Parking Meters and Egg Creams

Waddaya mean you don't see no connection?

You're right. They don't have anything to do with each other.

I usually don't read obits, but this one intrigued me:
The last New York City mechanical parking meter - an emblem of street life since 1951 was withdrawn from service recently.

Before you rejoice and decide to move back to the City from Boca or wherever it's always beautiful weather, read on. The meters have slowly been replaced by more than 62,000 battery-powered digital meters that the City finds more accurate and vandal-resistant.

In a somber but unpretentious ceremony somewhere in Coney Island, the last mechanical meter was replaced by a digital version ready to take quarters.
 Quarters? What happened to dimes?
I remember dime meters on Flatbush Avenue and then along Church and Utica Avenues. And not the type that required the driver to twist a handle after inserting the coin. Just put the coin in the slot, listen for the gears winding or more likely inserting the coin and waiting for nothing to happen before pounding it on its side to jiggle the coin enough to engage the gears. The latter took some finesse.

Parking meters came to New York somewhat late in the dance. They were first introduced in Oklahoma City in 1935. How's that for embarrassment? Scooped by Oklahoma City! I'm sure that really alleviated the parking crisis in downtown OC.

Anyway, it took sixteen years before New York realized that it was letting a lot of dimes - and quarters - to say nothing of slugs and foreign coins, to slip through their fingers. The meters were first installed on West 125 St, and it sure didn't take long for the fungus to spread to the 'outer boroughs.'

Those original meters required weekly winding by some guy walking along the curb with a crank, winding each meter. (Another occupation replaced by modern science and after all that special training you went through to get that job! ) But, the job that really impressed me was the guy who emptied the coins from the meter into a 2-wheeled canister with a long vacuum-cleaner type hose.

Now, that was a job! Just think of the possibilities. Think of all the promotional opportunities that must have been turned down once you got that job. "No, sir. Thanks for the offer, but I really don't want to be borough president. I think I'll just stay down here in the Department of Traffic doing the same boring job out there on the streets I've been doing for 23 years, collecting all those dirty coins for the City I love and making sure they all get into this canister I drag around every day."

A side note for all you ex-pats out there. It no longer costs a quarter for an hour of parking. For that lone quarter you get 10 to 12 minutes of parking. That could be why the City has installed meters that can accept coins or credit cards and/or parking cards. How thoughtful. There is no longer a need to carry a roll of quarters. There are were about 600 meters that accept credit cards.

There must be a lot of folks feeding these machines. In a recent year, the City took in more than $96 million from those meters.

Here's a further update.  Those digital meters have been replaced by muni-meters.  First the meters were removed, leaving only the hollow poles until the City got around to removing them.  I'm sure that the overly honest drivers just dropped quarters down the hollow tubes.  At the other end of the moral spectrum are the citizens who just yanked the poles out of the sidewalk and sold them for scrap metal. 

In any case, now once you've found a parking spot you then have to locate the nearest muni-meter (There's usually two or three per block conveniently disguised as all the other street stuff you find along a curb.)  Determine how much time you need to buy and how you will pay for it (cash or credit). Then run down the block, pay for your parking, run back to the car, put the receipt on your dash - all while looking for the parking enforcement agent.

Figure on about three dollars an hour  A lot of years ago I was in some town on Long Island.  Pulled up to a meter, put in a penny and got twelve minutes of parking.  Since there was already 40 minutes on the meter I felt I had beaten the system.  By the way, many of the digital meters have a sensor that puts the timer back to zero when the vehicle leaves the spot.  Saves you the time and grief of looking for a spot with time on the meter so you can save a dime.  (Don't tell me you didn't do that years ago!)

I'm getting too old to handle all this change.

Well, I was so distraught over another loss from my youth (Ebbets Field, trolley cars, Ebingers, Tilden High School, and now parking meters) that I decided to drown my sorrow, literally, in an egg cream.

Anyway, I could not find a decent egg cream, let alone many who knew what an egg cream is. Anyone out there know where the name came from? Why 'egg'? Check this: a current neighbor who grew up in Bay Ridge seems to remember an egg cream made with CREAM SODA!!! (That's why your mother told you never date anyone from any number street that didn't have 'East' in front of it.)

Decided to see if I could recreate an egg cream on my own.

Fox's U-bet Syrup - a Brooklyn institution long before Ebbets Field was conceived.

The only syrup allowed in an official 'egg cream.'
 

Just as Brooklyn bagels taste better than bagels from any other city, so too, with egg creams.
 

As a public service, the following is the recipe for an 'official Brooklyn egg cream' from Fox's website:

• Take a tall, chilled, straight-sided 8 oz. glass
• Spoon 1 inch of U-bet chocolate syrup into glass
• Add 1inch whole milk
• Tilt the glass and spray seltzer (from a pressurized cylinder only) off a spoon, to make a big chocolate head
• Stir, drink, enjoy

It didn't taste the same!

By-the-way: No more glass jars; only plastic squeeze bottles. For those of you who insist on scooping your syrup out of a hard-side container, Fox's U-bet is available in 55-gallon drums. (No kidding!)

This is a response to the previous installment announcing the demise of Tilden High School. The story, in part, appears courtesy of Sam Roberts, class of '64 and The New York Times.

WHEN TILDEN WAS THE WORLD
By SAM ROBERTS
Published: December 17, 2006
THE REV. AL SHARPTON and I don’t have much in common — but we do share a defining backdrop for our wonder years in Brooklyn. At different times, we both attended Samuel J. Tilden High School.

And both of us were chagrined by the announcement Monday by the New York City Department of Education that Tilden — deemed unsafe and unsalvageable academically — would be closed and replaced by a cluster of smaller and presumably more manageable institutions.

Tilden alumni are hardly slouches. In addition to Mr. Sharpton, they include the Mets manager Willie Randolph, the labor leader Victor Gotbaum, the former White House counsel Leonard Garment, the writer Murray Polner, the jurist Milton Mollen and the weightlifter Dan Lurie.

Sid Gordon batted for Tilden before joining the baseball Giants. Ronnie Blye broke scoring records at the school before playing for the football Giants. The folk humorist Sam Levenson, though not an alumnus, taught Spanish there in the 1940s.

Jake Ehrenreich, whose memory play, “A Jew Grows in Brooklyn,” opened Off Broadway in October, not only graduated from Tilden but also makes his entrance on stage wearing a Tilden sweatshirt, emblazoned with a giant T.

Tilden, which opened in 1930, was built to accommodate about 3,800 students. But within a decade, enrollment swelled by 50 percent. I grew up about a mile away, on Kings Highway, one block from the hulking New Lots el, which more or less defined the border between East Flatbush and Brownsville. Almost overnight, Brownsville, heavily blue collar and lower-middle class, would be recast from Jewish to black. We lived in what we considered solidly middle-class East Flatbush, which I deluded myself into thinking was an integrated neighborhood because an Italian family lived on our corner.

Also, I like underdogs, and like almost everybody at Tilden during those years, I knew that its namesake was a New York governor who had won the popular vote for president in 1876 but been deprived of the job because supporters of Rutherford B. Hayes had stolen the election in Congress.

The school wasn’t perfect. As early as 1958, a police officer was regularly stationed outside. We abandoned the annual Thanksgiving football rivalry with Jefferson High School ... because more injuries were suffered in the stands than on the field.

After last week’s announcement by the Department of Education, I dug out my 1964 Tilden yearbook. Since we graduated on the stage of the old Loew’s Kings, I’d been in touch with a handful of Tildenites and knew what had become of them. Robert Ellman became a teacher, just as he’d predicted in the yearbook. Marilyn Schwartz became an educator, too, and acquitted herself in the thankless role of spokeswoman for the school district that includes Columbine High School in Colorado. Paul Nussbaum had said he wanted to be a politician; he became chairman of a giant hotel chain.

Most of the girls said they wanted to be teachers or stenographers. One boy wanted to be a roofer. Was that really what they aspired to? ... Did Ilene Kleinman become a psychiatrist? Did Philip Asher become a choreographer? Judy Gitlin had been voted most likely to succeed. Did she? At what?

At Tilden, fewer than 44 percent of students scheduled to graduate last June did so, and only half of those got a Regents diploma.

In the 1930s, Tilden established the school system’s first guidance department to effectively deal with what was quaintly described as juvenile delinquency. Now it is considered one of the city’s most dangerous schools.

In the Tilden I attended, nearly 98 percent of the students were classified as “others,” a euphemism the Board of Education used to designate people who were neither black nor Hispanic. Still, the mix of ethnicities and religions made the school much more multicultural than any place I’d ever been.

By the time Mr. Sharpton graduated, the proportion of “others” had shrunk to 63 percent, which was still considerably more than he would have encountered if he had stayed put on Lenox Road.

Right around the time Mr. Sharpton was attending Tilden, Sam Levenson was asked how the old neighborhood had changed since he taught there. More mixed, he replied. “No matter where I go, or how successful or unsuccessful I am,” he explained, “I never in my life shall ever feel that ‘they’ are coming. There is no ‘they’ to me, because I know about being ‘they’; I have been ‘they.’ ”

Hold On To Your Tilden Sweat Shirts, Folks

From the official Samuel J. Tilden High School website:

www.tildenhs.org/ Brooklyn 5800 Tilden Ave Brooklyn, NY 11203


The staff of Samuel J. Tilden High School is a staff committed to excellence. This excellence will be evidenced in the development of out future leaders. It is our plan to insure that the young people that graduate from these portals are prepared with the social and academic skills necessary to achieve in an ever changing, technologically developing world. Within our young people we will reinforce the positive values that they bring from their homes and their communities. As they develop a sense of self-worth and dignity, they will also develop a strong appreciation for their own culture and respectful tolerance for the lifestyles of others. We will reaffirm the necessity for our youth to be academically prepared, socially concerned, and intellectually discerning human beings who will feel confident and adept in an ever changing multicultural and multifaceted environment.

Well, it seems that not everyone agrees with the above statement. Certainly not the New York City Department of Education ('Board of Education' to us Boomers) who on December 11, 2006 said that it would close five failing high schools that had proved unsalvageable.

That honorable distinction was bestowed on Tilden, as well as Lafayette and South Shore, and two small Manhatten schools.

The Brooklyn schools will be replaced by collections of small schools with about 400 - 500 students, typical of the Bloomburg administration, which has closed or is in the process of closing 17 other large schools across the City.

Education officials said the schools to be closed had notably low four-year graduation rates, did a particularly poor job helping students who were already behind as incoming freshmen, and proved exceedingly unpopular with prospective students.
In addition, the schools all had safety problems. Extra police officers and security guards were put into each of them after each school was named an 'impact school.' (South Shore and Lafayette were taken off the list after improving.) Hey, remember when Ralph was the only cop assigned to the school and there probably wasn't enough for him to do.
At Tilden, 43.5 percent of students scheduled to graduate in 2006 did so. (What was the graduation rate the year your graduated? Did you even know anyone who did not graduate?)
Don't throw away your Tilden keepsakes.
They're sure to become great conversation pieces. You can tell your grandchildren that you remember when Tilden was a great school in a great neighborhood, in the best borough of the greatest city.

A sad day.

Class Jobs - more

I don't remember class presidents prior to the fourth grade, but from that point on until I got into junior high school we always had a boy president - not that it really mattered because the president didn't do squat. Every year the boys would decide who they wanted as president and then procede to nominate at least two girls.

Duh!

It was simple. Boys voted for the only boy; girls split their vote between the two or more girl candidates. There was no platform; no promises; but lots of patronage. (More about patronage later.)

Who knew then that we were being prepared for the real world.

Every year the same drill, with the same inevitable outcome.

The president had real power - unless the teacher didn't like him which was the case with any boy duly elected. So, the teacher would appoint a monitor - the kid who would be sent to the main office to retrieve messages or supplies, but more importantly he or she was the rat, the stooly who would stand up in front of the class when the teacher left the room. When the teacher returned, the monitor would report all the miscreants and their often exaggerated crimes. Recently, a federal law was enacted to protect whistle-blowers and I'll bet Congress had these class monitors in mind when they drafted the law.

I had taught for a while at Abraham Lincoln High School (It was NEVER Lincoln High School.  Either Lincoln or Abraham Lincoln High School) but it wasn't until I joined Meyer Levin Junior High School that I perfected the fine art of patronage. If I had twenty eight kids in my class, my goal was to give each one a job. And they loved it! There were so many kids in my official class doing 'stuff' that I thought about assigning student supervisors.  I was once late to class and when I came in every one was doing his/her assigned job.

Hampton Gathers was my favorite. First, I loved the name. Some days I would call on him five or six times a period, just to hear the sound of his name. Hampton Gathers. He was my main man. This kid was ultra cool before cool was even invented. He was what I unofficially called our lollipop monitor. As important as his job was, it was, at best, a part-time assignment. But Hampton embraced this job with his whole being.

Let me refresh your memory.

Every room had a round red sign, about twelve inches in diameter. Stenciled on each side was the room number. And this sign was attached to a wooden dowel about the size and length of a teacher's wooden pointer. During a fire drill, and other occasions requiring evacuation of the building, the teacher was expected to carry the sign aloft as he and the class behind him left the building. This way, the class, in the ensuing frenzy could easily reassemble.

Now, on paper, this sounds like a plan.

And if there was one thing this teacher shared with his students, it was the opportunity on some early spring afternoon, when the leaves are just beginning to bud, to leave the building for a nice stroll out Beverly Road and left along Ralph Avenue, cross Tilden Avenue and observe the miracles of nature and possibly make a quick detour toward Tomain Joe's Luncheonette.

What this teacher did not particularly like was having to carry the silly sign in the building, let alone out in the street.

Hampton Gathers to the rescue. My main man.

"Had this been a real emergency you would have been instructed to get out of Teacher's way unless you can run faster than him." 

Hampton was pressed into service maybe three times that year and on one occasion for an unexpected fire drill. The latter caused major administrative concern. The smart money put the blame on Hampton who vigorously denied any wrongdoing. Everyone knew it was not a scheduled fire drill because it wasn't a particularly warm day; Dr Herselle would never schedule a drill where students might be required to put on coats. And the last thing he wanted was a posse of piqued panicked parents parading into the principal's office.

My absolute best student assistant was Carol G. On the first day of class, my first day in the school, Carol told me I would need a class secretary and she would be happy to be that person. She was in my 8th grade SP official class.

Any way, Carol, at the ripe age of 13, was better organized and more mature than most of the secretaries I've had since leaving teaching. And, she could print like a typewriter.  Remember, this is before computers. I mean this kid was great. Carol's arrival signalled the end of most of my administrative duties. (She later expanded her duties to be our son's babysitter. How neat was that?)

There was one job in junior high school, because of its importance, that could not be relegated to students. During passing between classes, all teachers were required to stand outside their classroom to observe the flow of student traffic. For what? To break up fights? In Meyer Levin in the sixties? To watch for kids passing on the right or weaving in traffic? Ha! Pity the poor student who inadvertently made a left turn across oncoming traffic to enter a classroom without first going to the designated u-turn area, so marked on the corridor floor with turn arrows. Amazing the power of the system. Three years in the school. I don't think I ever saw a kid knowingly cross that line and if he had, what punishment is appropriate? Well, technically it is a moving violation.  We may have to bar you from graduation ceremonies.  I used to like calling a kid walking on the other side of the hall to see me and see how they would react. Invariably the student would walk forty feet further down the hall, make a u-turn at the designated arrow and come back to where I was standing.  By that time I had forgotten what I wanted to say.

I don't know if teachers were exempt from the white line rule, but until I got tenure, I wasn't going to take any chances.

One more chapter on Meyer Levin - its teachers - and then we'll mosey through the neighborhood again. I'd like to hear from some of you who lived east of Ralph Avenue. No, not you, Billy. You lived south of Flatlands Avenue and that was Canarsie - or Flatlands. Definitely not East Flatbush.

Street Merchants

Update to this article:  Wow, did this generate interest!  All the mobile food vendors. Buy a truck and a grill.  Fry some food and bingo, you're in the restaurant business.  Sixty years ago we thought it was exotic.  "Hey ma, I bought an egg roll offa dat truck an' I still got money for ice cream."  Compared to today, it was truly primitive. Let's save that for another discussion.

We did most of our daily shopping on Church Av - there was no need to go elsewhere. The closest thing to a mall before there was a Kings Plaza was Flatbush Av or Kings Highway near the Brighton subway station or Pitkin Avenue.("So, where else to shop for a Bar Mitzvah suit?")

But there was an entire retail world that came to our door. There were the obvious 'seasonal' vendors. The ice cream guys in the warm weather. In our neighborhood, the Good Humor man reigned supreme. We're talking about a specially designed pick-up truck with a roofless cab. (In bad weather there was a canvas roof that could be unrolled.) The poor Bungalow Bar guy came in a distant second. He had to endure some very unflattering elementary-school poetry and even more damaging rumors regarding the cleanliness of the product. The latter ultimately contributed to the company's demise. (What do you think happened to those neat

trucks with the house roofs?) For a while, even Howard Johnson's got into the frey and then there was a bunch of independent operators. (One summer I went on a banana ice cream binge sold only by some independent guy with a truck that got washed once a season which coincided with his own showering. Fortunately, I overcame this lapse in culinary judgment.)

It wasn't until several years later that Mister Softee came on the scene and the days of the white-uniformed ice cream men who actually rang bells would join the ranks of horse drawn wagons.

Well, not quite.

There was the junk man with a horse-drawn wagon with a bunch of cowbells jingling on the back and in a somewhat related industry, the rag man.  The rag man must have been related to Pop, the hot knish man.  Same stature, same vintage, same origins.  I spent the better part of my youth trying to figure out what he was saying: "I cash clothes."  Not a clue, but everyone else on the block must have understood because they'd all run into their houses and come out with unwanted clothes.  After some obligatory haggling he'd stuff them into a giant pack on his back that must have outweighed him  and he'd shuffle off.  No one ever questioned what he did with the clothes.  He was ultimately replaced, not with a machine or a truck, but with a giant clothes bin unceremoneously located in a parking lot or at the edge of a gas station.

The vegetable vendor with his hand-lettered prices written with black crayon on a shopping bag also graduated from a horse-drawn wagon to a converted and repainted school bus and raised his prices accordingly. Other than my summer day camp rides to Broad Channel Day Camp on a school bus, Vegetable Joe's converted bus was my only school bus experience. Come on, did you know anyone who rode to school on a school bus in the fifties and sixties? This was Joe's 'store' in an earlier life.

The knife sharpener guy intrigued me. He announced his arrival with a special sounding gong. He also advertised that he would sharpen lawnmower blades. I mean it. He even had a picture of one painted on the side of his truck. Now there was a dreamer! Lawnmowers? Who had a lawn? My mother would save the scissors and dull knives for the day every two weeks when the sharpener guy would show up and it was my job to flag him down. Then, run back to the house and get the scissors and walk carefully and slowly, very slowly, to the grinder. Very slowly. "Stand back folks. Don't go near the kid. He's got knives." It was like the scene from "Dead Man Walking."

And then there was the horse-drawn hand-cranked merry-go-round wagon. The wagon was ultimately replaced with a truck-mounted 'whip' ride, which indirectly provided an unexpected lesson in centrifugal force as it pertains to a not-fully digested meal in a young stomach. Spectators in the know, and even loving parents, learned to stand a respectable distance from the ride.

The ice man not only cometh but wenteth. By the time I joined the human race there weren't too many people on our block with ice boxes - in spite of what my grandmother called the refrigerator. So, most of the ice man's business was with the retailers on the Avenue. He, too, joined the mid-twentieth century by forsaking his horse for horsepower but still retained that awesome ice crushing machine. Drop a giant cake of ice into the hopper and out came crushed ice. Or, cakes of ice were handled with a giant set of tongs and hoisted onto the iceman's towel-covered shoulder for delivery to the customer. I can still hear the sound of that machine. If it could do that to ice, what would it do to human bones? It didn't seem to bother the horse, though.  The horse had other things to worry about - like career alternatives.

Rivaling the competition between the ice cream vendors was that between the Dugans and Krugs packaged bake goods drivers. What ever happened to them? Dugans went stale in October 1966. Krugs? Who knows. Who cared?  There was always Ebingers!

 

dAnd finally, there was the milk delivery: Borden's, Sheffield/Sealtest. In real glass bottles. The Borden's products came from Utica and Kings Highway in what at one time was a stable. And they drove those neat Divco trucks while standing up. Refrigeration consisted of throwing a couple of ice cakes in the back to preserve the milk. Divco engineers followed the same styling concept adopted by Checker taxis. Hit on a decent style and stick with it - forever. Both Divco and Checker are out of business. 

 

Hey, wanna know sumpin?  The milk deliverers weren't crazy about giving up their horse drawn wagons.  Seems the horses weren't as dumb as we think.  After a while they knew the route. And, if there were several stops on a block, the driver could get out carrying enough bottles for all his stops on the block and go from house to house without having to get back on the wagon.  The horse would just follow along and know where to stop. No truck could do that.  Didn't matter; the horses were replaced.  Done deal! 

By the way,  I was never sent for a quart of milk.  It was,"Go to Lou's and get a milk."  Later on, it was "Go to Bohack and get a container of milk."  Sending a kid for milk was easy back then. Ever check out the milk display case in a modern supermarket?

What ever happened to those flat-topped Canco containers with the lid in the corner? 

Here's another by-the-way:  Milk, when you were growing up came only in quarts.  The advent of half-gallon containers signaled the beginning of the end for home delivery of milk.

Cross the Hudson and people look at you kinda funny when you call it a container when what seems like the rest of the world calls it a carton.

Who did I miss?

 

A Road By Any Other Name

I guess I'm not quite finished with the street name change thing. Please indulge me. This won't take long.

The neighborhood, East Flatbush, started life as Rugby, (hence the Rugby Theater, The Rugby branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, the Rugby post office.  Get it?) yet you have to travel to the equivalent of E14th St to find a Rugby Rd in the heart of what is now Ditmas Park and its million-dollar Victorian mansions. Rugby Road starts at the Parade Grounds at Caton Av and ends around Av H where it assumes its more pedestrian E 14th St.

I had a friend who lived in an apartment house on the corner of what is now Dr. Wesley McDonald Holder Av and Detectives R. Parker and P. Raffery Way.

(Try giving that address to a cab driver!) The names honor local residents and the intersection is Schenectady and Snyder Avs.

'Schenectady' isn't one of those words that just rolls off one's tongue, and it sure isn't easy to spell - not like Utica or Troy or Albany. OK. 'Rochester' was already taken, but there have to be easier names.

I've tried to figure a pattern for the street names along Church Av or Linden Blvd between New York Av and Kings Highway . 

New York Av is the equivalent of E35th.

Brooklyn Av, the equivalent of E36 St, sneaks in and messes up the theory but the next wide street is six blocks east of New York Av- Albany Av(E41st); followed by Troy Av (E44 St) and then Schenectady (E47) and Utica (E50).

The wide streets have upstate names. And at three-block intervals. But, why no names for E53rd or E56th? And why are some two-way streets?

Well, back to Schenectady Av. It's interesting that it's the only named street that most people from the neighborhood feel more comfortable referring to in writing as E47th.

Want to know if someone is really from Brooklyn?  Ask them to pronounce Nostrand Av.
NOS trand?  No way!  NO strand? Way!

Well, I apologize for the digression. Thank you for your patience.

Next session, we'll talk about commerce in the neighborhood. Where we bought stuff; where we ate out; what we did for fun that wasn't free.

What Ever Happened To Linden Ave? Deehan Ave? Wilde Lane?....



surprise quiz - match the original street name (column A)with the one you remember from the sixties (column B):
column A
Grant
Wilde Lane
Vernon
Linden Av
Deehan Av
and, so you don't feel like a total loser:
E 44 St

column B
Linden Blvd
Troy
Tilden
Linden Blvd (2)
Snyder
Church Av
See the bottom of this blog for answers. No cheating! No help from your parents!

Before we begin, did you read the posting in the column to the right?  Did you read the blog that appears below this one?  Good!

The picture, courtesy BrooklynPix.com, at the upper right of this blog is what is now Linden Blvd looking west at Utica Avenue toward E49th St taken in 1924. If you look carefully, that tall building on the left, about two blocks away is PS 135. The tracks in the foreground carry the Utica Avenue trolley. Check out the cobblestones. Smooth roadway had not yet entered the lexicon of road builders.

There were some major thoroughfares that took us out of the neighborhood, but none could offer us the vast
opportunities afforded by Linden Blvd. Whereas Church Avenue and Utica Avenues provided easy transport to all three subway lines and various connecting surface lines, their ultimate destinations were all within the confines of the five boroughs. Even Kings Highway - my, what a regal name - while it meanders through so many Brooklyn neighborhoods and grows to an eight-lane giant by the time it reaches East Flatbush (yeah, the Department of Traffic considers the curb lane as a lane, even though it's primary purpose is for parking) it meets an ignoble, and some may say, untimely end at Howard Avenue in East New York. Even Utica Avenue at its southern terminus contributes to Flatbush Avenue's march toward Floyd Bennett Field and the Marine Park(way) Bridge.

In all fairness, even Linden Blvd has a humble beginning, with its start at Flatbush Avenue between Caton and Church Avenues as a one way eastbound street. How many of you have ever visited the Flatbush branch of the Brooklyn Public Library on Linden Blvd just east of Flatbush Avenue?

If you were fortunate to grow up in a family with a car, NY Route 27 - Linden Blvd - was the way to get out to the country. Route 27 starts at the Gowanus Expressway, shares the right of way with the Prospect Expressway and then heads east on Caton Av until Bedford Av where Caton ends and makes a slight left turn to join Linden Blvd. At this point Linden Blvd is flanked primarily by six-story apartment houses, interspersed with the occasional two-family house. While not high-end, the houses do exude a degree of upper-middle-class class - many had doormen, at least in the nineteen thirties and forties; by 1960 they had long-since peaked. By the time the traveler reaches New York Avenue there are more and more four-floor 'walk-ups.' No elevators! And more two-family homes.

I've been unable to confirm this, but while I was growing up on Linden Blvd rumor had it that the white line down the center of Linden Blvd separated more than just the on-coming traffic. It allegedly also served as the boundary between the six-seven and the seven-one police precincts, now part of Brooklyn South. The word was, 'Don't ever get hit by a car while standing on the white line; neither precinct would respond. Drag yourself to either side.'

Further east, probably around New York Av, the white line (yes, 'white'!) also served as the boundary between Erasmus Hall and Wingate High Schools, once the latter opened in the late fifties.

There is nothing of any architectural significance until Albany Av and St. Catherine’s RC Church and school. If you lived in the neighborhood and you were Catholic, you went to St. Catherine's. As a result, the local elementary school, PS 235, on Lenox Rd at East 39th St was predominantly Jewish.

Seven blocks east was East Flatbush Jewish Community Center, on the corner of Schenectady Av. Well, actually, not on the corner. The plan was to build a sanctuary on the vacant lot on the corner and convert the original building into a community center - a dream that never materialized. The building is now a church. Diagonally opposite is PS 135, an imposing five-story building that was old sixty years ago. And a block further, across the street was a brand-new health care facility. (Help me out folks: I think it was a nursing home. Interboro?)

I bought my first tank of gas at the Texaco gas station on Utica and Linden. (27.9 cents for regular, leaded gas and they checked my oil!). 1959 was a very good year. I learned every bump and pot hole on Linden Blvd.

The Rugby library's first home was east of Utica, in a row of stores on the north side of Linden Blvd, before it moved to a new, larger building on Utica and Tilden Av.

Linden goes through another change east of Kings Highway. The intersection of Kings Highway, Remsen Av and Linden Blvd has to be the most pedestrian-unfriendly intersection in the City. (Actually, in 2003 there were 92 accidents at the intersection, ranking it the fourteenth most dangerous intersection in the City. In the early fifties there was some talk and plans were proposed to make one of the roadways under ground.  No doubt the plans were left on the center island of the intersection and no one was brave enough to retrieve them. Pennsylvania Av at Linden Blvd was more dangerous - 103 accidents that year.) Anyway, on its steady march to the 'country,' Linden Blvd now becomes an eight-lane monster.

Linden Blvd had an interesting traffic control arrangement as it sliced through East Flatbush. Not every intersection had a traffic light. Small signs well-hidden on lamp posts at each corner advised drivers to stop at the intersection if the light ahead of them was red. In most cases the lights were at three-block intervals. For example, Albany Av had a light and the next eastbound light was at Troy Av. The next light was at Schenectady Av, three blocks to the east and then another three blocks at Utica Av which sported an overhead signal. This traffic control concept might have been successful had it been a universal policy throughout the City or if Linden Blvd were in the middle of a desert with no foliage growing in front of the traffic lights or the small signs.

Traffic lights were black four-sided box-shaped lights which were effective only at intersections that were true right angles. They were mounted on stantions about ten feet high at the curb on the corner. Usually two signals controlled an intersection, mounted diagonally across the street from each other. And, they were absolute. Either the light was red or it was green, and the second the light turned red for one direction, it turned green for the waiting traffic. In a nod to fairness, the Department of Traffic experimented with the equivalent of an amber signal. Just before the signal would turn red, both green and red signals would be lit. In New York, that was typically viewed as a signal to speed up.

Now, for the poor hapless driver waiting, say at East 43rd St., to cross Linden Blvd. He was instructed via a small sign where normally there would be a stop sign to look in both directions to see if the light was red for traffic on Linden so he could cross. Even if it were red, there was a fifty-fifty chance that some Linden Blvd driver would not stop at East 43rd St, but continue on to the next traffic light. Obviously, to make this work, all the lights had to change at the same time. If our hero made it across Linden Blvd he was greeted at Lenox Rd with a yellow stop sign (with reflective bead letters) and another stop sign at Clarkson. Standardized red stop signs were still years away as were three-light traffic signals and progressive signals to keep traffic moving at a steady pace and yellow lines down the center of the street. Someone in the City government woke up and by the end of the fifties, Linden Blvd had joined the ranks of other streets with a more conventional traffic control system.

Although it loses its identity somewhere at the Queens border and becomes North Conduit Rd, it still maintains its Route 27 title as it continues east on The Sunrise Highway which was built in the 1920's to alleviate the congestion on Montauk Highway. It will go through several such changes until 122 miles from its western beginning, it ends at a non-descript traffic circle at Montauk Point.

OK.  A word about Vernon Av - not to be confused with the Verson in Long Island City.  As anyone who spent at least one semester in Tilden High School, the street and eventually the school was named after Samuel J. Tilden, an attorney and New York governor who battled Boss Tweed's Tammany Ring.  In the most contested presidential election of the nineteenth century Tilden came up one electoral college vote short to Rutherford B. Hayes despite gaining the popular vote and there went Brooklyn's claim to having a president of the United States.  Hey, it couldda been worse.  You coulda graduated from Vernon High School.

Our next session, we're going to discuss where we bought 'stuff.' You know, like food, clothing. Like I said, 'stuff.'

Quiz Answers:

Grant - Snyder Av; Wilde Lane  (later became Church Lane)- Church Av; Vernon - Tilden Av; Linden Av - Linden Blvd; Deeham Av - Linden Blvd; E44 St - Troy Av.

Commuting in mid-century East Flatbush

Commuting

Both pictures courtesy of BrooklynPix.com a great resource for all things Brooklyn (Thanks, Brian)

I've always had long commutes. (I'm a firm believer real men don't have short commutes.) My commutes - more like journeys, than commutes, started when I was 12.

There was no easy way for me to get to Winthrop. Meyer Levin would have been closer, but I graduated in '55 and the school was not a option.

It was less than a mile - as the crow flies. For mere mortals, it was a little longer: Church Avenue trolley ( yes, 'trolley.') to Utica. Then, the bus up to Winthrop St. Then, 2-blocks to the school.

I don't remember what qualified a student for a transportation pass, but I sure qualified. No one else had a longer commute to school. Each month a new pass. They were called bus passes, but I was the only one in my class to use it on a trolley.

I got the free monthly pass for a while. Then I remember paying a dollar a month. By the time I got to high school I paid a nickel per trip. Anyone out there remember what the deal was?

I liked getting on the bus or trolley and flashing my pass. Unlimited use on school days. Sometimes we'd ride the Utica bus up to Empire Blvd to White Castle for lunch. That was cool. Lunch consisted of six hamburgers and a cola. Close your eyes; think small square hamburgers smothered in onions on a soft roll. Six of them lil babies. Then compare that to the tuna fish sandwich on stale Wonder bread your mother packed for you in waxed paper that sat in the wardrobe until lunch period on a hot Spring day.

No contest!

Waiting for the trolley and the actual ride was an exercise in optimism. First, you hoped it wasn't stuck behind some double-parked delivery truck. (This problem was more prevalent on Church Av which was narrower than Utica Av.) Then, although you were supposed to wait at the curb at those corners with the blue enamel 'trolley station' signs, you hoped the motorman would see you, so you would step into the safety zone near the tracks and hope that the small warning sign and the white lines painted in the street would protect you from on-coming motor vehicles. See the picture at the top right. That sign would have to be on a car driver's hood for thedriver to read it.

There was a sub-group of optimists- usually teenagers - who would hop on the outside back of the trolley, stand on the bumper and hold on to the window mouldings and hope they wouldn't fall off. The trick was to hold on but crouch down below the window line to avoid detection by the motorman looking in his rearview mirror. Their optimism often came to a near-fatal end. Falling off was the least worry of the options. Being run over by the vehicle following the trolley was a very real possibility. Being detected by the motorman who would stop the trolley and go after the kids with a steel rod used to change the track switch at junctions was another.

Our claim to mischievous behavior consisted of putting pennies on the rails and waiting for the trolley to flatten them. Amazing what a couple of tons rolling over a penny can do. Years later a friend of mine admitted to putting a rock on the Utica Av tracks and watch to his horror as the trolley derailed.

The Utica Av trolleys were gone by the time I started junior high school. The tracks were still there as remembrances of things past. In fact, Utica Av south of Tilden Av was only partially paved. The center of the roadway had two sets of tracks which were mounted on wood crossties embedded in the dirt but the intersections were paved The end of the Utica line was Avenue N where there was a massive car barn that served the Flatbush and Utica lines. The car barn was converted to a bus garage when buses replaced the trolleys.

Hegeman St. was the eastern end of the Church Av trolley. That's where the car barn was for the Church Avenue line until, in the early fifties, it was ultimately replaced by a very unglamourous 'turnaround' near Bristol Street. (The 'destination' sign on the trolleys said 'Bristol')

The picture at the top left of this blog shows a Church Av trolley sometime before 1950 at its eastern terminal at Hegeman St. If you look closely at the 'destination' sign on the back of the trolley it says 'Ralph Av.' Someone must have been messing with the sign.

The Utica Av line and some of the cars on the Church Av line (like the one in the picture) were what is known as double-ended cars. They had trolley poles and motorman controls at each end, thus avoiding the necessity of having to turn the cars around at the end of the line. The car would come to the end of the line; the motorman would make sure all the coins were out of the fare box and 'flip' all the wood seat backs so the seats now faced in the other direction. And then he would take his coin dispenser (used to make change; the 'exact fare' concept had not yet been invented); get out and lower the pole in the back and raise the pole in the front to the wire. The final step required him (It was always a 'him' back then.)to throw the track switch with a steel rod he'd slip between the 'points' of the rail so when he started on the reverse trip the trolley would switch to the other track.

(By the way, after August 31, 1969 riders had to have the exact fare. No longer would drivers make change.)

There was a short one-track shuttle trolley that ran along Tilden Av from Nostrand Av to the west entrance of Holy Cross Cemetery at Brooklyn Av. It may have run only on weekends. Two blocks east; two blocks west. And so it went, all day. Change the poles at each end of the trip; probably left half the seats facing in each direction. Talk about a low-stress job.

By the time I rode the trolley by myself these old double-ended cars had all been replaced by sleek, streamlined PCC cars and the Cemetery shuttle had been replaced by a bus.

The Presidents' Conference Cars (PCC) were trolley's last gasp at competing with buses and represented a radical change in design and operation. They came on the scene in 1936 and as lines elsewhere were converted to buses, they wound up on the McDonald Av and Church Av routes, the last trolley lines in New York City. (October 31, 1956 was the last day of operation for the trolleys.)

The neatest thing about the Church Av line was the tunnel under Ocean Parkway. No one knows the rationale for the tunnel. One school of thought says it was to appease the rich people on Ocean Parkway who didn't want the noise; another group claims it was to avoid the long red light at that intersection. The tunnel was unpaved; originally it was just a single track but later widened to two sets of tracks set into the dirt. Every once in a while a motorist - usually at night - would learn that it was a private right of way for trolleys only. For some reason the vehicles, perhaps on sheer momentum, could make it down to the bottom, at which point they would have to be towed out, disrupting trolley operation in both directions.

I finished high school taking the Church Av bus to Erasmus on Flatbush Av.

Buses: no soul; no character; no fun.

Again, take a look at Brian Merlis' www.brooklynpix.com for more great East Flatbush pictures.

School Fixtures

First, a bit of housekeeping.  If, as you scroll down this page everything is in one long, very long, paragraph, then you are not reading this in the original format. Someone has stolen my blog for their own use. So, to see it in its original, please go to EastFlatbushMemories.blogspot.com

I went to Winthrop JHS – an expanded version of the typical 200-series Brooklyn public schools. If you went to Somers, you'd have no trouble finding your way in Winthrop.  Same layout.  White brick (well, the purists would call it 'cream'), 4-story building, auditorium to the right with massive chandeliers, wood seats, linoleum floor that was buffed daily.

The weirdest class was co-ed guidance where the hot topic consuming most of the semester was whether girls in junior high school should be allowed to wear makeup. Wow!!! Now that really held the interest of the boys in the class. The common element for both groups was that they both wanted lipstick that didn't wear off. (In fewer than ten years later I was leading student discussion groups on unwanted teenage pregnancies. I had two pregnant girls in my eighth grade official class. The hell with the attendance award. That made my class a contender for the school fertility award! ) More about the junior high angst later.

I had Miss Casey for math, Mr. Zeitlin for woodworking, Mr. Spear for Guidance. Some terrifying woman for Spanish and learned English grammar and the parts of a sentence from an elderly woman who had the inate ability to make thirty fairly bright kids double over with fear. Our big courtyard discussion was deciding whether it was better to have English in the morning and get it over or prolong the agony until after lunch. The cowards wanted to prolong it, as did the perennial optimists who hoped that by prolonging what everyone knew to be the inevitable that she might die during lunch, or better yet, a fire drill would be scheduled. Neither of which happened. What did happen was that I learned grammar and, you know what? It was logical and it was fun. How many of you can parse a sentence? Find the verb, the subject, the object? How many of you really understand subject-verb agreement? Good old Whatshername left her mark on me! And I went on to share this joy with countless other students.

There must have been more to my education, but that’s about all I remember about the two years in JHS 232, Winthrop Junior High School.

Except for the school fixtures – the perennials. The constants that were there when you started school and were still there five, ten years later when you came back to visit (or still there as a student). The same constants that your older brother talked about when he went to the school. No change. I mean the really important things that really matter when you’re growing up.

I mean fixtures like Winthrop’’s version of Tomaine Joe’s; Tilden's Ralph, the cop; the pretzel guy; the Mr. Softee truck and Pop the hot knish guy. Knishes were seven cents; pretzels only a nickel. (Do you split for the extra two cents and get a knish sprinkled liberally with a month’s worth of sodium, or go for the pretzel and ten ounces of mustard?) These are weighty decisions when you’re thirteen.


Wait a minute.  Breathes there a person who knows not what a knish is, or even how to pronounce the word?  Whaddayou, from Cleveland or sompin?
Get off this site, now!

Pop’s personal hygiene was a topic of much speculation and we agreed that his bathing coincided with major natural events, primarily lunar eclipses. But, one thing about Pop: he was dependable. Here was a guy who truly embraced the Post Office motto.

Every day, rain or shine, there he was pushing that little cart with four squeaky wheels and his inventory, if you could call it an inventory since it consisted of only one product – knishes. I mean HOT knishes. Now, we’re talking about simple days before microwaves. Even if they existed, he’d need a 600 foot extension cord. It was years later that the topic came up and we wondered how did he keep them hot for so long. The concensus was that there was a charcoal or wood fire at the bottom of the cart. We’re not talking about crispy two-inch high Mrs. Stahl's things; these were soggy, greasy, ultra hot, flat jobs delivered on a small piece of wax paper that did nothing to protect your fingers from the molten blob of knish. And, anything that tasted that good had to be really bad for you.

Anyway, back to Pop and his fully insulated wagon that looked as though it was a junior high school metalworking shop project that started out as an ashtray. We thought Pop was unique unto Winthrop. How could there possibly be another hunchbacked ninety-year old with a thick European accent of undetermined origin?

And then it happened.

I seen it wit my own two eyes. Pop had a twin in the business and there the two of them were both pushing their carts up Utica Avenue toward East New York Avenue. I couldn’t believe it. At first I thought I was seeing double. And then, around Rutland Road they were joined by a third. Damn!. Pop was one of triplets – all in the same family business. Each hunched over his cart; they looked alike; they walked alike, they dressed alike. Jeez. Stepford wives of the pushcart cuisine world.

You mean EVERY school has a Pop? Say it ain’t so! There can’t be!

The picture to the left is a fine example of nepotism at its best. Shown is a vendor who must be Pop's grandson working outside the E58th side of Tilden.  No way Pop would let anyone, even mishpuchza, encroach on his "Winthrop turf.'

Here's an update:  Seems there was a guy, Ruby, who muscled in on Pop's turf.  We're talking up-scale because this guy had a van for his inventory.  Same dress code, same hygiene standards.  His franchise may have been further south, closer to Tilden and Canarsie High School.  But his presence no doubt signaled the death knell for the Pops of this world.

On days I didn’t bring my lunch we would go to the corner luncheonette. Now, you wanna get some blank stares? Try explaining what a luncheonette is to someone who grew up west of the Hudson or east of the Queens border. In any case, the place to be seen at lunch was Pinky's,  a block from the school on Rutland Road for what was possibly the world’s worst hamburgers and french-fries.

Pinky's was a spatial phenomenon.  At 10:30 in the morning, it looked like a typical corner Brooklyn luncheonette with enough seating at the counter and in the booths for maybe twenty customers. Two hours later half the Winthrop student body would cram into Pinky’s,

But, once every two weeks my friends and I would treat ourselves to a deli sandwich on Clarkson and East 51st.

I’m talking real kosher deli and real corned beef and pastrami and fat French fries – not those string things that Pinky passed off as French fries. Anyway, the sandwich was under a dollar, the French fries were probably a quarter. I don’t have a clue how much the Dr. Brown’s Celray Tonic or cream soda was. Now that was living! Cholesterol had not yet been discovered. (Think Ratner's; think jars of chicken fat as a delicacy.) 

I feel so strongly about the passing of kosher deli's that I've devoted an entire chapter to them.  Check the table of contents.

Raise your hand if you ever ordered a pastrami sandwich with mayo?  Let me guess; you're from Ohio, right?

But, I digress.

Years later, outside the main gate to Brooklyn College was ‘the’ pretzel guy. Sold them, also for a nickel, out of the trunk of his Pontiac – a new Pontiac every year. (Why was I knocking myself out in school when this guy with the speech impediment that wouldn’t allow him to say ‘fresh pretzels’ without screwing up one or both words so it sounded like presh fretzels, he had a new car every year.)

Four years in the school. There he was every day. Went to the same grooming advisor as Pop, the knish man.

I went back for my Masters. There he was, still hawking presh fretzels.

A regular school fixture.

Sorry

Two of the cardinal rules I learned as a beginning teacher: First, Don't ever do anything that may require you to make a public apology to one or more students; and, second, if you do something worthy of an apology, don't hesitate to own up to your mistake.

Now, with that said - I apologize for the last inane assignment. You remember, the one where you were to name ten Brooklyn high schools that were in existence in 1960. Who knew that other Brooklyn bloggers would latch on to this?

And I thought it was so brilliant! Let's see if I can make it up to you.

Here's the list - semi-geographically. .

Sheepshead Bay, Thomas Dewey, Lincoln, Lafayette, Ft. Hamilton, New Utrecht, Madison, Midwood, Prospect Heights, Erasmus Hall, Wingate, Tilden, South Shore,Canarsie, Jefferson, Bushwick, Boys, Girls, Clara Barton, Brooklyn Tech, Roosevelt. OK, we'll throw in Brooklyn Tech, Wm. H. Maxwell Automotive and Grady VHS. And, I'll allow half of Franklin K. Lane - the half in Brooklyn.

Let's fast-forward 46 years but first, raise your hand if you remember when high schools were named after famous people - mostly presidents or local politicians - or the neighborhoods in which they were located.

In addition to the old standbys: James Madison, Midwood, Sheepshead Bay, South Shore, Clara Barton, Lafayette, New Utrecht, Ft. Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Brooklyn Tech, George Westinghouse, FK Lane - a number of the larger high schools have been divided into smaller specialty, boutique, schools:
Erasmus has now been divided into separate schools and is referred to as Erasmus Campus: Hospitality and Tourism, Business/Tec, Humanities, HS for Service and Learning, HS for Youth and Community Development.


Several of the older schools have reinvented themselves:
Canarsie International High School, William Grady Career and Tech Educ HS, Bushwick HS for Social Justice, Thomas Jefferson HS of Civil Rights, Wingate International Arts and Business High School/High School for Public Service Heroes of Tomorrow (Wow, I'd like to see what this looks like on a sweat shirt!) , Dewey High School for Service and Learning, International HS at Prospect Heights

And several new schools have joined the roster:
W.E.B.DuBois, Paul Robeson, Edward R. Morrow, Medger Evers, Rachel Carson HS for Coastal Studies, Leon M Goldstein HS for the Sciences, Harry Van Arsdale.

Boys High School and Girls High School have been combined into one (What happened to the possessive apostrophe?)

What school is now High School for Youth and Community Development? or Brooklyn High School for Science and Environment?


If you've been out of Brooklyn for a while these will throw you:
International Arts Business School, Brooklyn Academy of Science and the Environment, HS for Global Citizenship, HS of Telecommunication Arts and Technology, Brooklyn HS of the Arts, South Brooklyn Community HS, FDNY HS for Fire and Life Safety, HS for Enterprise and Technology, HS of Telecommunications, Pacific HS, Brooklyn HS for Music & Theatre.


Tilden? Sorry, still just plain ole Samuel J. Tilden. (update: Oops!  Spoke too soon.. See more recent posts!)

Again, these are just Brooklyn public high schools. Let me know if I omitted your school.

Remember when elementary schools were known by just their numbers? Most now also have names:
135 - Sheldon A. Brookner
208 - Elsa Ebeling
219 - Kennedy-King
233 - Langston Hughes
235 - The Lenox School (my elementary school)
244 - Richard R. Green

Junior high schools are now intermediate schools, grades 6, 7, 8. Does the 2- or 3- year SP still exist? I taught at Meyer Levin for three years. No one could get that name straight.

Some current sample student demographics*:
Tilden: 2095 Black, 143 Hispanic, 13 Asian, 13 White
IS 285 (Meyer Levin): 975 Black, 37 Hispanic, 6 Asian, 6 White
IS 232 (Winthrop): 811 Black, 37 Hispanic, 6 Asian, 5 White
135: 747 Black, 30 Hispanic, 1 Asian, 11 White
233: 755 Black, 39 Hispanic, 1 Asian, 6 White
244: 1027 Black, 28 Hispanic, 4 Asian, 8 White

Do you remember your school having so many students?

*courtesy NYC Department of Education 2006

Next session: We're going to talk about 'school fixtures.' I don't mean the desks or those great chandeliers in the auditoriums. I mean...

Well, you'll see. And then, we'll move on to some other topics. But first...

Capitalization hint: high school is capitalized if it is part of the school's name: Erasmus Hall High School or if 'high' is the first word in a sentence (High school was fun. I went to Tilden High School, but: 'I went to high school.')


Also: You graduated FROM high school; not 'graduated high school.'
(Sorry; I couldn't resist. I feel better already!)