature multiple times. I recently saw a posting of the Greatest 100 Films of All Time, and neither was on it. I don’t suggest that I am an expert or fit to judge this, but I have my opinions, and if I were compiling the list of the 100 Greatest Films I Have Ever Seen (which, in full disclosure, would not include the majority of the films on that other list), those two would certainly be on it!

The two most-grounded-in-the-neighborhood members of my family were my mother, based both on her role as an early-childhood teacher in one of the local schools and her incredibly warm and engaging personality that made, really, everyone love her, and my youngest sister, who attended public schools through high school on the UWS. Actually, she went to the school right next to our building, while my mother taught at the one 3 blocks away, which was itself closer than my own elementary school in Brooklyn had been to where we lived, demonstrating the density of Manhattan. I mentioned diversity; in terms of race and ethnicity, and even income, it was. I am sure that Sesame Street, beginning about that time, was based on the Upper West Side of the late 1960s. Not only were many ethnic groups represented in the neighborhood and in our building, but unlike in Brooklyn there were many mixed families – not only Italian AND Jewish (the big ethnicities of my old neighborhood) but Irish and Puerto Rican, Black and Polish, and on and on.

Things change in 50+ years. My father, who lived in that building from 1966, died a couple of years ago; it was a rental, not a condo, so we couldn’t buy and keep it. This means lots of people – family (not just immediate but very extended), friends, friends of family and family of friends, no longer have his apartment to stay in while visiting New York. Just as Brooklyn has changed so much I cannot recognize it, so has the Upper West Side. The family-owned stores are mostly gone, and walking on Broadway it seems like most of the stores are the same chains you would see in a suburban shopping mall. But not completely; there are still places to get NY pizza (the BEST!!! No question or comparison!!), if not for 20 cents a slice, and a few delis to get knishes, and a lot of fruit-and-flower stands. But a lot fewer movie theaters. The Thalia (now the Leonard Nimoy Thalia) no longer shows movies; its day as a repository for thousands of films was doomed by DVDs and streaming services. It, and the old Symphony are now Symphony Space, still a cultural center. The Loew’s 84^th St is a multiplex fit for any suburban shopping mall. But there are still a few theaters that regularly play both old and new “art” films (an old term generally equated with “foreign”).

My mother has been gone for decades; even the “new” playground at the school she taught in that had a plaque in dedication to her has been replaced by a newer playground, with no plaque. The Upper West Side is both mallified and gentrified, and also become a destination for young Orthodox Jews, especially Lubavitcher. And, yet, despite the fact that no one with a regular job can afford an apartment, there are still lots of poor people living there, so it remains a diverse community.

So I still have warm memories of both Brooklyn and the Upper West Side  from different parts of my youth. Being a child in Brooklyn was good, and being a young adult in Manhattan was great. It was a much cooler place to bring people I was dating to see; long walks actually took you places – Central Park and Riverside Park and the river and the Boat Basin at 79^th St., and Columbia and Grant’s Tomb and Riverside Church. All those things are still there even if Broadway is full of chain stores.

For my father’s 90^th birthday, we hired a car and driver and went to Brooklyn, starting in Coney Island and heading up to the Bedford-Stuyvesant and Williamsburg where he grew up. We saw my old neighborhood farther south, my high school and Brooklyn College, and the Ebbetts Field apartments. It was nostalgic, but it was good to get back to Manhattan.

But I actually have no plans to go back to either in the near future; I’ll work off of my memories and don’t need them replaced.

Herbie: 90 years and Brooklyn...

Late last month, my father turned 90. He’s in pretty good health (knock on wood, keyn eyn-hore,  כײן עַיִן הָרָע) though it looks different from his perspective than it does from that of most others. He lives on his own in the same Manhattan apartment he has for nearly 50 years (when it was new), walks several blocks every day to take his water aerobics class, and takes buses and subways to get around, both to doctors and museums and progressive events and occasionally to visit his remaining friends and acquaintances in nursing homes. He sometimes forgets things, but this seems to be not a lot more than most of us, and his analytic mind is sharp. It is harder on him when he flies places, but he still does. (The time two years ago when we both flew to DFW on Christmas Day and had to change planes to different places and a rare snow there meant the SkyTrain was out and the fact that it was Christmas meant no one was driving little carts and he had to walk from B15 to C36 – B to C is over the highway – was a challenge, but he did it fine.)

This is the part that other people see as great. For him, his left knee hurts a lot – he had his right knee replaced many years ago and it didn’t go well, so he never got the other done, and now it is really bad – so he has to count the days between SynVisc® injections. He is sometimes physically unstable. He hates that he forgets things. He sleeps a lot and takes daily naps (sounds good to me!). He never thought he’d make it anywhere near this long. His only brother was killed at 20 in the Spanish Civil War when my father was 14. His father died of cancer at 53. His mother died at 66. MY mother died, also of cancer, at 57. His oldest grandson, my son, committed suicide at 24. And here he is at 90, outliving most everyone of his generation; he just lost his last, and closest, first cousin. He knows people who are older, but most are homebound (or nursing home bound); a couple are still active, but it is rare that they see each other.

A birthday, he would be the first to point out, is just a day, one more. But it is symbolic, and the weekend before this day his children and grandchildren and spouses, none of whom live in New York, came to the city to spend time with him. In order to break up the constant eating, we rented a large van and driver and went to Brooklyn to see where he (and his children, also, in other neighborhoods) had grown up. We started in the south at Nathan’s (Famous) in Coney Island. This was a real high point. Nathan’s hot dogs and French fries are available in some airports around the country, but they taste different in Coney Island. And there are fried clam strips, hard to find anywhere in the Midwest. The clerks were apparently instructed to push Nathan’s “famous” Mac ‘n’ cheese, but none of us remember this from our childhoods as being part of Nathan’s. No, hot dogs (with brown mustard and sauerkraut), fries (the best in the world) and clam strips. And then, on a sunny but chilly day, walking around on the Boardwalk (there is, however, no more “under the Boardwalk” – sorry, Drifters – there was too much crime and drugs happening there), looking at the huge beach, and some of us (younger ones, and certainly not me) going on rides like the Thunderbolt (the roller coaster starts off going straight up vertical!) and the whatever-it-is-called that pendulums you back and forth starting way up in the air (Andy only). More on the carousel.

And finally we retrieved the driver and headed north, to Sheepshead Bay and to where we grew up. The kind of run-down, two family homes we rented an apartment in looking decades shabbier. But, amazingly, Zillow’s rated at about $1.8 million!! Come on! Then up past James Madison HS, my alma mater as well as my mother’s, and I was able to go into the swimming pool where the teams are now the Golden Knights, not the Highwaymen of my youth, and then to Kings Highway (after which the team name) and up to Brooklyn College, where my mother graduated and my father attended for a while. It is nice there; the quad is as I remember it, but there are more buildings to the west (I keep wanting to say south; I have a good sense of direction except when I think of Brooklyn, where I grew up I always think of what is in fact east as north and west as south, probably because the numbered “East” street where we lived ascend to the east.) Hanging around, my sister discovers a yellow parakeet. For real. Hopping around. The bird is catchable, to the entertainment of a little girl, who is worried it will die. We assure her it will not, as we place it in an empty coffee cup with a lid and an airhole, say goodbye to the girl, and the driver takes us was back south again to a Petco where Rita buys a cage and some birdseed. The bird is ravenous.

So we continue back north, through Flatbush, past Midwood and Erasmus high schools, and the old Ebbetts Field, into Crown Heights and then into Bedford-Stuyvesant where my father grew up. We drive past several addresses where he lived (they seem to have moved every six months or so; in the depression the first month was free), some of which buildings are still standing. We stop at the old Boys’ High, where he went, now not a regular high school (and not to be confused with the newer Boys’ and Girls’ high school not too far away).  It is an amazing, huge, castle-like building of gothic proportions. My father says he never saw the south side entrance in his years of going there; he lived to the north, and came in from that direction, or the east entrance. We wander around; across the street on the south side are big row houses, 4 stories plus basement. It is not the best neighborhood, even now, so we wonder what they would cost. Midblock they change to smaller, only 2 stories plus basement. One is for sale, and we look it up on a phone. Nicely renovated, 2200 sf, only $2.8 million. These prices are more than a little shocking for people from Kansas City.

We continue north, into and through Williamsburg, now hip to the north of the el-covered Broadway we are on and still Hasidic (including enclosed sukkahs built on the terraces) south of that street. Finally across the Williamsburg Bridge and back to Manhattan, tired and, on this Saturday afternoon in October so crowded we decide to even forego a stop at Yonah Schimmel for knishes, a major sacrifice, and make it back to his apartment in time for sunset. It was actually a great trip, and this is the consensus of a group of family who hardly ever all agree on what to do and whether it was fun.

And, I think, my father liked it. No matter how well he is doing, he and we know that he is 90, and that the opportunities to do things like this may be limited in the future.

Not too soon, though, we all hope.

Brooklyn Nostalgia

The web is full of sites where people reminisce about the places they are from, especially when they don’t live there anymore and so can romanticize it a bit. Brooklyn, New York, where I am from, seems to be particularly a focus of such memories. One of them, complete with pictures, can be found at http://www.screanews.us/NewYork/BrooklynOld.htm.

This site has a lot of good pictures, and some very good memories. Of course, most of the text is hallucinatory (few or no one-parent families), often projecting ("this was my life, so I imagine it was that of others'"), and frequently stupid. The "good old days" were not always so good. There is even a book by Otto L. Bettmann called “The Good Old Days – They Were Terrible!” (Random House, 1974), reviewed here nearly 30 years after it was published. Another site compared various "good old days", going back generation by generation showing what seemed better in memory was not really a very good time. The conclusion on that site is that “the good old days” were never a time period but rather when you were a kid. It is not the time -- it is that things seemed simpler, and often better, and we repress the bad memories from -- when we were kids.

That said, our memories are our memories; we accept the things that are better and regret the things that we miss. However, it is fun to look back at our past, and at our youth, the good and the bad. As far as the Brooklyn described on the website above, at least the pictures are good. While the memories range from the 30's to the 60's, they seem to focus largely on the 50's, and there is a report card from Kindergarten (1a) in 1949, so I would guess that the person who put this together is probably in his very late 60s.

Many of these things were still around in my memory, although the prices were up. Subways were 15 cents when I started riding them; for a quarter, the newsstand guy at the Neck Rd station would give you the NY Times and a token in change. Phil Ochs wrote a song in the 60s about the "Daily News" with the lyric "7 little pennies in the newsboy's hand and you ride right along to never-neverland!", and I remember that it was a big deal when it went up from a nickel. There is an early picture of me wearing a Daily News "Strike" body placard, having gone with Uncle Benny (who worked there) on a picket line. And Uncle Benny would bring the Sunday News comics home on Saturday -- magic!

I remember pizza slices at 15 cents also, but the real treat was walking to Roma's Pizzeria on Avenue U just east (but if you had asked me I would have said "north" probably, since in that part of Brooklyn the “East” numbered streets increased from west to east; the numbers of the streets were going UP, so of course it would be north!) of Nostrand Ave to get a WHOLE pizza for dinner. And walk back with it 5 blocks. Toss-up as to whether this beat Brennan and Carr, hot roast beef sandwiches, on the opposite corner. Which I think is still there. (On the map, the area where I lived is the northern part of “Sheepshead Bay”, bleeding into southern part of what is labeled “Midwood”;  the angled street that crosses the border SW to NE is Kings Highway, which is what most people called that area; Avenue U is a few blocks to the south. Often the whole area north of Sheepshead Bay up to nearly Prospect Park was simply referred to as "Flatbush". For another take, see the 1974 movie "The Lords of Flatbush", which featured young Sylvester Stallone, Henry Winkler, and Perry King!).

I remember the last of the straw-seat subway cars, the oldest on the Franklin Avenue Shuttle which ran for 3 stops and connected the Prospect Park station on the Brighton train (ours; then the Q, now the D) with the Independent train at Franklin Avenue (or so it said on the maps). Mostly I rode the one stop to the Botanic Gardens station in order to walk the long block down Eastern Parkway to the Brooklyn Museum; a couple of times to the second stop, Park Place, where the Brooklyn Children's Museum was (and, I am told, Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, where I was born, and now part of "Interfaith Hospital" having merged with St. John's).

I certainly remember the crowded beaches of Brighton and Coney Island, and Mrs. Stahl's (under the Brighton Beach subway station on Coney Island Ave and Brighton Beach Ave) and Shatzkin's (on the Boardwark in Coney Island around W. 38th St.? The same guys with the paper shopping bags with knishes in one hand were hefting a huge metal cooler on their other shoulder, picking their way among the jam-packed beaches (I can't even describe these -- ENORMOUS beaches, matched in size hardly anywhere in the world, hundreds of yards from boardwalk to ocean -- SOLIDLY packed with people, a couple of inches between their blankets!) shouting "Hot knishes! Cold drinks!"

We did play a little stickball, and more "Catch a fly is up" (later I heard it referred to as "One-o-Cat") in the street, as well as an odd version of baseball at the spot between our house and the Constantinos' where the narrow driveway on our side was home plate and lined up about midway across from the double driveway of the "rich" (read "attached single family, probably costing about $8000) houses across the street, which were 1st and 2nd bases on the corners. Pitcher stood in the middle, no bat but slapped the red rubber ball with your hand. That ball, a "spaldeen" (I understand because they were the discarded cores of Spalding tennis balls that were without hairy covers) were the mainstay of every game we played. In addition to the above, and a little hopscotch or potsy (is there a difference?), we had "two-box" (= "hit the penny”), "3-box" (also called "box baseball"), and "5-box" (a complex game involving bouncing the ball in each box). Also "off the wall" and Chinese handball (why "Chinese"?). And, of course, the mainstay because you could play it alone or with friends: stoop-ball (catch it on one bounce, 5 points; on the fly 10 points; off a “point”, 50 points – it comes at you fast – and off the top step point, 100 points! Or something like that.)

Movies were a quarter for a double-feature, at least on Saturday afternoons (take your sister!). And they were preceded by cartoons. And a nickel bought a candy bar, which went fast. Necco Wafers lasted forever, but had minimal taste. A compromise might be Jujyfruits, Jujubes, or Turkish Taffy, which stuck to your teeth and could be licked out for hours. Maybe that’s why I had so many cavities – or maybe it was because, as a dentist pointed out many years later, that NYC fluoridated its water sometime between the eruption of my “6-year molars” (full of cavities) and my “12-year molars” (very few). I do remember the unanesthetized pain of getting them filled, though!

I never had report cards like the guy on the website (I think he went to Catholic school). First of all, they were not A-F. We had (U)nsatisfactory, (N)eeds improvement, (S)atisfactory, and SO (really S°,  with a superscripted degree mark) that meant superior. I got a lot of S's, some SO's, and scarcely ever better than "N" in my two bete noirs, handwriting and Conduct (sometimes called “self-control”)! It seems to me that in Albany, when I was younger, we got graded in both "Ability" and "Effort". I will allow readers to decide which of these I received lower grades in.

I think those high schools in the pictures are Boys, Brooklyn Tech, and Erasmus Hall. I went to none of them. Bedford Ave was "HS row", being home to (south to north), James Madison (my alma mater, and that of 3 current or recent Senators and a Supreme Court justice, several sports figures, and Carol King – then Klein – and Chris Rock -- ok, this picture is from before my time!), Midwood, and Erasmus. Most of the newer HS (not Boys or Erasmus) were "U-shaped"; Tech was a full rectangle, and so big (8 floors!) on each floor than instead of numbering the rooms like 401-435 (as at Madison), they were numbered by corridor (e.g., 4W20).

As far as Coney Island amusements were concerned, when I was a kid Luna Park was gone, but Steeplechase was still there. I never liked the fast or scary or high rides, although decades later my son Matt managed to get himself really sick by riding (alone) the Cyclone several times. I did like Skee-Ball. And shooting. And another big thing was that there were Tuesday night fireworks in Coney Island all summer long, and we mostly watched from the roof of Grandma's building on E. 22d St. I remember when I first discovered somewhere, with pity, that there were places where there were only fireworks once a summer, on July 4.

And, while the website’s observation that most people in Brooklyn were Italian, Irish or Jewish might not have been completely true, I remember being quite surprised at some point in adolescence when I discovered there were White Protestants (Christians, but not Catholic and, unlike the non-Catholic Christians I knew, were not Black) -- an idea also expressed (obviously not stolen from me, but I had it way before I read it there) by the mayor-loosely-based-on-Ed-Koch in Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities".

The image of Brooklyn in the popular consciousness, and the memories of those who left it, change with the generations. The "Kid from Brooklyn" was a staple of World War II movies, tough, smart-alecky, and ethnic, often with a Jewish or Italian name. And relatively small, certainly smaller than the big Southern farmboy, another stock character. In the 1950s, when TV was new and based mostly in New York, both the writers and characters were often New Yorkers, and particularly Brooklynites. Shows like Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners (Irish working class folks living in an apartment that was sparse by any standard) and The Goldbergs (Jewish, and a little higher level working class) introduced (stereotypical) Brooklyn folks to the rest of the country.  There were a lot of smart kids from Brooklyn, many in important jobs all over the country.

And now Brooklyn is hip. Having transformed the winter hotels and apartments of Brooklyn retirees in Miami’s South Beach in the last 20 years, young “new” (=”often moved from elsewhere”) New Yorkers are filling the places those retirees came from, moving from the exorbitant rents of Manhattan and long-gentrified Park Slope to the slightly-less exorbitant rents of Brooklyn, filling the formerly Hasidic area of Williamsburg and the asbestos-shingled houses of Greenpoint and Red Hook with yuppies, and the leading edge now moving into – Bushwick! Of course, nostalgia ain’t what it used to be!

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